We are asking three key questions:
Phase One is Complete!
Over 1,000 Mainers from across all sixteen counties have come together to discuss values, how our communities have changed and where we hope they will go, the essential skills and capacities youth need to co-create a thriving future Maine, and how schooling needs to evolve in response. Now you can hear their stories and explore insights from the project through the Maine School Stories Portal.
Explore the Maine School Stories Portal
Phase Two: Citizens’ Assembly
The Maine Citizen’s Assembly on Education Priorities 2026, June 17-18 at United Technologies Center in Bangor and virtually on August 28. 64 delegates were chosen using stratified random sortition from over 350 volunteers to broadly represent the demographics and geography of Maine. Delegates learn and deliberate together and then decide on a ranked list of educational priorities to share with gubernatorial candidates and Maine legislators.
Go to Citizens’ Assembly Website
Phase Three: Legislative Strategy Work
Our team is working with a bipartisan group of legislators and experts to design and advance policies in alignment with the delegates’ priorities. The Expert Advisory Committee is led by Representatives Holly Sargent, Kim Haggan, Sheila Lyman, and Dan Sayre. For a list of current members and the group’s activities, please see our website.
Go to Citizens’ Assembly Website
The Essentials Report Briefs
These briefs describe how we framed the study in the context of the realities of educating in 2026, key challenges identified by Mainers, and implications for policymakers. (Descriptive findings with ample quotes are contained in the full report. We ground the policymaker implications in the Public Education Promise framework from AASA, The School Superintendents Association.
Project Rationale
What are the essentials of a Maine education? What do students need from their education to thrive personally, civically, and economically in the Maine of 2050? How can Maine develop a comprehensive strategy that brings our smallest schools and largest districts along together, over time, to ensure a flourishing future for our state?
The Maine ED 2050 project, led by Dr. Jennifer Chace, engaged students, parents, educators, community members, and industry leaders to imagine the Maine of the future — what is coming toward us now and what we value and want to strive for. It asked Mainers to consider what it means to thrive personally, civically, and economically in their community now and how that might change in the future. It also asked Mainers to consider what those visions might mean for schooling in particular.
What skills and capacities are needed? How are those skills and capacities best developed? Where and with whom are those skills and capacities best developed?
Maine ED 2050 has been a place to meet each other to discuss, grapple, expand our understanding, imagine, and ultimately contribute to the ongoing conversation about school’s role and value in our society.
Maine ED 2050 brought the people together for meaningful, small group, guided discussions on these topics and gathers their voices into white papers and reports as well as provides an online platform, the Maine School Stories Portal (linked), for their stories to be heard by all.
Education is how our young people learn to sustain and evolve our communities toward desired futures, and it necessarily needs to evolve itself in order to provide newer generations with the knowledge and ways of thinking and being appropriate to their task. School is only one of the ways we become educated, but it is an important one. Family, our legal system, arts and culture, social media, and even the natural environment all provide education. But our public schools are a place where all students come to learn to create the future, our future, together.
In a democratic society, the importance of “together” can’t be overstated. To educate ourselves together in common schools requires sharing a common vision for what it means to flourish, what that will look like and require in the future of our communities, and what young people need to know, be, and be able to do to facilitate that future flourishing.
We, the people, together, can inform the work of local school boards as well as state education agencies in maintaining and evolving our systems of schooling. Without a meaningful voice, we can feel disconnected from public schools as well as disillusioned about their work. For public schooling to remain relevant and trustworthy, its evolution needs to be both purposeful and transparent and also guided by a diversity of meaningfully engaged Maine people.
Maine Education 2050 provided an on-ramp to participation for everyone and lifted their voices to be heard by the public and decision-makers at all levels, building trust and hope through engagement and increasing common understanding and the social good will necessary for successful democratic governance.