Maine school safety

The district ranking on this page is two lines long. That is the method working as designed, and it is the first thing worth understanding here.

To rank a district, we need enough of its schools to have records we can stand behind. Of Maine's 215 districts, two clear that bar in the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection. Portland Public Schools ranks safer than 84% of ranked US districts; within its scored set of 16 schools, 7 had data complete enough to score. RSU 40/MSAD 40 ranks safer than 54% of ranked US districts, with 7 of the 7 schools in its scored set complete enough to score. For the rest of Maine, the individual school pages are where the information is.

What a score means, and what a blank means

We compare each school to roughly 1,500 schools nationally that are closest to it in enrollment and teach the same grade levels. Among the peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile of the incident rate — a deliberately low bar. A school that reported less than a quarter of what that implies for its size has not given evidence of safety. Grades A and B go to records we believe, and those are the schools with a published safety score: 153 of Maine's 602 schools. C means a school reported almost nothing but is small enough that a genuine zero is common — not evidence of safety, but not implausible. D and E mean schools of the same size normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and this one reported almost none.

Eighty-nine Maine schools fall into D or E. That is 14.8% of the state, against 11.3% nationally. Read that carefully: it is a statement about records, not about children. Our comparison is not adjusted for state, so a gap like this one reflects differences in what gets written down and submitted, not differences in how safe Maine kids are. Nothing in this collection can tell you that a school here is more or less dangerous than one across a state line.

What you can take from this page is narrow and real. If your child's school shows a score, it rests on a report we were able to check against schools its size. If it shows no score, that is not bad news and it is not good news — it means the record is thin. The useful next step is to ask the school or the district office what they reported for 2021-22, and how they count incidents. A blank is a question, not a verdict.

Safest ranked cities in Maine

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Maine city with schools

Every Maine school district