A School with a Studentbody of Two Represents an Almost-Lost Core Value of American Education
Ohanian Comments: As you read this article, with wonder and astonishment, keep this precept, buried toward the end, in mind:
"Efficiency is not one of the core values of American education. It's about learning to succeed in a very complicated world. And knowing who you are and developing a strong sense of identity are crucial to (success). Country schools allow children to develop that way."--Andrew Gulliford, Author America's Country Schools
In country schools, they probably don't care if students wear hooded sweatshirts.
Inside a red-roofed schoolhouse, teacher Terryl Reed circulates among four little desks. Ben de Grise, 10, sits at one. His brother Aaron, 9, works at another. A paper doll the size of a small child occupies the third. And the fourth desk is empty.
On this gray autumn day, attendance is 100 percent at Emigrant Gap School.
"Sometimes I feel guilty having just two students," Reed said. "But there is a real need."
Not everyone agrees in this community between Colfax and Truckee. Some say that operating a public school for two brothers is an inefficient use of funds and that children in such a small school lose out on social development.
But the tiny school pays for itself through a special state funding formula. And experts are quick to list the benefits of learning in an intimate environment, and point out the role one-room schoolhouses play in America's history.
Emigrant Gap School dates to 1863 and, by today's standards, has never served many students. However, the current enrollment is the lowest anyone can remember. A generation ago, the school had as many as 18 students. In the two years Reed has been in charge, enrollment has peaked at eight.
Locals cite several reasons the number of children at "The Gap" varies from season to season. Enrollment swings hint at the poverty affecting the area, where one gas station and a Burger King make up the entire commercial core. An inexpensive motel nearby attracts some families in need of temporary shelter. Others come for seasonal work in the logging industry, then leave when the jobs dry up. Some parents who live there permanently choose to send their children to a bigger school.
And, of course, there are the winters.
The area gets more snow than any place in the contiguous 48 states, according to the National Climatic Data Center. The average snowfall in Blue Canyon, two miles from Emigrant Gap, is more than 20 feet. Only Valdez, Alaska, gets more.
"By March, the path to the school's front door is like a snow tunnel," said Debbi Sandoval, principal of Emigrant Gap School and superintendent of the Alta-Dutch Flat School District.
Extreme geography is a unifying factor among the state's one-room schools. In 1999, the most recent data available, 33 one-room schools were scattered throughout California's woods and deserts.
"Why do they exist? They exist because they're isolated," said Mark Cooper, chairman of the Small School Districts Council of the California School Boards Association.
Small schools stay open, he said, because of difficulty in transporting children to larger schools: It may take too long to make the trip, or weather and geography can be insurmountable.
"These kids, if they don't have home-to-school transportation, they just don't go to school," Cooper said.
That's exactly why the boys' father, Ben de Grise, requested that Emigrant Gap School stay open when officials wanted to close it two years ago.
"There's no education worth my child's life," said de Grise, a traveling mechanic who, in between jobs, makes money chopping wood. "The winters are so treacherous on (Interstate) 80. I'm not putting them on the freeway."
De Grise, who lives down the road from the school, said he would teach his children at home if the school shut down. The next closest school is 12 miles away in Alta, which de Grise said is too far for the boys to travel by car in the snow.
But other families from the area send their kids to school in Alta and say the trip is not prohibitive. They say they'd rather have their children in the K-8 school of almost 200 students. There, they can make friends and prepare for the transition to Colfax High School, about 25 miles away.
When morning math is finished, Aaron is sent to parse out lunch from a week's worth of food in the storage room. He counts out two turkey sandwiches, two bags of chips, two oranges and two cartons of milk.
Then he drops one lunch on Ben's desk and takes his own to his seat across from the life-size paper doll. It was Ben's idea to make the paper playmates, Reed said, and he took his home.
"Aaron likes his sitting there," she said. "I think there's a need, they need friends."
With Reed's guidance, crafting the paper dolls became an impromptu lesson in basic geometry. Once Ben suggested the project, she used the opportunity to teach the boys about cylinders, rectangles and the rest of the shapes necessary to build the dolls.
Reed merges history and science lessons for fourth-grader Aaron and fifth-grader Ben. But to keep their learning in line with state standards for each grade level, she teaches them separately in English and math. Her students must take the state's achievement tests, but because the school is so small, results are not reported publicly.
Experts say good teachers are especially important in one-room schoolhouses because students are taught year after year by the same person.
Keeping good teachers at remote schoolhouses can be difficult, said Andrew Gulliford, a professor at Fort Lewis College in Colorado and author of "America's Country Schools."
That doesn't seem to be a problem at Emigrant Gap, a 45-minute journey from Reed's home in Nevada County. After years of teaching 140 students a day at Jonas Salk Middle School in Sacramento, Reed said she loves her job at the tiny mountain school.
And her devotion to the children is evident. When she wanted her students to have a library, she brought all her children's books from home and filled the shelves to create a reading corner. When Ben made a significant turnaround in his behavior, Reed gave him one of her horses. When the weather is good, she packs them up in her car for trips to parks and museums in Sacramento and assemblies at Alta School. In winter, she takes them to snow survival lessons or for nature walks on snowshoes.
Reed said it's imperative the boys get out so they can learn to socialize with others. Time management, table manners and other conventions of society, she said, are difficult to teach in a setting that's practically a home school.
The move to close Emigrant Gap School began a couple of years ago. At the time, the school made up its own district. But state law requires a minimum of six students to keep a district open, and the average daily attendance was slipping dangerously close to that threshold.
"We didn't think we were going to have enough kids, so we decided to merge with Alta," said Shelly Tipton, who was on Emigrant Gap's school board. "When we merged, we thought the school was going to be closed."
Tipton, who lives in Blue Canyon, sent her own children to Emigrant Gap School in their early grades before transferring them to Alta.
"It was nice because they did get a lot of one-on-one attention," she said. "But there are other problems. They missed out on a lot -- field trips, assemblies, friends, the things that go on at bigger schools."
And it's just not efficient to run a school for so few children, she said.
The Emigrant Gap school district shut down in 2001, its property and children becoming part of the Alta-Dutch Flat School District. Many thought that was the end of Emigrant Gap School.
But de Grise went to Superintendent Sandoval and argued the case for keeping it open. He said he had moved to Emigrant Gap in 2000 because he wanted his children to have the individual attention provided in a small school. He had chosen a life removed from crowds and said he didn't think it was safe to send the boys down I-80 in winter.
Since Emigrant Gap had become part of a larger school district, the school could be sustained through a special state funding formula.
Most schools receive money from the state based on the number of children they serve, with a typical annual apportionment of approximately $4,500 to $5,000 per student.
A category called "Necessary Small Schools" -- in this case elementary schools that are part of a larger district, serve no more than 100 students and have children who would have to travel at least 10 miles to the next school -- receive funding that generally allows them to operate no matter how low attendance goes.
Emigrant Gap, like other necessary small elementary schools serving fewer than 25 students, gets about $100,000 a year from the state. That's enough to pay for a full-time teacher, a part-time aide and the utilities and maintenance to keep up the 1933 schoolhouse.
"Unless the county or state tells me they won't fund a small school, it certainly doesn't benefit anyone in our district to close that school," Sandoval said. Because if Emigrant Gap School closes, she said, the money disappears with it.
Is there such a thing as a school that's too small?
"Not before the eighth grade," said Gulliford, the author of "America's Country Schools."
By high school, he said, students need to develop their social skills in a setting with other teens. But before that, Gulliford believes, nothing is more important than the sense of self children gain in a small school and the learning they can accomplish with one-on-one attention.
"Sure, two kids may seem to be extreme, but in many instances there are deep, deep roots for a country school in remote places where families prefer the small scale, the human touch," he said.
And financial decisions, he says, shouldn't determine the value of a school.
"Efficiency is not one of the core values of American education. It's about learning to succeed in a very complicated world. And knowing who you are and developing a strong sense of identity are crucial to (success). Country schools allow children to develop that way."
He and Cooper, of the California School Boards Association, point out that many large schools look to small schools for lessons in how to improve.
Trends such as peer learning, where older students tutor younger ones, and the creation of academies within large high schools stem from the benefits one-room schools offer, they said.
Although Reed says it's important to help students develop social skills, she also says crowded conditions at many schools aren't good for children, either.
"Socialization is good to a point," Reed said, noting that larger schools have to deal with more social conflict, arguments and fistfights. "I think if we could have more small schools, children would be better off."
The school day closes at Emigrant Gap with reading practice followed by a Spanish lesson. At one table, Aaron reads aloud from the fourth-grade text, and Reed asks him questions after each paragraph. On the couch in the corner, aide Sharon Zentner reads with Ben from the fifth-grade text.
Then they all move to a table, and Zentner leads the boys and their teacher through a Spanish lesson.
"El pelo," Zentner says, touching her hair, and the three others repeat.
"La cabeza," she continues, rubbing her head, eventually going through all the parts of the body.
At 2:30 in the afternoon, Zentner and Reed walk the boys outside, where their stepmother is waiting to take them home. She's arrived on her horse, Belle, with another in tow. Reed gives Aaron a boost onto Belle, and he grabs on to his stepmother's waist. Ben jumps onto Valley, the horse his teacher gave him, then decides he'd rather walk her down the hill. In a picture that recalls schoolhouses of the distant past, the horses and children head home, crunching through a thin layer of snow
— Laurel Rosen
In a class all their own
Sacramento Bee
2003-11-27
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/7858649p-8798885c.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
