The Maine Agenda › Live in Maine
School Calendars by District in Greater Portland, Maine: Every 2026-27 First Day, and the Two You Cannot Look Up
There is no such thing as the first day of school in Greater Portland. There are eleven of them, spread across seven calendar days, and in most districts your own two children will not start on the same morning.
That is not a scheduling quirk. It is what happens when twelve independently governed school departments each adopt their own calendar in February, publish it in whatever format their website vendor allows, and never compare notes. A family with a fifth grader in Falmouth and a tenth grader in Falmouth has two different first days. A family that moved from Gorham to Yarmouth over the summer has a start date six days later than the one they planned around.
We read all twelve district calendars against the districts' own published documents this week. Ten of them we could verify. Two we could not, and that turns out to be the most useful thing on this page.
The short answer
Gorham starts first, on Wednesday, August 26, 2026. Grades 6 and 9 and PreK go in that day, the rest of the district the following morning.
Yarmouth starts last, on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, and it is the only district in the region that appears to bring every student in on the same day.
Everyone else lands on Monday, August 31, or splits across August 31 and September 1. But "everyone else starts August 31" is a sentence that will send somebody's kid to a closed building, because who starts on August 31 differs sharply by district.
Settle into Maine. Free.
Neighborhoods, real costs, and the community worth knowing about for anyone making a life here.
No edition has gone out yet. Sign up and you are on the first one. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
First day of school, 2026-27, by district
Gorham School Department. August 26 for grades 6, 9 and PreK. August 27 for grades 1 through 5, 7 through 8, and 10 through 12. September 1 for kindergarten. Staff inservice August 24 and 25. Adopted February 11, 2026.
Portland Public Schools. August 31 is the "First Day of School for Grades 1-12." September 1 is the "First Day for Pre-K and K." The calendar's own footer reads "CALENDAR LAST UPDATED MARCH 31, 2026," the latest revision date of any district in the region.
South Portland School Department. August 31 for grades 1 through 12. September 1 for kindergarten, with an early release that day. September 2 for PreK.
Scarborough Public Schools. The most staggered start in the region. August 31 is a student day for grades 6 and 9 only, with K through 5 by appointment. September 1 adds grades 6 through 12, K through 5 still by appointment. Grades K through 12 are all in on September 2. If you have a Scarborough second grader, your first real day is September 2, not August 31.
Falmouth Public Schools. August 31 for grades 1 through 5, grade 6, and grade 9. September 1 for kindergarten, grades 7 and 8, and grades 10 through 12. September 2 for Pre-K. Approved March 18, 2026.
MSAD 51 (Cumberland and North Yarmouth). August 31 for grades 1 through 9, with grade 9 orientation the same day. September 1 for grades 10 through 12. September 2 for kindergarten. September 3 for Pre-K. Kindergarten orientation is still listed as TBD. Adopted March 5, 2026.
RSU 5 (Freeport, Durham, Pownal). August 31 for PreK through grade 9. September 1 for all students PreK through 12. Note the district also closes both September 4 and September 7 around Labor Day, which is unusual in the region. Adopted January 28, 2026, the earliest adoption of the twelve.
RSU 14 (Windham and Raymond). August 31 for grades 1 through 9. September 1 for grades 10 through 12. PreK and kindergarten come in half a class at a time on September 2 and September 3, with schools contacting families individually about which day. September 4 is also closed. Adopted February 25, 2026.
Brunswick School Department. August 31 for the transition grades only: PreK, kindergarten, grade 3, grade 6 and grade 9. September 1 for all students.
Yarmouth School Department. "The year begins with the first day for students on Tuesday, September 1." No grade-level split is stated anywhere in the announcement.
Cape Elizabeth School Department. Board-approved February 10, 2026. Dates not verifiable. See below.
Westbrook School Department. Not verifiable. See below.
The two districts that publish an approved calendar you cannot read
This is the part no aggregator will tell you, because admitting it would leave a hole in their table.
Cape Elizabeth approved its 2026-27 calendar at the school board's regular business meeting on February 10, 2026, and announced the next day that it "is available on the website now." That is true in the sense that a file exists. It is not true in the sense of being retrievable: the district's calendars library at cape.k12.me.us renders entirely client-side, and the only Cape Elizabeth calendar that surfaces publicly is the 2025-26 one. There is also a naming trap worth knowing. The domain that sounds right, capeelizabethschools.org, is not the school department. The district runs on cape.k12.me.us.
Westbrook is the harder case. Every page on westbrookschools.org returns navigation and a footer and nothing else without JavaScript, and the district's document endpoints sit behind a bot-detection challenge. There is a live page titled "25-26 School Calendar" and a retrievable 2025-26 PDF approved February 12, 2025. There is no 2026-27 equivalent on any host Westbrook controls that we could reach. Given the district's own pattern of approving in mid-February, a 2026-27 calendar almost certainly exists. We simply could not read it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Here is why that matters. Third-party school-calendar sites publish a confident-looking Westbrook 2026-27 calendar with specific dates: a February 15 to 19 vacation, an April 19 to 23 break, a June 15 half day, a June 5 graduation. Those numbers are not sourced to Westbrook. They are the regional pattern, filled in. They may well turn out to be right, which is exactly what makes them dangerous: a table that is right four times and wrong once is worse than a table with a blank cell, because you stop checking. If you have a child in Westbrook or Cape Elizabeth, call the district. Westbrook's number is (207) 854-0800.
Two more documentation problems worth flagging, both harmless but both capable of costing you an afternoon:
- South Portland's current calendar lives on its Calendar page, but the district's Documents section, which is where most people look for a printable PDF, contains exactly one file: a 2023-24 calendar. Three years stale, and it is the only thing in the folder.
- Brunswick's file is named "Approved_2026-27_School_Calendar.pdf" and stamped "Adopted 2/11/2026," but the header inside the document still reads "DRAFT 2026-2027 CALENDAR." The word was never removed. Treat it as adopted; the filename and the adoption stamp both say so.
Last day of school, and why you cannot compare these numbers
Every published last day in this region is conditional, and the conditions are not the same, so putting them in a column next to each other produces a comparison that means nothing.
Ten districts publish a zero-snow-day last day and add days on from there. Portland is June 11, 2027, explicitly labeled "Tentative," with make-up days June 14 through 16. South Portland is June 10 and enumerates each contingency out loud: June 11 with one snow day, June 14 with two, June 15 with three, June 16 with four, June 17 with five. Yarmouth is June 11, adding one day per closure until June 17, after which additional days go remote. RSU 14 is June 11. Scarborough and Falmouth both publish two dates, June 14 with no storm days used and June 17 with three; Scarborough adds that anything past three storm days becomes asynchronous rather than extending the year. RSU 5 is a June 14 half day with make-up days running to June 22. Brunswick is a June 14 half day. MSAD 51 splits by grade: June 11 for Pre-K, June 14 for K through 8, June 15 for 9 through 12, with the first two storm days made up at the end and everything after that going remote.
Gorham is the exception, and it inverts the whole comparison. Its last student day is June 15 with five storm days already built in. So Portland's June 11 is a floor that moves later all winter, and Gorham's June 15 is a ceiling that moves earlier if the winter is mild. Read side by side they look like a four-day difference. They are not the same kind of number at all.
February and April vacation are more uniform than they look
Every regional summary we found treats vacation weeks as varying by district. Read the actual calendars and they do not. What varies is the labeling.
Scarborough lists its February vacation as February 13 to 21. Portland lists February 16 to 19. That looks like Scarborough gets nearly twice as much time off. It does not. February 13 is a Saturday and February 21 is a Sunday; Scarborough is simply listing the weekend bookends. Portland lists only the four school days it closes and counts Presidents' Day, Monday February 15, separately as a holiday. Both districts are closed the same five school days. So are South Portland, Falmouth, MSAD 51, RSU 5, RSU 14, Gorham and Brunswick. February vacation in Greater Portland is the week of Monday, February 15, 2027, everywhere that publishes one.
April is nearly as uniform. Patriots' Day falls on Monday, April 19, 2027, and every district that publishes an April calendar is closed that week. The one real divergence is Friday, April 16. In Falmouth, South Portland, Scarborough and RSU 14 there is no school that day, whether the calendar calls it spring break, a teacher day or a staff flex day. In Portland, Gorham, MSAD 51, RSU 5 and Brunswick, April 16 is a normal school day. If you are booking travel for a family split across two districts, that Friday is the only date in the entire spring calendar where the two of them disagree.
Thanksgiving is the same story told a third time. Every district is closed Wednesday November 25 through Friday November 27, 2026, but only some of them call November 25 a break. In Gorham it is a flex day, in RSU 5 a professional compensation day, in RSU 14 a teacher workday, in MSAD 51 the first flex day, and in Scarborough a staff flex day. Same three days out of school, five different words for it. December is uniform too: every district that publishes one is closed December 23 through 31, 2026.
Early release is where the districts genuinely differ
If you need childcare planning rather than vacation planning, the early-release pattern is the number that actually varies, and it varies a lot.
Portland releases early every Wednesday, district-wide, and dismissal times differ by school: 1:10 at East End, Longfellow, Ocean Avenue and Talbot; 2:30 at Lyseth, Presumpscot, Reiche and Rowe; 1:50 at the middle and high schools; 12:20 at Cliff and Peaks Island.
RSU 14 releases PreK through grade 5 every Wednesday, at 12:50 in Windham and 12:30 in Raymond, with grades 6 through 12 released on four dates only.
Most other districts run roughly monthly. Gorham has eight, Falmouth has eight, South Portland has ten, Brunswick has nine, MSAD 51 has five plus conference days.
RSU 5 has two. February 3 and May 12. That is the entire year. A Freeport parent and a Portland parent are managing completely different problems.
Knowing the first day is only half the problem. The other half is what time the bell actually rings, and that is published far worse than the calendar is: we could find readable 2026-27 bell times for only one district in the region. If you are new to the area and trying to assemble the rest of this picture, our guides to moving to Portland, Maine and property taxes by town cover the two things people research next. For the weeks the calendar just opened up, we keep a running list of indoor and rainy day options.
How to verify this yourself
Every date on this page came off a district-published document, not an aggregator. If you want to check one:
- Go to the district's own domain. Not a school-calendar site, not a search snippet.
- Confirm the school-year label on the document itself. A 2025-26 calendar and a 2026-27 calendar are visually near-identical, and several districts reuse the same URL year over year and overwrite it, so cached page titles lie.
- Look for the adoption stamp. Most of these calendars carry one, and it tells you whether you are reading the version the board actually approved.
- Confirm the state. Portland Oregon, Falmouth Massachusetts, Yarmouth Massachusetts, Gorham New Hampshire, Windham New Hampshire, Freeport Illinois and Brunswick Georgia all have school districts, and all of them outrank their Maine namesakes on some searches. We hit Portland Oregon and Falmouth Massachusetts in the top ten results while researching this page.
FAQ
When does school start in Portland, Maine in 2026?
Monday, August 31, 2026 for grades 1 through 12, and Tuesday, September 1 for Pre-K and kindergarten. Portland Public Schools last revised the 2026-27 calendar on March 31, 2026.
Which Greater Portland school district starts earliest?
Gorham, on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, for grades 6 and 9 and PreK, with the rest of the district starting August 27. That is five days ahead of the August 31 start used by most neighboring districts and six days ahead of Yarmouth.
Do all Greater Portland districts have the same February vacation?
Yes, in practice. Every district that publishes a 2026-27 calendar is closed the five school days of the week of Monday, February 15, 2027. Districts label it differently: Scarborough lists February 13 to 21 because it includes the weekends, Portland lists February 16 to 19 and counts Presidents' Day separately, and the rest list February 15 to 19.
Is April 16, 2027 a school day in Greater Portland?
It depends on the district, and it is the only spring date where they disagree. There is no school on Friday, April 16 in Falmouth, South Portland, Scarborough and RSU 14. It is a regular school day in Portland, Gorham, MSAD 51, RSU 5 and Brunswick.
Why can I not find the Westbrook or Cape Elizabeth 2026-27 school calendar?
Both districts publish through platforms that render content only in a live browser, and Westbrook's document endpoints additionally sit behind bot protection. Cape Elizabeth's calendar was board-approved on February 10, 2026 and announced as posted; Westbrook approved its 2025-26 calendar in mid-February of the prior year and presumably followed the same pattern. Neither is machine-retrievable. Call the district rather than trusting a third-party calendar site. Westbrook is (207) 854-0800.
When does school get out in June 2027?
Between June 10 and June 15, 2027, depending on the district, but the dates are not directly comparable. Ten districts publish a last day that assumes zero snow days and moves later with each cancellation. Gorham publishes June 15 with five storm days already built in, so its date moves earlier in a mild winter while everyone else's moves later.
Which district has the most early-release days?
Portland and RSU 14 both release early every Wednesday, Portland district-wide and RSU 14 for PreK through grade 5. At the other end, RSU 5 in Freeport has exactly two early-release days all year, February 3 and May 12, 2027.