Way, Way Back to Basics

By Ezra Bowen

Morning on the high plains. Inside the red frame Hanging Woman school, 30 miles from the nearest paved road in the cattle country east of Sheridan, Wyo., Fifth-Grader Emily Myers, 10, sits at an upright piano practicing Silent Night for the Christmas pageant. Close by, a second grader starts her daily struggle with sums, while a fifth grader plays a geography game on a computer. Both seem oblivious to the plinking of the carol. Outside, snow is falling on waves of brown, sage-spotted hills.

At Salund elementary school in McLeod (pop. 50), N. Dak., Teacher Janice Herbranson, 51, has served breakfast to her three pupils. After morning lessons, she will cook lunch. At day's end, if the parents are away, she may take one of her charges home with her to spend the night. At the Lennep school near Montana's Crazy Mountains, Second-Grader Lee Cavender, 7, barges in to say that his sisters, twins who constitute the entire seventh grade, will be absent today. They turned 13 over the weekend, old enough for deer-hunting licenses, and, of course, their father has taken them shooting. With or without the twins, it is time for classes to begin. Erica Hess, 11, has the school-bell duty today. But the rope has broken, so she blows a whistle out the door. Her schoolmates troop in, put their snow boots in a neat row, then line up to pledge allegiance to the flag and sing My Country, 'Tis of Thee.

Unlike so many fossils of the frontier, hundreds of one-room public schools such as these not only survive but, in some places around the nation, are making a modest comeback in the face of a long-running drive to wipe them out. Between 1960 and 1982, the number of public one roomers in the U.S. shriveled from 24,000 to 798. Reason: a push for consolidated districts in which pupils would be bused to big central schools with presumably better learning opportunities. Recently, however, parents and educators have been working to save the one-room public school. Montana has opened three new ones this year, and nationally the total has risen to about 835--for some sound reasons. (Private one roomers, mainly sectarian, now total an estimated 1,000.)

Around a deeply rural place like Hanging Woman--so named, according to local legend, for a homesteader who used a noose to end her lonely life--school buses cannot get through the deep winter snow or spring mud. Therefore in 1981 the Kendrick Cattle Co., dominant ranchers in the area, provided the school building and a trailer to house Teacher Paula Brown, 28; the county came up with books, desks, the computer and Brown herself. "You have to take the school to the children if you can't bring them to the school," explains Audrey Cotherman, Wyoming's deputy state school superintendent.

Beyond such homely practicality lies a reawakened national concern for some faded educational verities, among them the close teacher-pupil contact that was much in evidence last week at Lennep. There, beneath pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Carol Sevalstad, 33, glided through the mellow buzz of a dozen children in six grades. When Lee Cavender tripped over his second-grade arithmetic game on Lennep's computer, Sevalstad untangled him. Then she turned to a Lilliputian table where two first graders were hard at their reading. "I want to spend a lot of time on reading with the first graders," she explained. "This is a critical age for them."

It bothered her not at all that Matt Hess, 6, read with his stuffed horse Floppy perched on his head. But Sevalstad permits no real classroom nonsense and gets little from ranch children raised to do chores right. Fifth and sixth graders give her a hand with the little ones. Said Erica Hess: "They ask me what words mean and what the directions in their work books say." Sevalstad takes pride in the Thanksgiving themes tacked to one wall. Wrote Vance Voldseth, age 10: "I am thankful for the Yamaha three-wheeler ... I am thankful for Fred [a calf] ... I am thankful for Mom and Dad."

To the surprise of many educators, the youngsters tend to score handsomely when they move on to high school. "Once there was a stigma attached to going to a one-room school, like you were a hick or something," says Ralph Kroon, field director of the Montana Rural Education Center at Western Montana College. "Now it's a back-to-basics phenomenon." Nowhere is the phenomenon more vital than in Nebraska, which has 300 public one-room schools, more than any other state, and where parents have collected 85,000 signatures for a 1986 referendum on stopping further consolidation.

Of course, all is not perfection in the one-room schoolhouse. November sport at Hanging Woman is a snow-swept game of croquet in a tiny school yard ringed by a wire fence that keeps out stray cattle but not, alas, bull snakes (Brown killed three of them earlier this year). At Lennep, science lab may be watching Alka-Seltzer tablets dissolve at varying speeds in glasses of cold, warm and hot water. Socially, too, youngsters nurtured in the gentle intimacy of a one roomer may tend at first to be loners, and lonely, when tossed into a big high school.

Nevertheless, most pupils and their parents would not trade the experience for anything. A particularly staunch supporter is Montana's Governor Ted Schwinden, himself a one-room alumnus. "I have nothing but good memories of it," he says. Another is Salund's Herbranson, who sounds like anything but today's unappreciated, burned-out teacher, despite a 1983 salary of $6,300, which the National Education Association certified as the nation's lowest (her wages have now soared to $6,800). "The feeling of being needed," she says, "that's something worthwhile. Many of my former students are married now, but we're still close. They still call me 'Teacher.'" --By Ezra Bowen. Reported by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Hanging Woman

With reporting by Reported by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Hanging Woman