AUGUSTA, Maine – Corporate branding in schools is drawing criticism in Maine, and Gov. Paul LePage recently vetoed a measure to ban brands promoting food and beverages prohibited by Michelle Obama’s federal school food laws.

The debate seems to center on government control over parents and schools, and LePage would rather leave the decision-making to locals, The Bangor Daily News reports.

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LePage vetoed LD 985 Tuesday and his decision was later confirmed in the House. The measure sought to outlaw corporate branded school assignments or other ads on campus from companies that sell products that do not comply with the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which imposed strict limitations on calories, fat, sugar, sodium, whole grain products and other nutritional elements of school foods.

Maine Public Health Association representative Tina Pettingill used an Oreo-brand school writing assignment as an example of what she believes are “ways marketing gets into the minds and hands of students during the school day without people really noticing,” according to the Daily News.

Source: Maine Public Health Association

“There is absolutely zero justification for using our children as captive pawns to hawk unhealthy products,” Pettingill told a legislative committee.

Pettingill implied the corporate school ads have contributed to the fact that nearly half of Maine fifth-graders are overweight or obese, and the state’s problems with overweight kids is projected to cost $1.2 billion over the next 20 years, the news site reports.

She also said companies spent $150 million marketing their products to kids in public schools since 2009.

LePage countered in his veto that the proposed bill was akin to supplanting the “judgement of lawmakers in Washington for the judgement of parents and school board members in our local communities,” the Daily News reports.

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“By outlawing incentives such as pizza certificates, which are used to bring about and reward academic success, the bill tells families that the government knows better than they do how to raise their kids,” he wrote.

Corporate logos and ads in public schools has been a hot topic in recent years, most notably in New York where Common Core-based standardized tests raised controversy in 2013 for being larded up with a litany of references to companies like LEGO, Mug Root Beer and at least a half dozen others, The Washington Post reports.

“I’ve been giving the test for eight years and have never seen the test drop trademarked names in passages – let alone note the trademark at the bottom of the page,” one teacher told the New York Post.

JHS 190 student Marco Salas said some of the product placements in the test didn’t make sense.

“For the root beer, they show you a waitress cleaning a table and the root beer fell on the floor and she forgets to clean it up. Underneath, they gave you the definition that it is a soda and then the trademark,” he said.

The controversy prompted the education company that designed the tests, Pearson, to issue a statement blaming the product placements on “previously published passages due to choices made by authors,” the Post reports.

“As one of the main shifts of the Common Core State Standards is to help students read and analyze more authentic literature and workplace documents, brand names are referenced occasionally in the passages,” according to the statement.

Those “authentic passages” come from authors whom Pearson neglected to name, and neither Pearson nor the state receive any compensation for including the name brands, the company contends.