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When Loring Air Force Base closed in 1994, the Aroostook County town of Limestone lost four-fifths of its population. Suddenly the school that had been built for those military families, accommodating 1,200 students, echoed with the footsteps of fewer than 400.
But sometimes subtraction can lead to the multiplication of opportunities. Where some saw abandonment, the state legislature saw possibility. And in 1995, the Maine School of Science and Mathematics (MSSM) was born.
From its inception as the first publicly funded magnet school in the state, MSSM has grown in both size and reputation. In November 2007, U.S. News and World Report ranked MSSM number 35 on its annual list of the top 100 public schools in the nation. It’s the only school in Maine on the list.
“The mission of the school is unique to Maine,” says Walter Warner, the school’s executive director since 2005. “While the emphasis is on math and science, students can come here and get a top-quality college prep education that will prepare them for colleges all over the world. We’ve had students who have gone on to major in art, music, English, history, and psychology.”
A list of colleges attended by MSSM graduates includes most of the Ivy League, plus schools like MIT, Amherst, Stanford, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, as well as those closer to home like the University of Maine, Husson, Maine Maritime Academy, Colby, Bates, and College of the Atlantic.
Academic dean Cathy Bowker has been at MSSM since the beginning, starting as an English teacher with the inaugural class in 1995. In the Loring days, she taught at Limestone Community School, which once had 1,200 students in grades seven through 12 but now serves just 325 K–12 local students. “When the Air Force base closed, we wondered what we were going to do with the space,” Bowker says. “A local committee looked at our options, one of which was to start an agricultural school. When the magnet school idea was proposed, we visited several other schools in other states to see how they did it.”
Limestone Community School and MSSM share the building, with the local school up front and MSSM in the back. Though the schools are administratively separate entities, they share a dining area and sports teams.
The old Limestone Elementary School was converted into a dormitory with four wings, two for girls and two for boys. It is here that MSSM’s approximately 120 students live during the school year. During the winter, the common areas become important social hangouts and an outlet for creative projects—such as the McCartneybot, a robot built by two students with the face and voice of Mike McCartney, a young English teacher and director of college counseling.
The McCartneybot is the brainchild of students Tony Nuzzo of Litchfield and Ian Curtis of Owls Head, both of whom will graduate in 2009. “Ian and I are known as the junk guys,” Nuzzo says. “People give us their used stuff, and we get other junk online. The base was donated by the theater department, and it’s driven by parts from the cheapest remote-control car we could find.”
Mike McCartney, whose two-part British literature class is among the most popular on campus, teaches in a space that feels more like a lounge than a classroom, in the dorm itself. There are no desks; students sit in chairs or on sofas that have been donated by past students and their parents.
“I call it a humanities lab,” says McCartney, who came to the school after doing graduate work at McGill University and Oxford. “It’s all part of our hope that we can integrate the residential and academic parts of the school.”
“You learn as much from people as you do from academics,” says Cait Charles of Cape Elizabeth, a 2008 graduate who is attending Marlboro College in Vermont. She was one of those students who came to Limestone not specifically for the math and science but for the overall experience. “I was looking for something different, and wanted to be away from home,” she says. “I’m actually more of a humanities person. My interests are primarily in theater, sociology, and outdoor adventure therapy. I figured I won’t get all that much math and science when I go to college, so it’s good to get it here.”
For Harry Mickalide of Litchfield, another 2008 graduate, it’s all about the math. He is now attending Brown University, majoring in “chemistry or physics, or maybe chemical physics.” But that doesn’t mean he spent the past three years doing nothing but studying. Mickalide was a member of the student senate, which plans social events, participates in interviewing faculty applicants, and hosts student forums to address school issues. He was also active in the made-up sport of “boffer”—a sort of jousting competition fought with homemade weapons constructed of foam-wrapped PVC pipe.
“It’s interesting living with 100 other teenagers in the same building in the middle of winter,” Cait Charles says. “We make our own fun.”
It isn’t, of course, all fun. The academic program is rigorous, befitting a school designed for smart, motivated students. “The students are very involved with their academics Sundays through Thursdays,” says Dale Dintaman, dean of students and residential life. “The typical student will spend those evenings studying. For the most part, they’re very self-disciplined. They very quickly learn how to manage their time and set priorities for their academics.”
Kristina Yurko is a 2008 graduate from Freeport. “It was more work than I expected,” she says. “It’s never been beyond what I could handle, but it’s always pushed me right to the edge.”
Most students attend the school for all three years of the program. Tuition is free to Maine residents, but families must pay for room and board, which costs approximately $6,400 per year. Financial assistance is available. The cost for tuition and room and board for students from outside of Maine is set annually by the board of trustees.
The school has only a handful of out-of-state students. Allison Dupont (pictured on the cover) came to Maine from Louisiana when her school was closed by Hurricane Katrina. “It’s a whole different culture up here, but everybody is very friendly,” she says. “It was easy to get in with a group.” Though she said the Aroostook County winter took some getting used to, she is staying in Maine for college; she entered Bowdoin this fall.
Many students get their first taste of MSSM through the school’s weeklong summer camps for boys and girls in grades five through nine. Four sessions are held from late June to late July. “We have 250 students from all over the state coming to summer camp,” says Sharon Gerrish, French teacher and the school’s director of public relations and marketing. “They’re like our farm team.”
Bill Ashley of Eastport, who will graduate in 2010, was one of those campers who became students. “When I came to camp I knew this was where I wanted to go.”
Classes begin each weekday at 7:30 a.m. and run until 4:30 p.m. with a break for lunch. Evenings are for study and special class meetings. Students must be signed in to the dorm by 10:30 p.m. and in their rooms by 11:30. The schedule operates more like a college than a high school, and the proximity of dorm to classrooms allows students a certain amount of flexibility within the structure. “If I want to, I can get up at 7, go to my first class in my pajamas, and come back and take a shower afterwards,” Allison Dupont says.
Each student is required to put in a handful of hours a week working in some area of the school’s operation. First-year students will typically help out in the kitchen; seniors hold down jobs with more responsibilities, such as acting as a teacher’s office assistant. A school-wide assembly every Wednesday afternoon provides a forum for announcements, guest speakers, and student presentations.
The isolation can be daunting, especially for students from southern Maine. “Once a month, they take us downstate for three or four days, which is really nice,” says Ashley Burr, a senior from Machias. “Otherwise we’d all go insane.”
“There aren’t a lot of stimuli here,” Dintaman explains. “We do provide activities and various outlets in the area. We’ll take them skiing, hiking, or biking, or to the mall in Presque Isle or to the dogsled races in Fort Kent. We use the climbing wall and other athletic facilities at the university in Presque Isle.” They also give their students a monthly opportunity to visit home. “Every month students have at least four days off. They’ll leave on a Friday and come back on a Tuesday.”
Dale Dintaman, who came to MSSM two years ago from another boarding school in Massachusetts, takes advantage of those breaks to visit his wife and children, who still live in the Bay State. During the school year, he lives in an apartment in the dorm. “It’s challenging, being away from the family, but I really enjoy working with the students.”
The MSSM school year is also broken up by the 10-day “J-term” in January, during which students can pursue topics of individual interest, either on or off campus. Tony Nuzzo used last year’s J-term to learn about the operation of blimps during a two-week internship with Telford Aviation at the former Loring Air Force Base. Sharon Gerrish has taken her foreign language students to France during previous Januaries. Other students have studied Acadian folk culture and history, designed a planetarium show, researched the environmental effects of mercury on Schoodic Point, or hunkered down at the school for 10 days of intensive creative writing.
Walter Warner says the remote location can actually work in the school’s favor. “I hear the upsides more often,” he says. “One of the attractions for parents sending their kids here is that it’s a really safe environment.”
And though the school may be many miles away from Maine’s population centers, there’s another country right next door. “Historically, the school has used Canada for learning opportunities,” Warner says. “Students go to Grand Falls, New Brunswick, which is only 20 minutes away—closer than Presque Isle. It’s a bilingual community with a European atmosphere. Fredericton is two hours away. There’s a wonderful art museum there, and a number of cultural and historical attractions.”
MSSM has 10 full-time faculty members and eight adjuncts, people from the surrounding community who teach part-time. And most of the administrators still teach a class or two. “I like the idea that the administration gets into the classroom, because it keeps us in touch with what’s going on,” says Bowker, who teaches an English class in addition to her duties as academic dean. “Because we’re small and secluded, we all hang out together and support one another.”
David Brown runs the computer science department and is MSSM’s director of information technology. His classroom is filled with new and not-so-new computer equipment, including an old Cray supercomputer that was donated to the school and that Brown and his students hope to restore to working order. He’s the faculty advisor to the student chapter of the Association for Computer Machinery, a national organization with chapters on many college campuses but few high schools.
But Brown’s students aren’t just tinkering with electronics—they’re publishing papers in professional journals. “It’s happened seven times,” he says. “That’s the beauty of having a blind review.The reviewers have no idea who the authors are. People were just bowled over that these were high school students.”
The papers come out of Brown’s computer science seminar course, in which students pursue selected research topics. “It’s based on the graduate school model,” Brown says. “I don’t let students pick a topic. They do my research.”
That research focuses primarily on the interaction between humans and computers. Students have coauthored papers with titles like “Multi-player Gaming and Its Increasing Impact on High School Age Students,” and “Teenage Gender Considerations in Online Social Networking.”
“We have a laboratory across the street,” Brown quips. “It’s called the dormitory.” In the five years Brown has been at the school, he’s taken students to scholarly conferences in Washington, Quebec City, New York, Barcelona, and Honolulu.
David Brown and his wife came to Limestone five years ago following five years in Dubai, where he helped to start a school for women in the United Arab Emirates. Prior to that, he taught at a magnet school in Indiana and at Kansas State University. Brown, who holds degrees in biological science, chemistry, and computer science, likes living in a remote spot in northern Maine. “Since I grew up in a small rural town in Oklahoma, it doesn’t bother me a bit,” he says.
But the students are the glue that keeps him here. “Kids come here not knowing what they want to do, or what they can do,” he says. “It’s very much like sports. They don’t know if they’ve really got the talent. I’m hell-bent on moving them as far as they want to go. And they come out the other side being attractive to colleges like Caltech, and being motivated to look at schools like that.”
But Brown and his colleagues also encourage students to look for opportunities closer to home, including the engineering programs at the University of Maine. “I think the legislature’s intent was to prepare students for higher education, and that many of them were going to stay in Maine,” he says. “While they won’t necessarily stay in Maine, a lot of them will come back to Maine, and I think Maine’s going to be better off for it.”
The school’s strategic plan, according to Gerrish, calls for an eventual enrollment of 300 students. Currently, the school is operating at less than half that number. One reason is that school districts all over the state are feeling threatened by consolidation proposals and want to hang on to their own students. Since MSSM is not a four-year high school, many potential students get into their freshman year in their hometowns, assimilate into the social life, sports teams, and extracurricular activities, and then are reluctant to leave.
Still, the school is ready to grow. While the residence hall houses a maximum of 144 students, there are multiple houses nearby that are part of the MSSM facility. “We make these available to faculty, administrators, and students as needed,” Gerrish says. Both she and Warner think the publicity in U.S. News and World Report will help MSSM recruit more out-of-state students.
“The thing that attracted me to this school in the first place, and that keeps me here, is that we are able to provide all of the best aspects of a private-school education that are normally available only to people who can afford it,” Warner says. “We have the brightest and most talented faculty I’ve worked with in the past 30 years, and we have motivated, talented students. When you put those two groups together and watch the interactions, there’s no better, more exciting learning environment.”
But sometimes subtraction can lead to the multiplication of opportunities. Where some saw abandonment, the state legislature saw possibility. And in 1995, the Maine School of Science and Mathematics (MSSM) was born.
From its inception as the first publicly funded magnet school in the state, MSSM has grown in both size and reputation. In November 2007, U.S. News and World Report ranked MSSM number 35 on its annual list of the top 100 public schools in the nation. It’s the only school in Maine on the list.
“The mission of the school is unique to Maine,” says Walter Warner, the school’s executive director since 2005. “While the emphasis is on math and science, students can come here and get a top-quality college prep education that will prepare them for colleges all over the world. We’ve had students who have gone on to major in art, music, English, history, and psychology.”
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A list of colleges attended by MSSM graduates includes most of the Ivy League, plus schools like MIT, Amherst, Stanford, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, as well as those closer to home like the University of Maine, Husson, Maine Maritime Academy, Colby, Bates, and College of the Atlantic.
Academic dean Cathy Bowker has been at MSSM since the beginning, starting as an English teacher with the inaugural class in 1995. In the Loring days, she taught at Limestone Community School, which once had 1,200 students in grades seven through 12 but now serves just 325 K–12 local students. “When the Air Force base closed, we wondered what we were going to do with the space,” Bowker says. “A local committee looked at our options, one of which was to start an agricultural school. When the magnet school idea was proposed, we visited several other schools in other states to see how they did it.”
Limestone Community School and MSSM share the building, with the local school up front and MSSM in the back. Though the schools are administratively separate entities, they share a dining area and sports teams.
The old Limestone Elementary School was converted into a dormitory with four wings, two for girls and two for boys. It is here that MSSM’s approximately 120 students live during the school year. During the winter, the common areas become important social hangouts and an outlet for creative projects—such as the McCartneybot, a robot built by two students with the face and voice of Mike McCartney, a young English teacher and director of college counseling.
The McCartneybot is the brainchild of students Tony Nuzzo of Litchfield and Ian Curtis of Owls Head, both of whom will graduate in 2009. “Ian and I are known as the junk guys,” Nuzzo says. “People give us their used stuff, and we get other junk online. The base was donated by the theater department, and it’s driven by parts from the cheapest remote-control car we could find.”
Mike McCartney, whose two-part British literature class is among the most popular on campus, teaches in a space that feels more like a lounge than a classroom, in the dorm itself. There are no desks; students sit in chairs or on sofas that have been donated by past students and their parents.
“I call it a humanities lab,” says McCartney, who came to the school after doing graduate work at McGill University and Oxford. “It’s all part of our hope that we can integrate the residential and academic parts of the school.”
“You learn as much from people as you do from academics,” says Cait Charles of Cape Elizabeth, a 2008 graduate who is attending Marlboro College in Vermont. She was one of those students who came to Limestone not specifically for the math and science but for the overall experience. “I was looking for something different, and wanted to be away from home,” she says. “I’m actually more of a humanities person. My interests are primarily in theater, sociology, and outdoor adventure therapy. I figured I won’t get all that much math and science when I go to college, so it’s good to get it here.”
For Harry Mickalide of Litchfield, another 2008 graduate, it’s all about the math. He is now attending Brown University, majoring in “chemistry or physics, or maybe chemical physics.” But that doesn’t mean he spent the past three years doing nothing but studying. Mickalide was a member of the student senate, which plans social events, participates in interviewing faculty applicants, and hosts student forums to address school issues. He was also active in the made-up sport of “boffer”—a sort of jousting competition fought with homemade weapons constructed of foam-wrapped PVC pipe.
“It’s interesting living with 100 other teenagers in the same building in the middle of winter,” Cait Charles says. “We make our own fun.”
It isn’t, of course, all fun. The academic program is rigorous, befitting a school designed for smart, motivated students. “The students are very involved with their academics Sundays through Thursdays,” says Dale Dintaman, dean of students and residential life. “The typical student will spend those evenings studying. For the most part, they’re very self-disciplined. They very quickly learn how to manage their time and set priorities for their academics.”
Kristina Yurko is a 2008 graduate from Freeport. “It was more work than I expected,” she says. “It’s never been beyond what I could handle, but it’s always pushed me right to the edge.”
Most students attend the school for all three years of the program. Tuition is free to Maine residents, but families must pay for room and board, which costs approximately $6,400 per year. Financial assistance is available. The cost for tuition and room and board for students from outside of Maine is set annually by the board of trustees.
The school has only a handful of out-of-state students. Allison Dupont (pictured on the cover) came to Maine from Louisiana when her school was closed by Hurricane Katrina. “It’s a whole different culture up here, but everybody is very friendly,” she says. “It was easy to get in with a group.” Though she said the Aroostook County winter took some getting used to, she is staying in Maine for college; she entered Bowdoin this fall.
Many students get their first taste of MSSM through the school’s weeklong summer camps for boys and girls in grades five through nine. Four sessions are held from late June to late July. “We have 250 students from all over the state coming to summer camp,” says Sharon Gerrish, French teacher and the school’s director of public relations and marketing. “They’re like our farm team.”
Bill Ashley of Eastport, who will graduate in 2010, was one of those campers who became students. “When I came to camp I knew this was where I wanted to go.”
Classes begin each weekday at 7:30 a.m. and run until 4:30 p.m. with a break for lunch. Evenings are for study and special class meetings. Students must be signed in to the dorm by 10:30 p.m. and in their rooms by 11:30. The schedule operates more like a college than a high school, and the proximity of dorm to classrooms allows students a certain amount of flexibility within the structure. “If I want to, I can get up at 7, go to my first class in my pajamas, and come back and take a shower afterwards,” Allison Dupont says.
Each student is required to put in a handful of hours a week working in some area of the school’s operation. First-year students will typically help out in the kitchen; seniors hold down jobs with more responsibilities, such as acting as a teacher’s office assistant. A school-wide assembly every Wednesday afternoon provides a forum for announcements, guest speakers, and student presentations.
The isolation can be daunting, especially for students from southern Maine. “Once a month, they take us downstate for three or four days, which is really nice,” says Ashley Burr, a senior from Machias. “Otherwise we’d all go insane.”
“There aren’t a lot of stimuli here,” Dintaman explains. “We do provide activities and various outlets in the area. We’ll take them skiing, hiking, or biking, or to the mall in Presque Isle or to the dogsled races in Fort Kent. We use the climbing wall and other athletic facilities at the university in Presque Isle.” They also give their students a monthly opportunity to visit home. “Every month students have at least four days off. They’ll leave on a Friday and come back on a Tuesday.”
Dale Dintaman, who came to MSSM two years ago from another boarding school in Massachusetts, takes advantage of those breaks to visit his wife and children, who still live in the Bay State. During the school year, he lives in an apartment in the dorm. “It’s challenging, being away from the family, but I really enjoy working with the students.”
The MSSM school year is also broken up by the 10-day “J-term” in January, during which students can pursue topics of individual interest, either on or off campus. Tony Nuzzo used last year’s J-term to learn about the operation of blimps during a two-week internship with Telford Aviation at the former Loring Air Force Base. Sharon Gerrish has taken her foreign language students to France during previous Januaries. Other students have studied Acadian folk culture and history, designed a planetarium show, researched the environmental effects of mercury on Schoodic Point, or hunkered down at the school for 10 days of intensive creative writing.
Walter Warner says the remote location can actually work in the school’s favor. “I hear the upsides more often,” he says. “One of the attractions for parents sending their kids here is that it’s a really safe environment.”
And though the school may be many miles away from Maine’s population centers, there’s another country right next door. “Historically, the school has used Canada for learning opportunities,” Warner says. “Students go to Grand Falls, New Brunswick, which is only 20 minutes away—closer than Presque Isle. It’s a bilingual community with a European atmosphere. Fredericton is two hours away. There’s a wonderful art museum there, and a number of cultural and historical attractions.”
MSSM has 10 full-time faculty members and eight adjuncts, people from the surrounding community who teach part-time. And most of the administrators still teach a class or two. “I like the idea that the administration gets into the classroom, because it keeps us in touch with what’s going on,” says Bowker, who teaches an English class in addition to her duties as academic dean. “Because we’re small and secluded, we all hang out together and support one another.”
David Brown runs the computer science department and is MSSM’s director of information technology. His classroom is filled with new and not-so-new computer equipment, including an old Cray supercomputer that was donated to the school and that Brown and his students hope to restore to working order. He’s the faculty advisor to the student chapter of the Association for Computer Machinery, a national organization with chapters on many college campuses but few high schools.
But Brown’s students aren’t just tinkering with electronics—they’re publishing papers in professional journals. “It’s happened seven times,” he says. “That’s the beauty of having a blind review.The reviewers have no idea who the authors are. People were just bowled over that these were high school students.”
The papers come out of Brown’s computer science seminar course, in which students pursue selected research topics. “It’s based on the graduate school model,” Brown says. “I don’t let students pick a topic. They do my research.”
That research focuses primarily on the interaction between humans and computers. Students have coauthored papers with titles like “Multi-player Gaming and Its Increasing Impact on High School Age Students,” and “Teenage Gender Considerations in Online Social Networking.”
“We have a laboratory across the street,” Brown quips. “It’s called the dormitory.” In the five years Brown has been at the school, he’s taken students to scholarly conferences in Washington, Quebec City, New York, Barcelona, and Honolulu.
David Brown and his wife came to Limestone five years ago following five years in Dubai, where he helped to start a school for women in the United Arab Emirates. Prior to that, he taught at a magnet school in Indiana and at Kansas State University. Brown, who holds degrees in biological science, chemistry, and computer science, likes living in a remote spot in northern Maine. “Since I grew up in a small rural town in Oklahoma, it doesn’t bother me a bit,” he says.
But the students are the glue that keeps him here. “Kids come here not knowing what they want to do, or what they can do,” he says. “It’s very much like sports. They don’t know if they’ve really got the talent. I’m hell-bent on moving them as far as they want to go. And they come out the other side being attractive to colleges like Caltech, and being motivated to look at schools like that.”
But Brown and his colleagues also encourage students to look for opportunities closer to home, including the engineering programs at the University of Maine. “I think the legislature’s intent was to prepare students for higher education, and that many of them were going to stay in Maine,” he says. “While they won’t necessarily stay in Maine, a lot of them will come back to Maine, and I think Maine’s going to be better off for it.”
The school’s strategic plan, according to Gerrish, calls for an eventual enrollment of 300 students. Currently, the school is operating at less than half that number. One reason is that school districts all over the state are feeling threatened by consolidation proposals and want to hang on to their own students. Since MSSM is not a four-year high school, many potential students get into their freshman year in their hometowns, assimilate into the social life, sports teams, and extracurricular activities, and then are reluctant to leave.
Still, the school is ready to grow. While the residence hall houses a maximum of 144 students, there are multiple houses nearby that are part of the MSSM facility. “We make these available to faculty, administrators, and students as needed,” Gerrish says. Both she and Warner think the publicity in U.S. News and World Report will help MSSM recruit more out-of-state students.
“The thing that attracted me to this school in the first place, and that keeps me here, is that we are able to provide all of the best aspects of a private-school education that are normally available only to people who can afford it,” Warner says. “We have the brightest and most talented faculty I’ve worked with in the past 30 years, and we have motivated, talented students. When you put those two groups together and watch the interactions, there’s no better, more exciting learning environment.”
