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By Suzie Boss

By noon on a weekday in late August, the thermometer is pushing up toward three digits on the dry side of the Cascades. For residents of Maupin, population 460, this is the peak season. Late summer sun bakes the basalt cliffs and turns the wheat fields to gold. Every sunny day brings more white-water rafters to this oasis on the banks of the Deschutes River, and all those summer tourists drop needed cash into a local economy that will be looking lean by winter.

At Henry's Deli, a stone's throw from the river, it's not rafters or fishermen who crowd the lunch tables today, however. It's teachers. Students won't return to school for another week, but the staff is already busy with inservice sessions and classroom preparations.

Looking down the long table in the middle of the café, Bernie Chastain, 48, takes in the faces of colleagues and neighbors she's known most of her life. A product of local schools herself, Chastain is a 25-year veteran of teaching in the South Wasco County School District. Just up the road, a community marquee congratulates her for being named state Teacher of the Year by the Oregon Small Schools Association. From her perspective, though, that award belongs to her community. "I just managed to bring it home," says Chastain, a modest-sounding but elegant-looking woman with honey-colored hair falling past her shoulders. When a visitor asks her a question about the quality of education in places like Maupin, it's only natural for Chastain to sidle up to that crowded café table and ask the group, "What are the good things about small schools?"

First, smiles spread around the table. Then the answers start to percolate: "We know our kids so well. We know their families, their parents, even their aunts and uncles. We're close." "We can be flexible to meet a student's needs." "We have more control over what we teach and how we teach." "We're given the freedom to find ways to help our kids succeed. The district trusts us to do a good job." "The school is the center of our community. We'll pack the gym for an elementary school program or basketball game, even if it's the middle of the day. And if our high school makes it to the state playoffs, everybody goes—even people with no kids in school."

Such tight school-community bonding can be found in larger cities, too, Chastain acknowledges, "but it happens here more easily. There are a lot of connections for our kids." The teen-age girl waiting tables at the café today, for instance, had Chastain as her second-grade teacher. The cook behind the counter is an organizer of the local Booster Club, which supports activities at the 100-student South Wasco High (Chastain's alma mater). Two tables over sits a little red-headed boy whose confidence as a reader soared last year in Chastain's literacy lab at Maupin Elementary. The young man sauntering in to order a milkshake is Chastain's nephew and former student.

"People who choose to live here are connected by school, family, church, and history. They have a sense of who they are," Chastain believes. She's lived here since 1965, "but that only makes me a semi-local," she laughs. "Families go back for five or six generations." Chastain appreciated those connections for her own son and daughter, now both in college, "and I see the benefits for my students. We may not be able to offer all the courses you'd find in a larger district," she admits, "but we provide more personalization of education. And we know how to be flexible."

Although the South Wasco district is large geographically, with some students traveling 40 miles each way to get to school, the enrollment is small—about 100 attending the high school, 200 in K-8. The yellow elementary school, junior high, high school, and administrative offices all share a campus smack in the middle of downtown Maupin.

Chastain can't even remember a time when she didn't want to be a teacher. What keeps her motivated and enthusiastic after a quarter-century in the classroom is the opportunity to keep expanding what she knows, whether by serving on a benchmark team with fellow teachers or developing ways to teach to multiple intelligences in the primary grades. "I like to learn, and I want to model the joy of learning and self-improvement for my students," she says. "I need to find ways to make learning connect for them."

A few years ago, for instance, Chastain got interested in brain research that shows how the development of neural pathways can lead to more fluent reading. The information seemed too valuable to keep to herself, so she shared her insights with Superintendent Tom Rinearson. In a small school district like South Wasco, she says, "the doors are open for those kinds of conversations." Rinearson believes in using strategic planning to improve school quality and manages with a data-driven approach known as the Baldrige framework. He suggested Chastain organize a field trip for her fellow teachers so they could assess whether a different approach to reading would fit into their district's overall vision. When they saw students thriving at a research-based reading lab in Eugene, Chastain recalls, "They were as excited as I was."

By fall of 1999, with backing from her superintendent and principal, Chastain had set up her literacy lab at Maupin Elementary (called the R.E.A.D. Lab, for Reading Errors Are Destroyed). She began assessing all students, from emergent readers through sixth-graders, on their reading fluency. She met with students individually to help them understand what sorts of errors were holding back their development as readers. Students set their own goals for improvement, and Chastain charted their progress with easy-to-understand bar graphs. Then, she organized a tutoring program so that more fluent readers—including students, parents, and other community members—could be trained to help students overcome specific reading errors and build reading speed and comprehension.

The approach has proved so effective at boosting students' reading skills that, this year, Rinearson has asked Chastain to leave her classroom and devote her full attention to the R.E.A.D. Lab. She hopes to expand individual reading assessments to include seventh- and eighth-graders. In addition, she's mentoring three brand-new teachers.

While she's thrilled to see students improve their reading skills, Chastain also is excited by the bonds that tutoring builds. "When our sixth-graders tutor the little ones, they become connected in a very positive way. Tutoring takes honest communication and encouragement. And the tutors model fluent reading, so that holds both tutors and readers to 100 percent accuracy." More and more adults are turning to the R.E.A.D. Lab—some to offer help as tutors, and others to seek help with their own reading.

When she sees students or adults make gains in reading, Chastain knows they also are improving their confidence to overcome obstacles. And modeling resilience—what she calls "learning to rise above"—is a theme in everything she does, whether in the classroom, the community, or her personal life.

Idyllic-looking places like Maupin aren't without challenges, admits Rinearson. Poverty rates are high in south Wasco County, and loss of population has meant closing schools in towns of Tygh Valley and Wamic. Rural communities face not only a tight economy but also an ongoing "brain drain," he says, with many high school graduates leaving family ranches for bigger cities and greener pastures. "But we have a choice," says the superintendent and unabashed advocate of small schools. "We can train our kids just well enough for minimum-wage jobs in the big cities, or we can educate them to become CEOs someday—and maybe telecommute from homes they choose to make in places like this one."

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