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.

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