Saco - EdTribune ME - Maine Education Data

78% of Maine Districts Never Recovered From COVID

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Maine 2025-26 Enrollment.

In the spring of 2023, Maine's public school enrollment ticked up for the second consecutive year. The COVID shock appeared to be fading. Districts that had lost hundreds of students were cautiously optimistic.

That optimism lasted exactly one year. Since 2023, Maine has lost 5,003 students across three accelerating years of decline, wiping out the post-COVID bounce and then some. The state now enrolls 168,923 students, an all-time low, and sits 11,436 students below where pre-COVID trends projected it would be. Of the state's 214 districts with sufficient data, just 47, or 22%, have returned to their pre-pandemic enrollment levels. The rest are still in the crater.

Three years of acceleration

The raw numbers tell a compounding story. Maine lost 1,307 students in 2023-24, then 1,562 in 2024-25, then 2,134 in 2025-26. That final figure is the largest single-year loss since the COVID plunge of 7,859 in 2020-21, and it is 11 times the average annual change Maine experienced in the three pre-pandemic years.

The post-COVID recovery was real but fleeting. In 2021-22 and 2022-23, Maine added back 1,456 students. The current three-year decline has erased that recovery more than three times over.

What makes this acceleration unusual is its timing. Five years out from the pandemic, most states have settled into a stable post-COVID trajectory, whether that means slow decline, stagnation, or recovery. Maine's losses are getting larger each year. The state has moved from losing 0.75% of enrollment in 2024 to 1.25% in 2026.

The big districts are losing

The 22% recovery rate masks a sharper divide by district size. Among districts enrolling 2,000 or more students, only four of 27, or 14.8%, have recovered to pre-COVID levels. Mid-size districts (500 to 1,999 students) fare even worse: just four of 57, or 7.0%, have recovered. The highest recovery rates belong to the smallest districts, those under 100 students, where 34% have bounced back. But those tiny districts collectively educate a fraction of the state's children.

Portland^↗, the state's largest district, enrolled 6,302 students in 2025-26, down 422 from its 2019 level of 6,724, a 6.3% decline. South Portland^↗ lost 229 students over the same period, a 7.7% drop, and is proposing to cut nearly 80 positions and potentially close an elementary school. Auburn^↗ is down 275 from 2019. Bangor^↗ is down 233.

The districts that have recovered tend to cluster in southern Maine's growth corridor. Saco^↗ gained 126 students since 2019, reaching 1,909. Gorham^↗ added 64 to reach 2,853. Sanford^↗ grew by 64 to 3,230. These are suburbs and exurbs of Portland, communities benefiting from the same pandemic-era migration that brought new residents to southern Maine while the state's interior continued to empty.

Where did the students go?

The 11,884 students missing from Maine's public schools since 2019 did not simply vanish. Several forces are pulling in the same direction.

The most measurable is homeschooling. Maine had roughly 6,800 homeschooled students before the pandemic. By 2024-25, that number had risen to approximately 10,100, a 50% increase that has proven sticky. In more than 50 districts, primarily in central and northern Maine, at least one in 10 students is now homeschooled. Religious co-ops have expanded alongside the trend: Calvary Belfast Academy, a faith-based homeschool cooperative, has doubled in size since launching three years ago.

Beneath the homeschool shift lies a deeper demographic current. Maine has experienced more deaths than births for over a decade, and the kindergarten pipeline reflects this: the state enrolled 1,879 fewer kindergartners in 2026 than in 2017, a 14.8% drop. Fewer births five and six years ago are now arriving as smaller kindergarten cohorts.

The Maine Department of Education has also pointed to early college programs and adult education as factors pulling older students out of traditional enrollment counts. Adult education enrollment is up statewide, providing high school completion pathways that reduce the headcount at traditional high schools without necessarily meaning fewer young people are being educated.

What reporting suggests

The consequences are materializing in school budgets and building closures. Maine's three largest southern districts have proposed deep staffing reductions for 2026-27, driven by declining enrollment, rising salary and health care costs, and property valuation shifts that reduce state aid.

"Between our two small elementary schools, we have nine empty classrooms... buildings still require the same level of heat and care." -- Matthew Cyr, RSU 34 Superintendent, Maine Public, July 2025

School closures have accelerated to match. More schools closed in Maine through mid-2025 than in all of 2024, with district leaders citing declining enrollment, aging infrastructure, and rising local costs. In RSU 4, Sabattus Primary School, open since 1953, shut its doors. In RSU 34, Viola Rand Elementary closed after enrollment made its nine empty classrooms untenable. These are not large urban consolidations. They are small community schools, often the primary civic space in their towns, closing because there are not enough children to justify the building.

The structural mismatch

The fiscal challenge is not simply that enrollment is falling. It is that costs do not fall at the same rate. A district that loses 30 students does not need one fewer teacher. It does not heat one fewer hallway. Per-pupil state funding follows students out the door, but the building, the bus route, and the special education staff remain. The Maine Policy Institute has noted that migration alone cannot offset the gap between a growing labor force participation shortfall and declining school enrollment. Even the pandemic-era population surge of 34,237 new residents between April 2020 and July 2022, a 190% increase over typical growth, has not translated into sustained enrollment recovery.

This creates a particular bind for Maine's 171 districts that enroll fewer than 500 students. These districts, 67% of all districts in the state, have the least capacity to absorb fixed costs across a shrinking student body. Yet they also serve the rural communities least able to transport children to consolidated alternatives.

Six years and counting

In Sabattus, the primary school that opened in 1953 is closed. In Bradley, Viola Rand Elementary is empty. In RSU 34, superintendent Matthew Cyr counted nine unused classrooms across two buildings before making the decision to consolidate.

These districts did not plan for six years of shortfall. They planned for a bounce that came in 2022, lasted 18 months, and vanished. The 167 districts still below their 2019 enrollment are not waiting for recovery anymore. They are managing permanent contraction -- and the next state valuation, due in spring 2027, will recalculate aid based on where the numbers actually landed, not where anyone hoped they would.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

168,923: Maine Hits Its Enrollment Floor

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Maine 2025-26 Enrollment.

The last time Maine added students to its public schools was 2023. Since then, the losses have grown each year: 1,307, then 1,562, then 2,134. The 2025-26 school year brought enrollment to 168,923, the lowest level in the state's dataset and a figure that erases nine years of what had been a remarkably stable headcount.

That 2,134-student drop is not large in absolute terms. But it is the second-largest single-year loss in the data after the pandemic's 7,859-student cliff in 2020-21, and it arrives at the end of an accelerating three-year streak that has now cost the state 5,003 students. Maine's public school system is shrinking faster in 2026 than at any point since COVID, and the forces behind the decline are structural, not cyclical.

The long plateau and the break

For three years before the pandemic, Maine's enrollment was essentially flat. The state held between 180,329 and 180,917 students from 2017 to 2020, a stability unusual for a state with the nation's oldest population and a median age of 44.8 years, more than six years above the national average.

COVID broke the plateau. The 7,859-student loss in 2020-21 was followed by a two-year bounce of 1,456 students in 2021-22 and 2022-23, recovering just 18.5% of the pandemic loss. Then the decline resumed, and the recovery stalled permanently. Maine now sits 11,994 students below its 2017 peak, a 6.6% drop, and roughly 10,500 students below where a pre-COVID linear trajectory would have placed it.

The pattern matters as much as the magnitude. The three years before COVID averaged a loss of 196 students per year. The three years since 2023 average 1,668. The decline has accelerated by a factor of eight.

Where students are not going

Maine is one of 17 states where deaths now outnumber births, recording 5,019 more deaths than births in 2025. The state's population still grew, reaching a record 1,414,874, but only because 11,446 net migrants arrived. That migration is skewing older: the state's 65-and-over population is projected to grow 35.6% by 2032, while the working-age cohort shrinks.

The kindergarten numbers tell the enrollment story in miniature. Maine enrolled 12,665 kindergartners in 2017. In 2026, it enrolled 10,786, a 14.8% decline. Pre-K, by contrast, has surged 30.0%, from 5,395 to 7,016 students, as Maine has expanded access. In 2017, pre-K enrollment was 42.6% of kindergarten enrollment. In 2026, that ratio hit 65.0%. More children are entering the system earlier, but fewer children exist to enter it at all.

Grade 12 enrollment has been more stable at 13,665 in 2026, down just 2.2% from 2017. The gap between kindergarten losses and high school stability means the pipeline is compressing from the bottom. Each graduating class is larger than the kindergarten cohort that will eventually replace it.

Homeschooling and the missing students

Not all of the enrollment decline reflects families leaving Maine. The share of school-age children who are homeschooled has nearly doubled since the pandemic, rising from 3.6% in 2019-20 to 6.4% in 2024-25. At least one in 10 students was homeschooled in more than 50 school districts, concentrated in central and northern Maine.

The 2021 implementation of a law removing religious and philosophical exemptions for school-mandated vaccines accelerated the shift. Religious cooperative programs have expanded alongside homeschooling growth: Calvary Belfast Academy, one such co-op, has doubled in size since it launched three years ago.

At roughly 6.4% of the school-age population, homeschooled students represent a meaningful share of the enrollment shortfall. But the magnitude does not fully account for the 11,994-student decline from peak: even if every homeschooled student returned, Maine would still have fewer public school students than it did in 2017.

The funding formula strain

Maine's Essential Programs and Services formula allocates state aid on a per-pupil basis. When a district loses students, it loses the state allocation that came with them. But building costs, heating bills, and teacher salaries do not scale down with enrollment. The result is a structural squeeze that has grown acute enough to prompt legislative action.

Portland^↗, South Portland^↗, and Lewiston^↗ have proposed 2026-27 budgets that would cut a combined 128 positions and increase property taxes, citing rising salary and health care costs layered on top of declining enrollment. Portland, the state's largest district at 6,302 students, has lost 445 students since 2017, a 6.6% decline that mirrors the statewide rate.

"Without big, difficult choices like consolidation, the situation is a recipe for a lot of under-resourced schools." — Maine Education Policy Research Institute, quoted in Portland Press Herald, February 2026

Lawmakers have responded with LD 2226, a bill proposing nine changes to the EPS formula, including adjustments for community poverty levels, special education funding, and regional cost of living. The formula, established in 2005, has not been substantially updated since. Whether the reform passes or not, the underlying enrollment arithmetic is moving in one direction.

School closures are accelerating

Fifteen schools closed in Maine during 2025, surpassing the 14 closures in all of 2024. The closures concentrate in small, rural districts where enrollment has fallen below the threshold needed to justify a building.

"Between our two small elementary schools, we have nine empty classrooms." — RSU 34 superintendent, Maine Public, July 2025

In MSAD 17, the school board unified Waterford Memorial School and Harrison Elementary, saving roughly $400,000, after neither school had enough enrollment to support a principal. The district has lost 430 students since 2017, a 12.6% decline.

The size distribution of Maine's districts underscores how widespread the vulnerability is: 170 of 253 districts enrolled fewer than 500 students in 2025-26. Eighty-five enrolled fewer than 100. These are not districts with slack in their systems.

Who is growing, and who is not

RSU 10 leads all districts in absolute loss, down 883 students since 2017, a 34.4% decline. RSU 02 lost 653 (-31.5%). Among the state's five largest districts, none has grown.

The gainers are few and small. Saco^↗ added 179 students (+10.3%), the largest absolute gain among traditional districts, part of a modest southern Maine growth corridor. Gorham^↗ added 126 (+4.6%), and Wells-Ogunquit CSD^↗ grew by 122 (+9.3%). Maine Virtual Academy, a statewide online school, added 144 students (+40.7%) as virtual enrollment has expanded.

Overall, 96 of 253 districts with data in both years hit their all-time enrollment low in 2025-26. That is 37.9% of the state's districts at their floor simultaneously, including Portland, Scarborough^↗, Augusta^↗, and South Portland^↗.

A changing student body

Maine remains one of the whitest public school systems in the country at 84.4% white, but the composition is shifting faster than the overall numbers suggest. White enrollment fell by 19,746 students since 2017, a 12.2% decline. Every other major racial and ethnic group grew.

Black enrollment rose 50.3%, from 6,256 to 9,403 students, driven largely by Somali, Congolese, and other African immigrant communities concentrated in Lewiston and Portland. Hispanic enrollment grew 70.8%, from 3,823 to 6,528. Multiracial students increased 62.2%, from 4,100 to 6,652. These three groups together added 8,404 students over the same period that white enrollment dropped by nearly 20,000.

Separately, English learner enrollment grew 54.3%, from 5,376 to 8,293 students. The EL population overlaps heavily with the Black and Hispanic growth, reflecting the same immigration patterns in Maine's urban centers. At 4.9% of total enrollment, Maine's EL share remains well below the national average but has grown at four times the rate of overall enrollment change.

The floor that was not a floor

Fifteen schools closed in Maine during 2025, more than in all of 2024. In MSAD 17, Waterford Memorial and Harrison Elementary combined into a single building because neither had enough students to justify a principal. In RSU 34, Viola Rand Elementary shut its doors after nine classrooms sat empty. These are not hypothetical consequences of the 168,923 figure. They are the specific buildings, in specific towns, where the school was often the last civic institution standing.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.