EdTribune ME - Maine Education Data

Maine Lost More Students This Year Than Any Since COVID

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Maine 2025-26 Enrollment.

South Portland is preparing to cut nearly 80 positions, 42 of them teachers, and close an elementary school. Portland^↗ proposed eliminating 20 jobs from a $180 million budget. Lewiston^↗ is making staffing cuts to balance its books. Three of Maine's largest districts are dismantling staff in the same budget cycle, and the reason is the same in each: fewer students, more costs, and a funding formula that follows the child out the door.

Maine enrolled 168,923 public school students in 2025-26, an all-time low for the decade-long dataset and a loss of 2,134 from the prior year. That is the largest single-year decline since the COVID shock of 2020-21, when 7,859 students vanished from the rolls. The difference is that COVID was a one-time disruption. This is a trend that is picking up speed.

Each year worse than the last

The three-year pattern tells the story more clearly than any single number. Maine lost 1,307 students in 2023-24, then 1,562 in 2024-25, then 2,134 in 2025-26. Each year's loss exceeded the one before, and the combined three-year total of 5,003 students dwarfs the post-COVID bounce of 1,456 that briefly suggested recovery in 2021-22 and 2022-23.

That bounce is now fully erased. The 5,003-student loss over three years exceeds it by a factor of 3.4, meaning the state has not merely returned to its pre-pandemic trajectory but has fallen well below it. Before COVID, Maine was losing an average of 196 students per year. The current three-year average is roughly 1,670 per year, more than eight times the pre-pandemic pace.

The 1.2% decline in 2025-26 may sound modest in isolation. It is not. It is the largest percentage decline in any non-COVID year in the dataset, and it follows two years that already ranked among the worst. Put together, the three-year run from 2024 through 2026 erased 5,003 students while the two-year COVID bounce recovered only 1,456.

The pipeline is shrinking from the bottom

The enrollment math is relentless. In 2025-26, Maine enrolled 10,786 kindergartners and graduated 13,665 seniors, a K-to-12th-grade ratio of 78.9. For every 100 students leaving, roughly 79 are entering. That ratio stood at 95.6 in 2020, when kindergarten briefly peaked at 13,071. After a COVID-year dip and partial recovery, it has fallen steadily since 2022 and now sits well below the 90.7 recorded in 2017.

The kindergarten decline is steep: 10,786 in 2026, down 17.5% from the 2020 peak. Grade 12 enrollment, by contrast, has been roughly flat, fluctuating between 13,659 and 14,119 over the past decade. The result is a widening gap at the bottom of the pipeline that guarantees continued enrollment losses even if not a single family leaves the state.

Pre-K tells a different story. Maine enrolled 7,016 pre-kindergartners in 2025-26, up 30% from 5,395 in 2016-17, reflecting expanded public pre-K programs. But that growth has not translated into kindergarten gains, suggesting either that pre-K is absorbing children who would not otherwise have entered the public system until kindergarten, or that the families using public pre-K are choosing other options for elementary school.

The oldest state's structural problem

Maine is the oldest state in the nation by median age, at 44.8 years, with 23% of its population over 65. It is one of 17 states that experienced natural population decline in 2024, meaning more deaths than births. The state's total population grew 0.5% in 2025, but that growth came entirely from migration: 7,406 domestic migrants and 4,040 international migrants, not from births.

The national birth rate has fallen more than 20% since 2007, but the decline hits Maine harder because the state had fewer women of childbearing age to begin with. Maine's fertility rate stood at 47.0 per 1,000 women ages 15-44 in 2023, according to the March of Dimes, below the national average. When a state's school-age pipeline is already thin, even modest birth rate declines translate directly into classroom losses.

Housing affordability is a competing explanation. Tracy Richter, vice president of planning services at HPM, a national school facilities consultancy, told Maine Public that birth rates alone do not explain the pattern:

"I think that the birth rates are going to stay low, but that's not all of it."

Richter pointed to the lack of affordable housing options that keeps young families from putting down roots in communities with school-age children. In Maine, where housing costs in southern coastal communities have risen steeply, that pressure may be pushing families to cheaper housing markets outside the state or into rural areas with even smaller school systems.

162 districts shrank, 93 hit bottom

The decline is not evenly distributed, but it is widespread. Of 254 districts and SAUs reporting enrollment in 2025-26, 162 lost students, 68 gained, and 13 were flat. Nearly two out of three districts are shrinking.

More strikingly, 93 districts recorded their lowest enrollment of the past decade, 36.6% of all reporting entities. RSU 10, covering the Rumford and Mexico area, lost 883 students over the decade, a 34.4% decline. RSU 02 in the Farmington area fell 31.5%. RSU 03 in Unity dropped 28.0%.

Portland, Maine's largest district, lost 253 students in a single year, dropping from 6,555 to 6,302. Over the full decade, the city has shed 445 students, a 6.6% decline. South Portland^↗ fell to 2,750, its lowest point in the dataset, down 9.4% from 2017.

Two of the state's largest districts bucked the trend. Lewiston^↗ added 36 students in 2025-26, reaching 5,349, though it remains well below its pre-COVID level of 5,574 in 2018-19. Auburn^↗ gained 66, its second consecutive year of growth after a seven-year slide that bottomed out at 3,179 in 2023-24. Both cities have significant immigrant and refugee populations, particularly Somali and African communities, that have partially offset the demographic pressures squeezing other districts.

Two out of three Maine districts now enroll fewer than 500 students. Eighty-five enroll fewer than 100. At that scale, losing even five students can mean losing a teacher, and losing a teacher can mean combining grades or cutting a program.

The budget math is arriving

The consequences are no longer hypothetical. Maine's Essential Programs and Services (EPS) funding formula allocates state aid on a per-pupil basis. When enrollment falls, so does state funding, but the fixed costs of maintaining buildings, heating classrooms, and running bus routes do not fall at the same rate.

"The only way that you're going to cut millions of dollars from a budget is by cutting positions." — Jesse Hargrove, Maine Education Association, March 2026

Across Portland, South Portland, and Lewiston, preliminary 2026-27 budgets proposed cutting more than 125 positions combined. About 40% of Maine's districts will see their state share decrease next year. South Portland's proposed cuts would eliminate 42 teaching positions, 16 educational technicians, and potentially close an elementary school to hold its tax increase to 6%.

Eric Waddell of the Maine School Management Association warned that the cuts may disproportionately target support staff:

"All these incredibly critically important jobs in our school that aren't necessarily viewed as providing direct care."

The school closure pace is accelerating in tandem. Fifteen schools closed in the first half of 2025, compared with 14 in all of 2024. In RSU 34, superintendent Matthew Cyr noted the district had "nine empty classrooms" between two small elementary schools before closing Viola Rand Elementary. MSAD 17 unified Waterford Memorial School and Harrison Elementary after neither building had enough students to justify a principal, saving roughly $400,000.

The budget season ahead

South Portland is weighing whether to close an elementary school. The district proposed eliminating 42 teaching positions, 16 educational technicians, and holding its tax increase to 6%. Across town, the heating bills have not changed. The bus routes have not shortened.

The EPS formula reform bill now before the Legislature proposes nine changes, including adjustments for community poverty and regional cost of living. District leaders have called the current formula outdated and inequitable. But the reform addresses how money flows, not how much there is. Augusta will vote on the formula. Birth certificates will determine the enrollment. And in RSU 34, the nine empty classrooms that prompted Viola Rand Elementary's closure are already being repurposed -- the question every superintendent in Maine is asking is which building is next.

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

Lewiston Is Growing While Maine Shrinks

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Maine 2025-26 Enrollment.

Across the river from Auburn, which has lost 331 students since 2017, Lewiston^↗ is doing something almost no district in Maine can claim. It is growing. Three consecutive years of enrollment gains, from a trough of 5,085 students in 2023 to 5,349 in 2026, have made Maine's second-largest district an outlier in a state that just hit its lowest public school enrollment in at least a decade.

Only 13 of Maine's 254 districts managed to add students in each of the last three years. Lewiston led them all, gaining 264 students since 2023, more than any other district with at least 500 students. The growth is modest in absolute terms. But in a state losing more than 2,000 students a year, any district moving in the opposite direction demands attention.

A Mill Town That Found a Second Act

The story of Lewiston's enrollment trajectory is inseparable from the city's transformation over the past two decades. In 2001, a Somali refugee family discovered Lewiston's affordable housing and low crime and began spreading word to immigrant networks across the country. What followed was one of the most significant secondary migration events in New England history.

Today, approximately 7,500 immigrants live in Lewiston, a city of roughly 37,000. Somali, Congolese, Sudanese, and other African families have settled in what was once a declining post-industrial city. The Lewiston school district now serves students speaking 42 different languages, with Somali the most common non-English language. The district's student body is 42% Black and 46% white, a demographic profile that would be unremarkable in most American cities but is extraordinary in Maine, where 84.4% of all public school students statewide are white.

The enrollment numbers trace the arc of this transformation. Lewiston peaked at 5,574 students in 2019, lost 489 students through the pandemic years to bottom out at 5,085 in 2023, then reversed course. The 173-student gain in 2025 was Lewiston's largest single-year increase in the dataset.

The Twin City Divergence

The contrast with Auburn^↗ sharpens the picture. The two cities sit on opposite banks of the Androscoggin River, share a metro area, and are often spoken of in the same breath. Their school systems have followed opposite paths.

Auburn enrolled 3,639 students in 2017. By 2024, after seven consecutive years of decline, it had fallen to 3,179, a loss of 460 students (12.6%). Auburn has shown signs of stabilizing in the last two years, adding 63 and 66 students respectively, but it remains 331 students below its 2017 level.

Lewiston, by contrast, is only 149 students (2.7%) below its 2017 mark and closing the gap. The difference between the two cities is not geography, not economics, not school quality ratings. It is immigration. Auburn does not have a large immigrant community. Lewiston does.

Growing Pains Are Real

Lewiston's growth has created a problem most Maine districts would envy: the schools are running out of room. Superintendent Jake Langlais told city councilors in April 2025 that enrollment had surpassed 6,000 students (a figure that includes programs beyond the state's October count), adding roughly 1,000 students in four years. "I'm hopeful it grows more slowly, because if it grows too quickly, we will reach capacity all over the place," Langlais said.

The district purchased a former Central Maine Healthcare building on Main Street and requested $1 million in the city's Capital Improvement Plan to design its conversion into educational space. Mayor Carl Sheline framed the capacity crunch as a sign of vitality: "This is really a good problem to have."

The infrastructure challenge underscores a paradox in Maine's funding formula. Per-pupil funding follows students, so growing districts receive more state aid. But Lewiston's growth comes with disproportionate costs. The district's multilingual education department, led by Director Lysa McLemore, supports students across seven primary languages. The instructional programs these students receive carry higher per-pupil costs than general education, and the gap between state reimbursement and actual cost of multilingual services is a persistent pressure point.

The State Is Going the Other Direction

Lewiston's trajectory is notable precisely because Maine's is so bleak. The state lost 11,994 students between 2017 and 2026, a 6.6% decline to an all-time low of 168,923. The losses are accelerating: 1,307 in 2024, 1,562 in 2025, 2,134 in 2026.

Maine's demographics explain much of it. The state recorded 5,019 more deaths than births in 2025, and its total fertility rate of 1.45 births per woman ranks among the lowest nationally. Any population growth the state experiences comes entirely from migration.

That is precisely what makes Lewiston's story significant at scale. Statewide, Black student enrollment grew 50.3% between 2017 and 2026, from 6,256 to 9,403, driven overwhelmingly by immigrant families in Lewiston and Portland^↗. English learner enrollment grew 54.3% over the same period, from 5,376 to 8,293. These are the fastest-growing segments of Maine's student population, and they are concentrated in a handful of cities.

The January 2026 Disruption

The growth trajectory hit a sudden complication in January 2026 when ICE launched "Operation Catch of the Day" across southern and western Maine, arresting more than 200 people. Across Maine's most diverse districts, absence rates for multilingual students approached or exceeded 50% at the height of the operation, with more than 4,000 students statewide missing school on a single day.

In Lewiston, Superintendent Langlais confirmed that ICE had not conducted enforcement at schools, bus stops, or school events, but acknowledged a rise in absences as fear spread through the community. Mayor Sheline disputed ICE's characterization of the operation as targeting criminals, noting that agents had detained "a Lewiston mother of an autistic son" and "a father of a newborn child."

The enrollment data in this analysis reflects the state's October count, taken months before the ICE operation began. Whether immigration enforcement affects Lewiston's 2027 enrollment count, through families leaving or keeping children home, is the most consequential open question facing the district.

A building on Main Street

The tension between a city running out of classroom space and a state running out of students is the Lewiston story in miniature. The district now accounts for 3.17% of Maine's total enrollment, up from 3.04% in 2017. That share will keep climbing as long as the state shrinks and Lewiston does not. After the January ICE operations, the more urgent question is whether the families who filled those classrooms will still be in Lewiston when the October count arrives.

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

One in 18 Maine Students Is Now Black

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Maine 2025-26 Enrollment.

Nine years ago, a Black student in a Maine public school classroom was a statistical rarity: 3.5% of total enrollment, roughly one in 29. Today that share has climbed to 5.6%, one in 18. In a state that lost nearly 12,000 students over the same period, Black enrollment grew by 3,147, a 50.3% increase that stands out against nearly every other trend line in the data.

The growth is not abstract. It has specific origins: Somali, Congolese, Angolan, and Sudanese families who settled in Lewiston^↗ and Portland^↗ over the past two decades, first through federal refugee resettlement and more recently through asylum. Their children now fill classrooms where, as recently as the mid-2000s, the student body was more than 95% white.

Three groups, one pattern

Black students added the most in absolute terms: 3,147 between 2017 and 2026. But Hispanic enrollment grew even faster in percentage terms, up 70.8% (+2,705), while multiracial students rose 62.2% (+2,552). Together these three groups account for all net growth among students of color, splitting the gains almost evenly: Black students contributed 37.4% of the increase, Hispanic students 32.2%, and multiracial students 30.4%.

The net result: students of color now represent 15.6% of Maine's public school enrollment, up from 10.3% in 2017, a 5.3 percentage-point shift. That still leaves Maine among the whitest public school systems in the country at 84.4% white, but the trajectory is unambiguous. Every year in the dataset shows the non-white share rising.

Meanwhile, white enrollment fell by 19,746 students, a 12.2% decline. Maine's overall enrollment drop of 11,994 is entirely a white enrollment story. Students of color gained 7,732, offsetting roughly 39% of the white loss.

The acceleration year

Black enrollment grew in eight of nine years, with the only decline coming during the COVID disruption of 2020-21 (-85 students). But the growth was not evenly distributed across time. From 2017 to 2023, annual gains ranged from 249 to 331 students. Then 2024 happened: Black enrollment jumped by 822 in a single year, the largest annual increase in the dataset by a wide margin. The 2025 gain of 592 and the 2026 gain of 373 were smaller but still above the pre-2024 pace.

The 2024 spike aligns with a period of record refugee resettlement in Maine. The state resettled close to 700 people through the federal admissions program in fiscal year 2024, the highest number on record for over a decade, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo among the top countries of origin. Many settled in Lewiston-Auburn, which overtook Portland as the primary resettlement destination that year.

Asylum seekers arriving independently of the federal program added to the flow. Portland's school district enrolled a record 979 multilingual students in the 2022-23 school year, roughly double the rate of the previous year, with most coming from Central Africa. The district's multilingual learner population now exceeds 2,000.

Multilingual learners as a parallel signal

English learner enrollment tracks closely with Black enrollment growth, and the two are intertwined. Many of Maine's Black students come from families where Somali, French, Lingala, Arabic, or Portuguese is the home language. Statewide, English learner enrollment rose 54.3% from 5,376 to 8,293 between 2017 and 2026, growing faster than any racial subgroup relative to total enrollment.

Indexed to 2017, English learner enrollment reached 154 by 2026 while Black enrollment hit 150. Total enrollment, by contrast, fell to 93. The divergence is striking: two populations growing 50% or more inside a system that shrank by 6.6%.

Across Maine, 7,208 students were classified as multilingual learners in the 2023-24 school year, a 28% increase over five years. The top languages have shifted: Portuguese has overtaken Somali as the most common, reflecting newer waves of Angolan asylum seekers.

"We are starting to look a lot more like the rest of the country in terms of multilingual, cultural diversity." -- Carlos Gomez, Portland Public Schools language development director, Maine Public, Oct. 2024

Of Maine's 234 licensed multilingual teachers, 57% work in just three districts: Portland, Lewiston, and South Portland^↗. The concentration reflects where the students are, but it also exposes the staffing challenge for districts elsewhere that are seeing smaller but growing numbers of multilingual learners without the infrastructure to serve them.

What the numbers cannot show

The data tracks who is enrolled. It does not track why they came, how long they have been in the country, or whether the growth reflects new arrivals versus children aging into higher grades. A family that arrived in Portland in 2018 with a toddler now has a second-grader in the enrollment count. Some portion of the growth is simply these households maturing through the system.

There is also a question about how the current federal immigration enforcement climate will affect future enrollment. In late January 2026, ICE arrested over 200 people in Maine during a multi-day operation, targeting Lewiston's Somali community. Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline described the detainees as "neighbors, our family members and employees." School attendance reportedly dropped during the enforcement period, and federal refugee resettlement dropped to just 50 people statewide in fiscal 2025, down from the nearly 700 resettled the prior year.

Whether that enforcement pressure translates into an enrollment reversal, or whether the established communities in Lewiston and Portland continue to grow through natural increase and secondary migration, is the open question for the 2026-27 school year and beyond.

A state remaking itself slowly

Maine remains overwhelmingly white. The 5.3 percentage-point shift in the share of students of color, spread over nine years, is not a revolution. It is, however, a structural change with compounding effects. The 26,320 students of color now enrolled represent the future workforce, voter base, and community fabric of a state where the median age is 44.8 years, the oldest in the nation, and where deaths have outnumbered births for years.

In Lewiston, the school district just purchased a former Central Maine Healthcare building on Main Street and requested $1 million to convert it into classroom space. The district is running out of room because of the very families whose enrollment growth defies every other trend line in the state. That is the paradox Maine faces: the students driving its diversity are also the ones keeping classrooms full in a state where most classrooms are emptying. The rest of Maine is watching from the outside.

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.

Maine Publishes 2025-26 Enrollment Data

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Maine 2025-26 Enrollment.

Last year, Maine lost 1,562 students. The year before that, 1,307 — a number that fit the narrative of a state whose enrollment had been declining slowly and predictably for years. Some observers took the modest losses as evidence that the bottom was near.

Then the Maine Department of Education published its 2025-26 enrollment figures: 168,923 students statewide, down 2,134. That is a 63% acceleration from two years ago, the largest single-year decline outside the pandemic in the state's dataset. Whatever floor people thought they saw in 2024 was not a floor.

What the numbers open up

Maine is the whitest state in the nation, the oldest, and one of the smallest by student population. Its education system runs through roughly 254 School Administrative Units that range from tiny island districts with double-digit enrollment to Portland's 6,700 students. When enrollment falls here, it falls differently depending on where you are — and this year's data reveals a state where the trajectories are splitting apart.

Maine hit an all-time enrollment low. The 168,923 figure is the lowest in the state's dataset, and the three-year decline has accelerated from 1,307 to 1,562 to 2,134. The state peaked at 180,917 in 2017 and has shed nearly 12,000 students since, a 6.6% decline that is now gaining speed rather than stabilizing.

Black enrollment surged 50% while overall enrollment fell. Maine added 1,795 Black students over nine years — a 50.3% increase driven almost entirely by Somali and African immigrant families in Lewiston and Portland. One in 18 Maine students is now Black, a figure that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

78% of Maine districts never recovered from COVID. Five years after the pandemic, only 47 of 214 districts have regained their pre-COVID enrollment. The state is 11,436 students below its projected pre-pandemic trajectory.

By the numbers: 168,923 students statewide in 2025-26 — down 2,134 from the prior year, a 1.25% decline and the largest non-COVID loss on record. The state has now lost students for three consecutive years, with losses accelerating each year.

The threads we are following

Two pre-K students for every three kindergartners. Maine's pre-K enrollment surged 30% while kindergarten fell 14.8%. The state is successfully expanding early childhood education, but the children flowing through it are a smaller cohort each year.

Lewiston is growing while Maine shrinks. Immigration has transformed Lewiston from a declining mill city into one of the few Maine districts adding students. Across the river, Auburn has lost students for seven straight years.

168 new schools in nine years, 12,000 fewer students. Maine's school entity count grew from 493 to 661 while enrollment shrank, diluting the average school to 256 students.

What comes next

Each of these threads will get its own article with charts, district breakdowns, and context. New articles publish Fridays. The first deep dive, next week, examines the all-time low and what it means that losses have nearly quadrupled in two years.

The enrollment figures come from the Maine Department of Education data warehouse. The data covers the official enrollment count for public schools statewide.

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