VISUALIZED AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS · ME
Maine Public Schools
The canvas comes first: every public school district in Maine, drawn from the federal boundary files. The data layers — enrollment change, funding, teachers, achievement — are built on top of this map, Missouri-style, in phases.
THE DISTRICT MAP
School district boundaries
Hover any district for its name. Boundaries are the 2024–25 school-year files from NCES EDGE / U.S. Census TIGER.
MAP IN PREPARATION
The Maine district boundary file hasn’t been generated yet.
Run scripts/make_boundaries.sh to rebuild boundaries/maine.geojson, then redeploy.
Source: NCES EDGE Composite School District Boundaries, 2024–25 (via U.S. Census TIGER/Line). Unified and elementary districts shown; secondary districts omitted.
261 districts are drawn on this map — 248 unified and 13 elementary.
How districts are drawn here. Maine has separate elementary and secondary school districts whose territories overlap. To keep the map readable, it shows unified districts plus elementary districts — together they tile the state exactly, with no gaps and no overlaps. The 6 secondary districts are not drawn, because they sit on top of the elementary districts rather than beside them. Data joined to this map follows the same rule.
TEACHER PAY
What Maine pays its teachers
A first look, from the National Education Association’s 2024–25 salary benchmarks. These are Maine statewide averages of district salary schedules; a district-by-district map is the next layer (see the note below).
$44,152
Average starting teacher salary — bachelor’s degree, no experience.
NEA 2024–25 Benchmark Report
$78,347
Average top-of-schedule salary — the highest step and lane a teacher can reach.
NEA 2024–25 Benchmark Report
167
of Maine’s 264 school districts had salary data reported (63.3%).
NEA 2024–25 Benchmark Report
Source: National Education Association, 2024–2025 Teacher Salary Benchmark Report (April 2026), state tables ST-1 and ST-4. Figures are unweighted averages of district salary schedules; “starting” = bachelor’s degree with no experience, “top of schedule” = the highest step and lane. For reference, the national average starting salary was $48,112.
The district map is the next layer. A district-by-district salary map for Maine is being built from federal finance data — NCES teacher counts and the U.S. Census F-33 school-finance survey — to show an
average salary per district (a derived measure, and labeled as one). Until it lands, this page carries the verified statewide figures above. For the fully built version of this theme, see the Missouri flagship’s
Teacher Pay page.