Gloucester Public School District: The Basics

It's the second week of school here in Gloucester, and if you're thinking of moving to town, or have just purchased real estate here, you may be wondering about our schools and the school system. Information on the Gloucester Public Schools may seem overwhelming to take in at first, but we can help you understand all the ins and outs of the system! It's a great school district full of caring teachers and administrators, with programs that help children of all learning styles thrive in their environment. We're proud of our schools here in Gloucester!

Education in Gloucester begins with the Gloucester Preschool, which runs half-day classrooms Monday-Thursday, with a tuition of $220 per month. The preschool follows the same calendar as the rest of the school district. There are five classrooms with a maximum of fifteen students in each of the integrated classrooms, with a licensed teacher and one or two highly qualified assistants in each of the classrooms. The Gloucester Preschool has speech pathologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists and a school psychologist. There is a special needs classroom with a small student to teacher ratio to facilitate positive learning. The Gloucester Preschool is located at 2 Blackburn Drive.

There are five elementary schools in Gloucester - Plum Cove, Beeman, West Parish, Veteran's, and East Gloucester. The "catchment areas" of each school varies - Plum Cove is in Lanesville, Beeman takes children from Riverdale and downtown, Veteran's also takes a lot of downtown children from the Portagee Hill area, West Parish is mainly West Gloucester and the Centennial Ave area, and East Gloucester takes children from parts of downtown East Gloucester. This can be confusing at times, because the downtown population is so high, and some streets go to one particular elementary school, while the adjacent street may go to another. If you would like to know which school your prospective home or new home is slated for, you can reach out to the school district's administration at 978-281-9800.

Once children reach 6th grade, they go to a central middle school, O'Maley Innovation School. Each Grade at O'Maley is divided into three teams (known as houses, with names like Ocean, Beach, Harbor, Island, etc) consisting of either two or four 23-26 student homerooms. A core-subject teacher (English Language Arts, Math, Science or Social Studies) leads each homeroom. There are many great programs at O'Maley - for instance, O'Maley Academy is an after-school extracurricular program that offers enrichment activities like flight simulator, LEGO club, drama, mountain biking, coding, robotics, gardening, Minecraft, programs with Sound Harbor, Art Hive, and Maritime Gloucester. In addition, O'Maley's SAILS program promotes building a respectful community through Service, Acceptance, Integrity, Leadership and Success.

All students graduating from O'Maley move on to Gloucester High School, which overlooks the Annisquam river off of Centennial Ave. GHS just opened brand new state of the art photography and design studio last week! They have a great drama program, robotics program, auto shop, and features the student newspaper, the Gilnetter. Like O'Maley, GHS has an afterschool program, called Gloucester U, which features programs such as the police academy, hiking club, anime club, and video game design. The brand new, state of the art Newell Stadium offers a great atmosphere for athletics.