Maine
Why Maine has private high schools that serve public students
Laborious Telling Not Understanding every week tries to reply your burning questions on why issues are the best way they’re in Maine — particularly about Maine tradition and historical past, each way back and up to date, massive and small, essential and foolish. Ship your inquiries to eburnham@bangordailynews.com.
This week’s query is a continuation of a query requested earlier in the summertime about why Maine has various townships named for defunct Massachusetts faculties.
Why does Maine have city academies?
It’s one thing that’s fairly distinctive to Maine: personal faculties that, in some ways, function as public faculties. They’re referred to as city academies, and their historical past runs parallel with the event of Maine as a state with its personal academic system.
Earlier than the state started to standardize its schooling system within the Eighteen Nineties, education throughout Maine existed in a form of hodgepodge vogue of a whole lot of unbiased districts. One-room schoolhouses had been the commonest kind of college, with solely bigger communities having their very own public excessive faculties. With Maine’s largely rural, agricultural make-up, and with vehicles and buses nonetheless many many years away, large regional public faculties simply weren’t potential.
However personal faculties that supplied room and board for college students had been pretty widespread. By the center of the nineteenth century, there have been at the very least 25 personal academies based by the residents of cities throughout the state, funded by tuition, donations and land grants given by Massachusetts, earlier than Maine turned a state. Greater than half of these faculties at the moment are defunct, however some nonetheless stay.
There are 12 of these authentic personal city academies presently working in Maine: Berwick Academy, Erskine Academy in South China, Foxcroft Academy in Dover-Foxcroft, Fryeburg Academy, George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, Gould Academy in Bethel, Hebron Academy, Lee Academy, Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, North Yarmouth Academy, Thornton Academy in Saco, and Washington Academy in East Machias. They had been all based in both the late 18th or early nineteenth centuries, except for Erskine, which was based in 1883.
As Maine’s trendy college districts started to take form and public education started to be improved and standardized by the state, city academies remained as a form of hybrid public-private possibility. The 1873 Free Excessive College Act required cities to both set up public excessive faculties supported by state funds, or to pay tuition to personal academies to teach their residents — an association that exists to at the present time.
Thus, these personal faculties, a few of which have been in operation for greater than two centuries, can have a scholar physique that’s made up largely of public college college students. Some faculties, together with George Stevens in Blue Hill and Thornton in Saco, can have wherever from 75 to just about one hundred pc of their college students as public tuition enrollees.
Different faculties in Maine function in related methods, although they aren’t among the many authentic city academies. Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield and John Bapst Memorial Excessive College in Bangor additionally settle for city tuitioning college students, although they had been by no means historically referred to as “city academies.”
There are additionally public excessive faculties, together with Hampden, Monmouth and Robert William Traip in Kittery, which might be known as academies, and had been all initially personal faculties that turned public faculties at varied factors of their histories. Mattanawcook Academy in Lincoln was all the time a public highschool, nevertheless.
It’s all a bit difficult, however like a lot in Maine — from city conferences to nation gala’s — it’s obtained its roots in one thing that belongs to a different period in one other century. And but, one way or the other, all of it nonetheless works.