How do they get this data?

Yeah not surprising. Every town must have its own school even though they don’t have any kids. Doesn’t mean we have particularly good schools.

... employment and enrollment figures

So fake data.

My school has an enrollment of 545 - we have 58 teachers so about 9 kids per teacher issue is that includes SPED courses with 5 kids in them, 1 to 1 behavior students.

It's averaging the entire state, and 9.3 is an even better number than the 11:1 reported. Try again?

My unfinished point (my bad) is that there are classes in my school that 40 students.

Do you understand what averages are?

Just summed up how bad our education system is lol

This person is a teacher, too.

....please tell me you are joking

I wish I was.

Well there. I'm done for the day. Back to work and to watch it snow lol. Thanks for depressing me more than my credit card debt

Maine will hold onto that until the bitter end. Take Millinocket and East Millinocket. Do they really need two high schools?

Happy to help

>there are classes in my school that 40 students.

You're not a math or English teacher I hope.

Take this data with a grain of salt. I have 120 students a day. Divided over 6 periods I average 20 per class.

BTW I consider 20 per class reasonable given the age of students.

Special Ed classrooms might have 6 kids or less at a time but that work is much harder in some ways to a “regular” teacher.

My high school had 5 towns in it I think a lot of places in Maine are like that

School begins before high school. There are elementary/junior high schools with graduating classes of 10.

I mean 40k a year would make me rethink being a teacher too.

Please tell me you’re a student and not a teacher.

Yes, Special Ed probably skews the data. I have a low number of students, but they are very high needs.

Well they played each other in the 78-79 Tourney at the old Bangor Auditorium so obviously they cannot consolidate into a single school.

It comes down to town rivalries unfortunately. Howland and Lincoln each have their own schools. So does Lee. They could easily consolidate to just Lincoln.

This frustrates me because I just looked at Maine's community colleges job portal and there are no jobs. I just graduated with my Masters in writing with the desire to teach but there's nothing available.

I taught at a community college in Ohio before moving here and tried my hardest to get something, anything at a CC around here and nothin’

I had a friend tell me that a lot of the adjunct positions at CCs in Maine are taken by retired professors, often from prestigious universities, who move to Maine and decided they’d like to teach a bit still. I don’t know how true that actually is but it seems plausible.

God no, Lee Academy doesn’t need to consolidate to Lincoln. Can’t speak for Howland, but Lee has a lot of kids from the small towns that go to it. On top of its foreign student program.

i don't know a single teacher (and i know a lot, living all over the state) with a single class with less than 15 students

Boy, this doesn’t really fit with the mythology that we hear all the time does it? The myth centers around the notion that teachers are somehow underpaid, overworked, and forced to spend their own money.

The reality is that teaching is a part-time job with every summer and weekend off, according to data you will only have 11 kids in your class on average so there’s not that much grading to do, and there’s a tax deduction that allows teachers to get extra money back for anything they put in Out of their own pockets beyond what the school has budgeted for.

Enough of the whining, this is a profession to embrace for its benefits.

Once all the old alumni have died off, it’ll be easier. There’s a lot of guys out there that lived their glory days/peaked at skank.

Like every other time maps like these are put together with flimsy statistics, this doesn't paint the whole picture. It's using averages, which usually aren't the best metric since extreme outliers skew the results drastically. Other people here have pointed out special ed classrooms as one of these outliers, for example. Many of Maine's schools have wonderful special needs resources which is a great thing. Many others don't.

You are woefully out of touch with reality with your comment.

Numbers don’t lie. I was taught to do math

I would ask how much teaching you've done/classroom time you've put in?

Apparently not very well. Numbers don't lie but people using misleading statistics to support their arguments do.

Using median data would be more significantly meaningful here than averages. I don't doubt that the information on this map is accurate, though I haven't verified. Even if it is, it's basically meaningless.

Windham typically has excellent teacher student ratios.

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...But they aren't working in the field of education. That's the catch.

This is an uneducated post made by someone who probably whittles their time away working in retail or fast food and doesn't know a single lick about the education field.

>there’s a tax deduction that allows teachers to get extra money back for anything they put in Out of their own pockets beyond what the school has budgeted for

Your whole comment is trash but I had to highlight this part, it made me giggle. Deductions don't change your tax liability directly (that's credits), they change your taxable income. You need a big change to have any impact. The educator expense deduction tops out at $300, and unless a teacher has a bunch of other deductions, they're probably not itemizing anyway -- which makes this deduction 100% worthless for those educators.

The idea that a $300 deduction, which only exists because your fellow citizens refuse to fund education well enough that you don't have to spend your own money on supplies, is somehow this game-changing perk in favor of teachers is hilarious.

i would imagine the wealthier districts are doing better in regard to this ratio than less affluent ones, but nothing radical/ground breaking about that statement, of course

Loads of high school and middle school positions are open!

I work in a district where folks complain about having 15 students in a class for 4, 60 minute classes a day (five total with one prep). I came from a district near Albany, NY where we had 30+ students and not enough seats or books (5 classes, 40-45 min, with 2 preps). Many of the teachers I work with have never worked in another state, so they have nothing to compare their conditions to.

Im a special Ed teacher too, but I usually have 10-15 students all with IEPs for ELA and math.

Biddo and saco definitely have less than 15 students.

Education is funded. Teachers buy extra stuff because they have the money available to them.

I mean the quality of the math education I received is directly related to the quality of my teacher. So theres that lol.

An average ratio of 1:11, using the same formula for comparison with all 50 states, is real and useful data. I’m sorry that it doesn’t fit with your world view.

My kids went to Lee. There is talk of consolidation. My son told me the other day that the foreign student program has just a handful of kids this year.

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Those rivalries run deep. Apparently there was talk a few years ago of Howland and Milo merging. Howland was not happy.

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It's not useful. It's intentionally misleading. Anyone using averages when sharing statistics is either inept or nefarious. Averages can be useful in specific cases but this isn't one of them.

Sorry you've apparently never taken a statistics class. The first thing they teach you is you can make the numbers say whatever you want them to say just by how the information is presented.

there are ways to save money but don't create a new problem be surgical.

If I had to guess, this is the data they used:

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/student-teacher-ratio-stats/maine

Compared to all of the other states, using the same formulae, Maine teachers have it easier. Why is that a bad thing to point out?

Because that's not what the data says. It's flawed from the start by virtue of using averages for its comparison. It lacks nuance and doesn't account for the differences between Southern Maine and Aroostook county. This is the equivalent of a puff piece news story of kittens jumping on trampolines. It doesn't mean anything. It just is. That's why it's useless.

Where are those numbers from? I know several teaches making $85k+

maybe they can take toesocks' job

Where do they teach and how long have they been teaching? I make 40k, am a teacher. I have a buddy who makes over 100k a year bartending. We live in a society

Go fuck yourself. Come in and sub and see how easy it is. Fucking idiot

Yeah they have it so easy they choose to work service jobs in the summer for funsies!

I hope you're a troll. Absolutely shocking idiocy. Come into a public school for a week and sub. You need a reality check

Dude there's a bunch of teachers at my school who have two jobs during the school year and will work all x-mas break. t's depressing.

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Okay, you're just trolling, got it. That makes the above slightly less funny, because it may not be an earnest belief, but it's still pretty good regardless.

> We live in a society

We're supposed to act in a civilized way!!

I’ve never only ever taught in Maine and 15 is the sweet spot for 7-12. I consider myself lucky to never have had 30-40 students some teachers have.

Can’t believe anyone would complain about 15 students.

Our school pulls from 3-4 towns along the coast and still only has like 40 kids per grade.

raising the pay for teachers in maine should be a major political priority. not only would it result in a better education for our children, the future of this state, but it would attract young professionals to this state, something our economy needs.

Also, teachers deserve the money. they work so, so hard.

This is a fact at all the schools I have worked in. Coming from an Atlanta suburb I giggle.

What we do have is some of the highest per pupil costs in the country, despite teacher’s salaries being among the lowest (MEA). This is because we have more administrators per student than anyone else, due in part to small schools and school districts. If the original data is counting administrators as educators that would make sense.

Dunno how this fits in to the conversation, but I’ve got two kids in Maine public schools and I think their teachers do a phenomenal job. I’m super appreciative of the work they do.

Where do live that teachers only make $40,000 a year?

I think it depends a lot on where you live. I live on the west coast and the average teacher salary is about $58,000. The average price of a house here and within a 40 mile radius is about $750,000. So if a house near where you teach is $400,000 and you are making $50,000 a yr as a teacher in Maine you are actually much better of than a teacher here in Washington making $8,000 more but having to pay almost twice as much for housing. We also have a 10.2% sales tax, gas is almost $5.00 a gallon of gas and my property taxes are $875 a month. A way more expensive place to live.

I am thinking of retiring in Maine ad it is so much cheaper.

Same! I have two elementary school kids. I feel really lucky that they have such great teachers and school staff. And small class sizes, incidentally.

Lots of Milo kids go to Foxcroft now, so at least they sort of merged somewhere

How the hell is this accurate? In California I have never had less than 31 in my class the past 5 years. This is for elementary.

I taught in CA for 15 years before moving here. My first year, and most of the next, class had 34 fifth graders. 25 were at some sort of English Language Acquisition level, 10 had IEPs. It was hard, but we did it. I don't get how Maine isn't knocking it out of the park, I really don't. My class this year has 18 kids, no ELA students and 3 IEPs. HOW in the heck do CA kids outperform ours? OR...why are our kids not outperforming theirs by a massive amount? I don't get it...

Pretty much every class my kids have been a part of have between 12-16 kids and every class in the school I work at has the same numbers.

That’s a wise choice on their part.

You’re at the wrong place. All the schools post openings on Serving Schools. You can set up alerts. Lots of jobs. So many jobs.

Thanks! I'll check it out

i think teachers in washington should be paid more too actually

My county in Florida got fined by the state like $20 million a few years ago because it was cheaper to get fined instead of just hiring more teachers. The average that year in high school was like 26:1 and I've had classrooms that have 35 kids in them even being an honors level class.

Same here!!! I came from 24 students, 5 SPed, 4 ESOL, 6 RTI Tier 2 at a suburb of Atlanta as well and now I have 9 kiddos total! I love the class size and the learning that is going on is simply amazing compared to behavior management/baby sitting I use to do in GA!

Gwinnet County is where I grew up taught in Hall.

And the schools are still overall pretty subpar

My wife was an Ed-Tech and she had 2-3 students a day, usually one at a time.

I grew up in Gwinnett, worked for them for 11 years and then moved over to Walton Co. for 3 before moving to Maine. I love it here!

Black Knight 95 here

Black Knight 98! That is too cool, how'd you end up in Maine? I just got here in June, will never go back to the south!

Drug problem. Wife drug me here. She is from SoPo. Good chance we know each other just sayin.