House-hunting in Bath, ME--good neighborhoods for young families? (Portland, Brunswick: houses, school district)

[Olga Hanim]

We recently moved to Maine and are beginning to look at houses in Bath--because they are the most affordable (and well-kept for their price) in the Midcoast area. Can anyone recommend great neighborhoods for young families/professionals or neighborhoods that have a high-percentage of residents who grew up outside of Bath? Also, if anyone has recent experience with the schools, I'd love to hear about it. Thank you!

[woolwiTch]

Hello Olga,

As a general rule, the neighborhood to the south of Route 1 and near Bath Iron Works is considered not that great----though it's still not a "bad" neighborhood. As you go further south from there, things improve. You can sense it as you drive around, so you'll just know.

If you're looking for a concentration of people who grew up elsewhere, on the north side of Route 1 look at Washington Street, Middle, High and the portions of the other streets within their boundaries. Once you get to High Street and west of there, it's still a pretty good neighborhood, but fewer people from other places. There are some housing projects just east of Congress Street that are not bad for housing projects but, unfortunately, you always have some real jerks there, including a couple that was operating a meth lab out of their place in the projects earlier this year. So if you're using a realtor, you might say you don't want to be in a house within a block or two of the projects.

As you've noticed, Bath is very small, so when I talk about these areas, we're only talking about a very few blocks at a time----it's almost too much to call them neighborhoods.

I don't have school-age kids, so all I can say about the schools is what I've heard from others. The elementary schools seem pretty good. Morse High School not so good. It has quite a high dropout rate. A lot of people within the Morse district send their kids to other area high schools like Wiscasset, Mount Ararat in Topsham and Brunswick. I live in Woolwich, across the river from Bath, and quite a few of the professionals here send their kids to Lincoln Academy in Newcastle. You might not know that several towns in Maine have public/private academy schools. They attract kids from out of state, but they also serve as the local public school. Lincoln Academy is one of them and it's a good school. I noticed in the newspaper this year that all its top graduates are going on to excellent colleges, which is not the case for the majority of Maine high schools. Some area people also send their kids to private high schools. Right in Bath there's the Hyde School. They do an excellent job and focus very much on character development. Some people shy away from it, though, because a lot of parents send their kids there BECAUSE they need work on their character development. (Cher sent her son there, for example, because he was wild.) A number of parents send their kids to the Portland private schools for high school like Waynflete and McAuley (Catholic girls) and the Ecole Francais in Freeport.

Good luck and please keep us posted.

[Coaster]

I'll echo pretty much what WoolwiTch said, with the proviso that no one local sends their kids to Hyde that I know of. The neighborhoods immediately around BIW tend to be a little shopworn, but once you get south of the Big Blue Drydock (say, south of Pine Street), you find some very nice, kid-friendly neighborhoods in the traditional style -- smaller lots than you see in suburbs, but nice homes.

Not sure why you'd want to isolate yourself from local people, but you'll find quite a mix almost anywhere in the city, from retirees fleeing Massachusetts to young Bowdoin College professors to people who still live in the house they were born in 60 years ago.

Schools are generally pretty good, although Morse High doesn't have a top-notch reputation. There's a very good k-8 parochial school in Brunswick (St. John's) that attracts a LOT of professional family kids, including public school teachers' children. There's no requirement that you be Catholic to attend BTW, although the students attend Masses for special events like Christmas. When our children went there the school board included a staunch Baptist! There are several very good private high schools in Portland, including Catherine McAuley (girls Catholic), Cheverus (boys and girls Catholic) and Wayneflete (upper class yuppie coed). If you live in Bath and send your children to a school outside the city school district, you'll have to pay full tuition, whether it's in Portland or at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle.

I should mention, both McAuley and Cheverus operate (or used to, you should probably check) shuttle bus service between Bath and Portland.

[Olga Hanim]

Thank you so much for your intro to the area! This is really helpful.