enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Elwen and Julian Bernard turn a cider press with teacher Joshua Halloway while Olivia and Eliza Crowley watch in the yard outside Cliff Island School. At left are teaching assistant Heidi Holloway and a volunteer.

enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

First-grader Elwen Bernard figures out the alphabetical placement of a word at the start of a school day. The five children who attend the school come from three island families.

enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

First-grader Eliza Crowley reads a book on a storage shelf during reading time at Cliff Island School. Eliza and her sister Olivia, a fourth-grader, are daughters of Cheryl and Dave Crowley, a Portland firefighter.

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Olivia and Eliza Crowley ride their bikes back to school after their lunch hour one day last week. Going home for lunch is rare these days at public schools because of time constraints, transportation costs and public safety concerns.

enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Teacher Josh Holloway reads a book to his students at Cliff Island School last week. Listening are, clockwise from bottom left, Eliza Crowley, Olivia Crowley, Cade Lent, Julian Bernard and Elwen Bernard. Holloway and his wife, Heidi, a teacher’s aide, are in their third year at the school.

PORTLAND — A stream of apple juice poured from the spout of the old cider press at an encouraging rate.

A handful of children, dressed for a late October day, jostled for a chance to grab the iron bar, march around the press and squeeze out every drop.

"It's really flowing now," announced Julian Bernard, one of five students who attend Cliff Island School.

The fall pastime of turning island apples into cider is a typical learning experience at the one-room public school, one of five remaining on Maine's coastal islands.

Cliff Island School, which serves students in kindergarten through fifth grade, is the small but vital heart of an increasingly extraordinary place that faces continuing demographic changes and growing economic pressures.

Six miles out into Casco Bay, Cliff Island is part of Portland, Maine's largest city. With unpaved roads and limited public services, it forges on with about 50 year-round residents and 250 summer people.

The school once had as many as 45 students, in the early 1900s when the island had about 150 year-round residents. Through the last century, families dwindled as the fishing industry faded, leaving the school hanging in the balance, year after year.

When enrollment dropped to three students in the mid-1990s, a publicity campaign temporarily boosted school enrollment. Now, again, islanders are anxious about the future of their community.

"We have one kid graduating this year and two graduating next year, and only two coming into the ranks that we know of," said Cheryl Crowley, president of the parent-teacher committee. "We need a whole lot more than that. We need to entice people with children to come here."

Islanders say their future depends on their school. They point to Criehaven, a Penobscot Bay island that closed its school for lack of a teacher in the 1950s. Families gradually left the island, and now it's largely a summer colony. Today, the coastal islands of Monhegan, Matinicus, Frenchboro and Isle au Haut also tend one-room schools, with enrollments ranging from four to 14.

"It's a pretty tenuous situation for many island communities," said Ruth Kermish-Allen, education director at the Island Institute in Rockland. "For them, the school really is the center of the community."

One-room schools offer a brand of education once ubiquitous in the United States, where more than 200,000 operated in the late 1800s, according to the Country School Association of America. Now there are about 200 one-room public schools operating in the nation, and the number is dwindling fast.

Portland school officials understand the importance of Cliff Island School, said Jill Blackwood, assistant superintendent, who oversees the district's 10 elementary schools.

Blackwood said the district is committed to educating island children, and will work with islanders to find the best solution for students if enrollment drops. She noted that if Cliff Island had only one or two elementary school-age children, they could attend nearby Peaks Island Elementary School, a four-classroom building that has about 50 students and shares a principal with Cliff Island.

However, Blackwood said, the district maintains a school on Cliff Island, at a cost of $118,000 per year, in part because it's concerned about the added cost, logistical issues and safety concerns related to transporting young children over sometimes rough seas. The current ferry schedule doesn't offer a direct route; children would have to ride to the mainland, then take another ferry to Peaks.

"We'd also have to consider the need to be with other children because kids enrich other kids," Blackwood said, noting that the multi-age aspect of Cliff Island School is one of its best features.

District officials and islanders count themselves lucky to have found the current husband-and-wife team that runs Cliff Island School. Josh Holloway, teacher, and...