This map shows all the rural Maine towns that have closed their public schools since 2004

This map was part of a project that has not come to fruition, but is informative enough on its own that it is worth posting. It shows every school in small-town Maine that has closed since roughly 2004, leaving behind no public school in that town.

There have been more schools than these that have closed in Maine in the past 12 years, but I have omitted those in towns that still have other schools, or which opened new ones in conjunction with closing others. The point of this map is to show the towns that made the painful decision to close their last remaining school and to have whatever schoolchildren they have left travel out of town each weekday.



For some, the distance is minor. Middle and high school students that used to attend school in Livermore Falls earlier this decade now attend school two-and-a-half miles away in neighboring Jay, making a seamless journey each day across a boundary hardly visible between the two close-knit communities.

For others, the closure is more impactful. Eagle Lake closed its school in 2017 and now sends its students each weekday to Fort Kent, more than 15 miles away. Students from Rockwood have to ride nearly 20 miles to Greenville each morning and then back each afternoon. In Vanceboro, which closed its school in 2015, students now board buses that travel 22 miles -- one way -- to school every day in Topsfield.

For each of those commutes, the edge of town is followed by a long stretch of two-lane road cutting through tracts of sparsely developed forest before, miles later, the next hamlet pulls into view. The distance is both physical and psychological. The sense of isolation is not as profound in every case, but the void left by closing schools is palpable for many people.

The school closures represent a broader issue in Maine -- one of small-town erosion brought on by escalating school costs and the increasingly global economy. Small businesses have a hard time competing against national chains or internet retail giants; local manufacturing or resource extraction jobs dry up; young people and families move away; local institutions shrink and shut down. Many equate the closure of a town's only or last remaining school with a rural community's slow death.

And when this happens in Maine 45 towns over the course of 10 years, it's hard not to think that a big part of Maine's history and culture is dissolving.

It is true that change is constant in nearly every visible aspect of life, and not all change is bad. But changes, good and bad, that stir up deep feelings of memory and identity are worth documenting. This is what I hope to contribute to with this map.