Staff Writer
Only eleven schools in the entire country are better than the magnet school in Limestone. On Dec. 5, it was announced that the U.S. News and World Report’s annual high school rankings placed the Maine School of Science and Mathematics (MSSM) at number 12 in the country for public schools and number 3 in the country for magnet schools. The current ranking of MSSM is an increase from last years ranking of 35 in the country for public schools and 9 in the country for magnet schools.
Though the faculty and students were excited to learn of their nation wide status, things are still school work as usual over at MSSM.
“We didn’t do anything to try to become 35 and we didn’t do anything different to try to go up or down [the ranks],” said Walter Warner, Executive Director of MSSM. “we just do what we’ve always done. We teach bright motivated kids; we have highly qualified accomplished teachers and they teach a challenging and accelerated curriculum to bright kids. If someone decided that it was worth recognizing, then that’s great,” Warner added.
According to MSSM, the ranking focuses primarily on college-readiness, though it also takes into consideration how well the school serves the student body as a whole and the success rate of ‘disadvantaged’ students.
“Our college-readiness index has actually increased from about 76 last year up to 94 this year,” said Warner.
College-readiness gauges how prepared high school graduates are for immediately beginning post-secondary work once accepted into their institutions of higher educational facility.
“Virtually none of our graduates end up taking remedial courses in any college that they enroll in,” said Warner, “and many of our graduates go into college with advanced standing.”
Warner also stated that Students of MSSM who are classified by the state as ‘disadvantaged’ out perform students in other schools in Maine and across the country by a significant margin as compared to other disadvantaged students.
Looking at the MSSM student performance data, the ‘disadvantaged’ students are pretty much indistinguishable from the ‘non-disadvantaged’ students.
“What that tells us is that if we do have students coming to us who, through no fault of their own, have not had access to the same educational opportunities prior to coming to MSSM that we are able to fill in the deficits for those kids and get them up to the point quite quickly where they’re performing as well as all of their peers,” said Warner, “and I’m actually as proud or more proud of that particular aspect of our ranking than I am about the actual absolute standard that our kids are meeting.”
There are a variety of indicators that the state uses to determine whether or not a student is deemed disadvantaged including whether or not the student requires any sort of special educational or whether the student falls into a specific financial bracket.
Warner is excited about the increased exposure the school has been receiving resulting from the ranking, but MSSM is not expecting an increase in enrollment or philanthropic donations, though either would be warmly welcomed and appreciated.
Though the ranking is an indicator of how intellectually ready the student may be for college, there are certain levels of preparedness that the report overlooks.
Graduates of MSSM who return to the school to visit with faculty and friends frequently speak about how the life experiences they gained by residing in the dormitory at MSSM helped them immensely at college.
“All of those lessons — how to live with people who are different than you, how to do your own laundry, how to manage your day to day living — are often things that our graduates come back and tell us that enabled them to handle college life much more easily than the kids who had been living at home until they went away to college,” Warner said.
Another aspect of MSSM that often gets overlooked is the internship opportunities offered to their students.
“Our January term is a two week session in between fall and spring semesters in which the educational focus is experiential learning,” Warner said.
During the January term, students obtain internships, travel, or become assimilated into professional research teams. These experiences often lead to summer jobs that really benefit the students knowledge and resumes.
