Best School Psychology Programs in Maine Rankings for 2026

To work as a school psychologist in a Maine public school, you need the School Psychologist certificate (093) from the Maine Department of Education. This is the credential almost everyone in Maine schools holds, and the requirements line up closely with the NASP national standard. You complete a state-approved specialist-level or doctoral program in school psychology, you finish a 1,200-hour supervised internship with at least 600 hours in a school setting, supervised by a certified or licensed school psychologist, and you pass the Praxis School Psychologist exam (#5403) at the NASP qualifying score of 155. You can spread the internship across one full-time academic year or two consecutive half-time years. Graduating from a NASP-approved or APA-approved program, or holding the Nationally Certified School Psychologist credential, satisfies the program portion directly. Applications run through the Maine Educator Information System (MEIS), and you start on a one-year certificate before moving to a three-year professional certificate.

Maine is distinctive in how it separates school certification from the psychology license, so it is worth being precise. The 093 certificate authorizes you to provide school psychological services in PreK through grade 12, and under state law a person certified this way may call themselves a school psychologist or a nationally certified school psychologist. It does not let you hold yourself out as a psychologist in the broader sense or practice outside the school setting. That broader practice is regulated separately by the Maine Board of Examiners of Psychologists under Title 32. In other words, the Department of Education governs your school role, and the Board of Examiners governs anything resembling independent psychology practice.

If you want a private practice, seeing families for evaluations or counseling outside a district, that is the Licensed Psychologist route, and it is a real step up. The Board requires a doctoral degree in psychology, roughly two years and about 3,000 hours of supervised experience including a predoctoral internship and a postdoctoral year, a passing score on the national Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP), and the Maine Jurisprudence Exam. Most Maine school psychologists never pursue it. You only need it if you plan to practice independently of the schools.

Maine pays school psychologists below the national median, and there is no way to spin that honestly. The BLS May 2025 data puts the Maine median at $81,650, against a national median of $95,990, a gap of about 15%. The range runs from roughly $66,960 at the 10th percentile to $118,450 at the 90th. Pay generally follows each district's certificated salary schedule, the same step-and-column scale that pays teachers, so it climbs with experience and graduate credits but starts modestly. One honest caveat in the other direction: Maine has no statewide cost-of-living premium like the Bay Area or Boston, and outside greater Portland your housing dollar stretches further, which softens the gap a little.

Location inside Maine matters less than it does in bigger states, because there is really one metro. The Portland-South Portland area is the top-paying and largest-employing metro for school psychologists in the state, with a median of $84,680 and roughly 80 of the state's positions, according to the BLS metro file. The rest of the jobs are spread thin across rural districts and county-level cooperatives, where pay tends to sit near or below the state median but where the shortage is sharpest and districts are often the most flexible on hiring. The candid comparison is across the border: school psychologists in New Hampshire and Massachusetts have reported earning $10,000 to $20,000 more, which is one reason Maine struggles to keep people. If salary is your single biggest factor, that gap is real and you should weigh it.

In a one-program state, choosing is less about ranking campuses and more about deciding whether to stay in Maine, cross a border, or go online. Here is how the options sort out for the work you want to do.