The Blue Hill Day School, on Union Street in Blue Hill, Maine, enrolls forty-eight children from prekindergarten through eighth grade. It occupies a converted Methodist parsonage that the parents of the founding class bought in 2003 for one hundred and forty-two thousand dollars.
The school's head, a soft-spoken woman in her late fifties named Cordelia Brann, has held the job since 2014. Before that she taught middle-school humanities at a larger independent school in Falmouth, on the southern Maine coast.
On a morning in mid-May, the building smells faintly of bread. The school has, since 2018, run a small kitchen program in which the seventh- and eighth-graders bake bread every Thursday morning, and the rest of the school eats it warm at lunch.
There are six grades represented across four classrooms. PreK and kindergarten share a room. First and second share another. Third through fifth are together in what was once the parsonage parlor. Sixth, seventh, and eighth meet upstairs in the largest room, under the eaves.
Tuition this year is $19,800. The school's stated commitment is that no child will be turned away for cost, and Brann says that about forty percent of the families pay something below the listed tuition. The financial-aid budget is funded by a small endowment, the annual fund, and an October auction at the Blue Hill Fairgrounds.
The teaching staff is six full-time and three part-time. Two of the full-time teachers have been at the school since it opened. The longest-tenured, a math teacher named Robert Halligan, started in 2003 in the basement of the parsonage when the school had eleven children.
Brann's office is what used to be the parsonage's pantry. There is a small desk, a coffee maker, two chairs, and a long row of file boxes on a high shelf, each labeled by graduating class. The 2014 box is full.
She begins her day at 7:20 by walking the building. She turns on lights, looks for water leaks, and notes which classrooms have been left tidy and which have not. She does not, she says, leave notes about the messy ones. She finds the teacher later and asks how the day before went.
Morning drop-off begins at 7:55. Parents walk children to the door. Many stay for a minute. The eighth-graders, who are old enough to be embarrassed, hover near the side entrance and pretend they have not been driven by their parents.
The school day begins with what is called assembly. The whole school — all forty-eight children, all nine teachers, Brann, the part-time art teacher, the part-time music teacher — sits together on a faded blue rug in the front room. It lasts twelve minutes.
Today an eighth-grader named Naomi is presenting on the lobsterman who lives next door to her, whom she has interviewed for a project on local industry. She speaks for six minutes. She has notes but mostly does not look at them.
After assembly the children move to their classrooms. The room shared by first and second grade has, on the wall, a chart of the books read aloud since September. There are forty-one entries. The current book is The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong.
The teacher, a woman in her thirties named Eliza Yoo, teaches both grades together. The first-graders sit on the rug for one part of the morning while she reads with them. The second-graders work independently. Then they swap.
It is, Yoo says, the hardest teaching she has ever done and the most satisfying.
Recess at Blue Hill Day School is at 10:15 and lasts forty-five minutes. The whole school goes out together. The older children play with the younger ones, more often than at larger schools, because there are no other older children to play with.
The playground is a stretch of grass behind the building with a tire swing, a wooden climbing structure built by parents in 2011, and a path through a small grove of birch trees. The path was put in by the third-through-fifth class as a project in 2019.
Lunch is at noon. The children eat in their classrooms with their teachers. The bread is on the table on Thursdays. On other days there is whatever the children have brought.
Afternoon is project-based. The school's curriculum is not unusual in its content — math, reading, writing, science, history — but it is unusual in its pacing. There is a great deal of time. Children are expected to finish things. Things take as long as they take.
The eighth-grade class this year is five children. They are working on a year-long project on the history of the Blue Hill peninsula, which they will present to the community in June.
Brann thinks the school works, when it works, because of its size. "Forty-eight is small enough," she says, "that we know every child. It is also small enough that no child can hide."
She is careful not to oversell it. The school does not have a gym. The science lab is a long table with a sink. There is no language teacher; the parent association pays for a Spanish tutor who comes twice a week.
Eighth-graders go from Blue Hill Day School to a range of high schools: George Stevens Academy down the road, Maine Coast Waldorf, the regional public high school in Ellsworth, a boarding school here or there. Most go to George Stevens.
At 3:15 the children pour out the side door and run down the walk to the line of parents and grandparents and one or two older siblings. The bread, by then, is gone, except for two small heels Halligan has set aside for himself.
