SOUTH PORTLAND — There has been a great deal written and said regarding the circumstances of the abrupt closure of the Maine Girls’ Academy, the state’s only all-girls school. There has perhaps not been enough said about the immediate impact this closure has had on current students, their families, faculty and staff. It’s a highly unusual thing for a school to announce its closure in the middle of the summer with no advance notice or warning given to its students, their families or the faculty and staff.

So what does this feel like? Well, the five stages of grief are a lot to ask people to move through in a week. Mostly, we’re frustrated and sad. Frustrated that the board of trustees didn’t warn us of this possibility or ask us for help or input before making a life-changing decision for our kids and for the school’s beloved faculty and staff. Sad because we know exactly what we’re losing.

You see, Maine Girls’ Academy wasn’t anyone’s second choice. As the only all-girls school in Maine, it offered a unique educational and social setting. Parents who sent their daughters to Maine Girls’ Academy recognized the value in that. They often talked about how their daughters had become different kids there, how they’d found their voices, come out of their shells and demonstrated previously unseen bravery and confidence.

As parents, we partnered with the school, certain that we were raising our daughters to be their very best selves – strong, confident, kind and well-equipped young women who were in no rush to be anything other than girls. They went to school makeup free, wearing plaid skirts, with their hair in messy buns and their feet in Crocs of all colors. It’s fair to say that we mothers both admired and perhaps even envied their complete disregard of societal rules about how they should look every day. They were there to learn, to work, to play and to be with their friends – and to hell with any expectations of anything else. It was enough to make a parent’s heart soar.

At the Maine Girls’ Academy, we knew that our girls had a faculty and staff that was overwhelmingly made up of women, with just a few brave men. They cherished our kids. Let’s face it, working at a small private school in Maine isn’t a good way to get rich. But the wealth was in the environment, the community, the ability to witness, over and over again, the transformations in these girls that so many parents noticed. Their dedication over the years has been second to none. Despite their own pressing concerns, the faculty and staff continue to reach out to our kids and families, trying to help us navigate this ordeal. They deserve so much more.

Our kids now face transferring into new schools without ever seeing what a day looks like in those places, an opportunity they were denied because of the timing of this announcement. Our juniors and seniors, who were excited about reaching the top tier in their school, will now start over somewhere else. There will be no powderpuff football game for homecoming at the next place, no class dance competition, no McAuley Tea, no mother-daughter tea and no Sister Edward Mary roaming the halls to brighten their day and remind them to be their best.

It is a stunning loss for these kids, one brought upon them by the decision of adults whose faces they’d never even seen. As parents, this has been a brutal thing to witness, a wrong that we cannot make right and a loss that we are grappling with ourselves as we try to guide our daughters into new schools, knowing that our own hearts are not there. We are mourning the loss of our faculty and staff while at the same time worrying about the financially precarious position that they were left in.

As a community, we are grateful for the schools that have opened their arms to our girls. The support of our alumnae has been fantastic throughout this debacle and has helped the girls to recognize the power of the sisterhood born in their school.

We’re thankful that our girls are healthy and conscious that new beginnings are a part of life. Still, we will mourn the million little things that made the school so special, the things that will no longer be part of our daughters’ everyday lives. And, as parents, we will do all that we can to ensure that the lessons of the school live on in our girls, knowing that the world so desperately needs them.

 

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