The Bay School is walking distance to the sweet little village of Blue Hill in Downeast Maine, home to a hill so high we call it a mountain, and numerous inlets that shape our craggy coastline. This inspired natural backdrop for our school holds offerings and exploration too numerous to count.
Nestled within all this beauty is The Bay School. Here you will find a 70-acre campus, most of it undeveloped with an abundance of wildlife.
There are eleven school buildings, one can hold over 300 people, another a handful of students, and still others offer teaching spaces for groups of 25. We love our Math House, the cottage dedicated to our educational support program, our forge hut, and the library building devoted to getting lost in books. Our Early Childhood Center, built in the last decade, is both tender and rugged; separate yet part of our community of older children. Our campus includes a wood fired oven designed and built by a 7th/8th Grade class and their teacher as part of their geometry class, not to mention the various impermanent shelters imagined and built by small groups of children during especially productive recess times. The newest addition to our campus is the Classroom Village, two buildings completed in 2022 that house our 6th, 7th, and 8th grade classes.
The school has a soccer field, an outdoor basketball court, and pretty pathways between buildings, all of which are surrounded by extensive woods and fields. There are gardens and still more gardens; right now, you’ll find 88 saplings in the tree nursery, 95 rows of spinach in the greenhouse, and 65 planted native trees and shrubs. The defining feature of our school’s landscape is children, just about 100 of them, who stand as a school, as a class, as friends, and as individuals.