METHODOLOGY
Students who reside in a town which does not operate or contract with a school serving their grade level may receive town-paid tuition to attend any private school meeting certain criteria, including that it be “a nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.” For purposes of this project, these towns are designated as having “full choice” for grade levels not served by their SAU. If a town is part of a school district which serves all grade levels, its choice is categorized as “none.”
Some SAUs contract exclusively with a private school to serve its students. For instance, Saco Public Schools does not operate its own high school, so its resident students are designated to attend Thornton Academy, a 60% publicly-funded private school. Technically, they are “tuitioned” to that school, but they otherwise do not have public school choice due to the existing agreement between the city and Thornton Academy. Towns with similar situations were categorized as providing no school choice for their resident students.
Lincoln Academy, another 60% publicly-funded school, accepts town-tuitioned high school students from certain Midcoast towns, which allow for some measure of choice for grades 9 through 12, but it does not contract with any particular school district for all of its students. This allows resident students of Damariscotta, Newcastle, Bristol, Bremen, and other nearby towns organized into Alternative Organizational Structure (AOS) No. 93, a regional SAU, full high school choice. Some school boards may choose to cover costs of transportation to certain area districts or schools for their students, as RSU 12 offers for their students attending Wiscasset schools.
Rising high-schoolers residing in the City of Portland may apply to attend one of the three high schools operated by Portland Public Schools based on availability, with a lottery system to decide enrollment in the event of more applications than spots available at a particular school. In cases like this where a town is part of a district which provides multiple options for the same grade levels, or a district contracts with multiple nearby schools or districts that serve the same grade levels, it was designated as having “limited choice” for those grade levels.
Jurisdictions marked as not available (N/A) are either those which the state’s Education in the Unorganized Territories (EUT) office has not assigned residents a school or SAU, or those which were not able to be reached by time of publication: Dennistown Plt, Glenwood Plt, Grand Isle, Nashville Plt, Monhegan Plt, Orient, Pleasant Ridge Plt, Shirley, The Forks Plt, West Forks, Willimantic, and Winterville Plt. Through EUT, 13 localities are designated to SAUs with limited school choice options; 92 are designated to SAUs with none. As more information comes to light from these towns, the map will be updated.