About the School
Maine Arts Academy is Maine's first and only performing and visual arts high school. We are a charter school, and as such, a public school. We are in our third year, educating more than 200 students from 57 towns across our state, with a dozen foreign exchange students. We receive funding only from the state level, and we supplement our lack of local government funding with donations, grant opportunities and support from Maine businesses. For the past 30 years, the arts have slowly been phased out of public school education due to the mounting pressure on our public schools to raise standardized test scores and face statewide and nationwide school comparisons. Maine public high school administrators have increasingly come to see arts education as a frill or a luxury versus complementary and essential to educational standards and success. Hypersensitivity to test results has motivated administrators to cut arts experiences selectively as well, the thinking being that "if you strug