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When Kate Legere moved to Islesboro 20 years ago with her family to take a teaching job at the island’s school, more than 90 students were enrolled.
Now, Legere is the school’s principal and next year, she’s expecting to have just over 50 students.
“It’s a complex, many-layered conundrum,” she said of the school’s declining population.
Many of the factors leading to the drop in enrollment are beyond the school’s control: Maine’s population is aging and birth rates are falling. Many young families are priced out of Islesboro’s housing market.
So the school is focusing closer at hand. It’s trying to boost its numbers by rebuilding its unique magnet program which has been bringing mainland students to the school for several decades, but has seen dwindling numbers in recent years.
Despite its shrinking student body, the school — a gabled, stone-clad mansion perched on a knoll — is still central to island life. Even people without kids come to its basketball games, concerts and fundraisers, Legere said.
“The school really is the heart of the town,” she said. “It sounds like a cliche, but it’s very true,” she said.
On Islesboro, support for the school remains strong. Last fall, more than 100 people attended a community meeting about the future of the school. “The school board co-chair ran the meeting and the first thing he said was ‘Islesboro Central School is not closing.’ And the gym erupted into wild applause,” Legere recalls.
With that level of support, she says she can’t imagine the school closing anytime soon.
“It would be a really big fight,” she said.
But it has prompted searching conversations about what the island will need to do to remain a robust year-round community.
Schools are key to keeping year-round island communities functioning, says Yvonne Thomas, who coordinates education programs on the Sunbeam, a ship run by the Maine Seacoast Mission, a nonprofit that provides essential services to remote coastal and island communities.
Without them, an island can struggle to attract families, becoming just a summer enclave, she said.
“When you don’t have families, you don’t have the adults in the community to be on the volunteer fire department and to teach in the school and to run the town,” she said. “It really starts to wither.”
Making sure families can afford to stay on Islesboro, or move there, is the best way to keep the school healthy, Legere acknowledges. But in the short term, the school is redoubling its efforts to recruit off-island students.
The school’s magnet program started in the 1990s. It allows students from the mainland to come to Islesboro for junior high and high school. While it charges tuition, its primary purpose has been to keep class sizes from getting too small and to introduce island students to a wider range of perspectives and peers. Unlike a typical magnet school, Islesboro doesn’t focus on a specific subject area, but does offer an individualized education program called Pathways as well as a number of experiential and technical learning programs.
Over the years, the magnet program has become central to the school’s sustainability, both in terms of revenue and helping keep student numbers up.
But the number of mainland students coming to Islesboro has also dwindled. Right now, there are only seven, down from 21 just four years ago.
For a long time, the school didn’t need to do much to publicize the program, Legere says. Northport, a mainland community with no high school, pays tuition for its students to attend other high schools and was a reliable feeder school. So were private elementary schools, though some have expanded to offer middle school in recent years, which means they’ve sent fewer students to Islesboro.
Islesboro recently revamped its tuition system, which makes it potentially more affordable for families but less so for towns that pay tuition. As of last school year, tuition is about $14,000, which is roughly double what it previously cost. Towns pay the full amount.
But the school has instituted a sliding scale for families, which means they can pay anywhere from the full price to nothing at all, depending on their financial situation.
Legere says she hopes any families that are curious but might worry about the expense will come visit. “Money doesn’t have to be a barrier,” she said.
The school is also upping its outreach efforts. Matava, the new magnet coordinator, is still getting her legs under her, but will be meeting this spring with people in midcoast communities and trying to get the word out about the school.
Some of the key selling points are the school’s academic rigor and individualized learning programs. The school takes advantage of the island’s trails and abundant nature. And it also offers hands-on learning through its horticulture program and the school-owned scallop farm
“Our kids are getting a private school education in a public school setting,” Matava said.
Sophia Skrivanich, a senior at the school, commutes from Camden every day. While Camden has a well-regarded high school, she says larger schools don’t offer the same individualized attention. “You can kind of get lost,” she said.
Her classes at the Islesboro school are so small that flying under the radar isn’t an option.
“Everyone talks, everyone participates, and everyone’s held accountable for their role in the classroom,” she said.
For Harper Conover, who grew up on the island, having mainland students in the school makes it much more vibrant. If the school was only for island residents, some grades might have only two kids, he said. “You add a lot of life when you get to like eight kids in a class,” he said.
Skrivanich and Conover said the school’s size means everyone can participate in sports. “There’s no tryouts. It’s encouraged that you just go try,” Conover said. “I think that’s one of the cool aspects of the school. There’s so much opportunity.”
Thomas, of the Maine Seacoast Mission said Islesboro’s magnet school is one of the creative ways that island schools have tried to survive. “I love the innovation of it, and I love that it’s endured,” she said.
Chebeague Island’s school, in Casco Bay, has also started accepting mainland students, she said. It’s easier for islands close to the mainland to institute programs like these, she said.
North Haven, which is more remote, has started an offshore program, which invites high school students to stay for a year or longer and live in shared housing while attending the school.
Legere acknowledged that choosing to come to Islesboro for school comes with its inconveniences. Parents have to drop their kids off at the ferry and pick them up. If there are evening events at the school, sometimes you have to take a water taxi home.
“Not everyone is built for that,” she said.
But the circumstances forge an unusually close-knit school community, she said, one in which every student is truly known.
While Legere has known many of the students from the island since they were babies, she and the rest of the school work to bond with the magnet students too.
“We have time to get to know them, to find out how they learn, what they’re interested in. We’ll really do backflips to find out what’s interesting to you,” she said.“We really put a lot of energy into each child, because we can.”
