In Montana, small schools aren't a new idea. They're a way of life.

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Story and photos by Suzie Boss

Depending how you measure it, downtown Reed Point, Montana, stretches for maybe half a dozen blocks. The wooden sidewalk gives out at the Hotel Montana, a bed-and-breakfast inn overflowing with antiques and hospitality, but the road continues across the railroad tracks, past the gas station/convenience store, and down to the new post office. This is the route for the town's annual Labor Day Sheep Run—like the running of the bulls in Pamplona, only woolier.

To find the real heart of Reed Point, though, you have to cut down a side street lined with modest homes and through the front doors of Reed Point School. Here, about 50 students in grades six through 12 are living, breathing proof that this ranching and farming community of 120 boasts not only a colorful past, but a promising future.

A decade ago, Reed Point's secondary school was an eyesore on Montana's educational map. The building was unsafe by any number of standards—from the basement boiler room with a door too warped to shut to the asbestos falling from the ceilings to the rope ladder to be used as an escape route by anyone unlucky enough to be upstairs if fire threatened. Enrollment was low, even by Reed Point standards and even with foreign exchange students inflating the daily attendance figures.

"We knew we had to do something," recalls longtime teacher Marianne Kaelberer. "Our choices were: build or shut."

Shutting Reed Point School would have meant putting students on a bus to Columbus, 17 miles east, or to Big Timber, 20 miles west along Interstate 90. Reed Point's elementary school, housed in an historic blue-and-white schoolhouse, would have stayed open, but for how long? Consolidation—the force that has meant the end of rural schools across the country for half a century—was knocking at Reed Point's door.

At town meetings, parents, teachers, and other local residents voiced the same concern. "Our community would totally die without this school," Kaelberer recalls hearing again and again. Staff from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's Rural Education Program worked with Reed Point as a partner site as the community went through a wrenching soul-searching process. At well-attended meetings, charts were drawn up to compare the pros and cons of building or consolidating. Grant applications were written. Building plans were drawn and redrawn, getting less grand but more economical with each version.

Finally, armed with a solid plan and convinced of strong taxpayer support, residents traveled to Helena to pitch the value of their local school to legislators who had an eye on the bottom line. To the surprise of folks from Reed Point, residents of other small towns showed up to lend their support, too. These unexpected allies weren't in any immediate danger of having their schools consolidated, Kaelberer says, "but they knew if we had to close, they could be next."

Superintendent Gary Wilz, 40, in his second year on the job in Reed Point, didn't go through the school building process personally. But the crew-cut transplant from North Dakota understands the significance of the story for the community where he and his wife are now raising and educating their own two daughters. Offering a quick tour, he points to the gym that gets a workout from both school and community, classrooms with a student-teacher ratio of about eight to one, brightly lit commons area where students gather for lunch or studying, high-tech equipment that makes Reed Point one of the most-wired schools in the country (with one computer for every 2.5 students and the town's only fax machine).

Not only is local enrollment strong—this year's senior class of 16 is one of the largest in years—but some families are driving their children long distances from other communities so they can attend school here, where the adult attention is close and cliques are practically nonexistent.

"In the end," says Wilz with a smile, "this is what happened."

LOCAL CONTROL
It's been six years since the new Reed Point School emerged from its old shell, but the story continues to resonate with those who live in the state's small towns and rural counties. Explains Claudette Morton, Executive Director of the Montana Small Schools Alliance: "This is a strong local control state. People feel a real connection to their schools, and they don't want to lose that. They're passionate about keeping these little schools open."

Montana's small schools were born of geographic necessity. With 878,000 residents scattered over 147,046 square miles, the Big Sky state is wide enough to stretch from New York City to Detroit but has the population density of Australia—the fifth-least-dense nation on earth. Almost two-thirds of the state's public school districts are rural, enrolling about one-third of all students. Schools with enrollments under 300 are the norm for 75 percent of Montana's elementary and secondary students. And about 150 elementary schools are so small that you can count their teachers on one hand.

By many measures, students thrive in these small schools. As the New York Times pointed out last summer, students from Montana's tiniest elementary schools (with 40 or fewer students) "tend to outperform their peers on standardized tests in every subject." What's more, the state's small rural schools tend to be an academic equalizer for students at risk because of poverty, according to a recent report by the Rural School and Community Trust. "The smallness of these schools is an asset to student achievement," the report concluded. Anecdotally, too, teachers and parents report positive results for small-schools students. "Kids who don't quite fit elsewhere manage to fit in a school like Reed Point," says Kaelberer. "It's a good place for a student who needs a chance."

Montana's small schools are more than a local success story. They offer a glimpse of the daily routines and teaching practices that may become more common, if national efforts to reshape large schools into more intimate learning communities prove successful.

Not to say that these little schools are perfect, Morton is quick to add. Teacher pay is low and benefits such as health insurance and funding for professional development are inadequate in many of the state's rural communities. Wilz worries about providing his students with enough course offerings so they can be competitive with peers from larger schools. But when Morton hears "big schools" teachers talking up the latest trends—peer tutoring or multigrade classrooms or project-based learning—she has to hold back a smile. "This is what small schools do," says the longtime educator whose career has taken her from the classroom to the state Office of Public Instruction to university teaching to national research projects. "It's what they've always done."

Spend a few days traveling the roads that wind along rivers and up valleys into the state's rural heartland, and you'll see that even the smallest town isn't complete unless there's a school at the center. For this state, the small schools model isn't a bold new invention. It's a legacy. And it's something that educators and community members find a way to make work, one small town at a time.

AS SMALL AS IT GETS
Not far from Reed Point, a two-lane road cuts south off the interstate and follows the Stillwater River through a landscape that belongs on postcards: red barns, green meadows, rocky hillsides capped with snow. Lower Stillwater Valley is dotted with communities of a few hundred residents. But as the elevation rises into the Beartooth Range, the miles stretch out between signs of civilization until finally, rounding a bend, you spot a little schoolhouse made of stone.

At Nye School, the lights come on early and burn late. Dawn Mill, 27, is the lone teacher responsible for educating 11 students in grades one through six. Planning six separate lessons for several subjects a day takes time, but she's determined not to shortchange the children this community delivers to the school doorsteps each weekday. Their future rests squarely on her shoulders.

Scattered across Montana's wide open spaces, more than 80 one-room schools endure. Only Nebraska has more still in operation. Nye School is kept alive by Mill's dedication and about a dozen local families who value what kids can learn in a classroom that feels like a family. Several parents work at Stillwater Mine, a platinum and palladium operation. Others find work at a nearby restaurant, the local post office, or employers located "down the hill" in towns like Absarokee (population 800). To supplement the lean school budget, the community hosts an annual auction and social event where fiddling fills the air and pies sell for upward of $200 apiece. In less than an hour, the auction raises $2,000 so students can go skiing at Red Lodge, take field trips to the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, or have access to the computers that connect them to the wider world.

On a Monday morning the kids crowd around Mill, eager to tell her about their weekend adventures. She shoos them good-naturedly to the desks that stretch across the wooden floor. This year's three first-graders sit in a row on one end of the room, seven more classmates are arranged by grade levels to their left, and the lone sixth-grader sits in a place of honor at the front of the class. Mill takes time to listen as a third-grader describes his successful rabbit hunt and a first-grader tells about his new dinosaur slippers. The class has a busy day ahead, but Mill doesn't rush the moment. "They just have to tell their stories," she says.

In a one-room school, students know that their stories matter. Mill doesn't discount the value of the personal attention her students receive—all day, every day. She practically wears out her shoes making the rounds from desk to desk to answer questions and offer individualized instruction. But after five years of teaching in one-room schools, she believes her students gain something even more valuable than personal attention. "What they learn here is independence," she says.

Like many Montanans, Mill is the product of a country education herself. There were three in her graduating class at Lavina. When she moved on to the big city of Billings and enrolled at Rocky Mountain College, she realized that she already knew "how to dig for information, how to find things out for myself, how to learn."

She sees those qualities emerge in her students, too, as they follow the unique rhythms of the school day. They learn patience by seeing that their turn with the teacher always comes around, even if it takes a while. In the meantime, they can ask a classmate for help or listen to the instruction taking place a desk away. There's no need for Mill to implement a formal peer tutoring program; helping your neighbor comes as naturally as breathing in multigrade classrooms. She's careful, however, not to rely on her older students to be mini-teachers. "They need time to be kids yet, too," she says. "I always ask them if they'd mind helping a younger one." As Kaitlin, the lone sixth-grader, admits, "The little kids can get annoying."

Sometimes all 11 students come together to work on a project, such as their recent investigation into bats. In a spirited group discussion, they compared notes on what they already knew and what they wanted to find out. Even the shyest boy in the room—a towheaded first-grader with an endearing grin—finds the courage to speak up in this nonthreatening environment. Without classroom walls to sort kids by age or ability levels, many students zoom past grade-level expectations. A couple of this year's students are reading even beyond the high school level. On the last achievement tests, Mill says, every student in the room earned the highest possible score on at least one subject.

The independence Mill learned early in life has helped as she's found her footing as a teacher, too. Although a school neighbor assists in the classroom as a teacher's aide and a visiting music teacher provides a lesson once a week, Mill is without traditional cohorts. There's no mentor in the building to answer questions or provide inspiration, no principal to step in if she encounters a discipline problem, no peers to kibbitz with in the teachers' lounge (if there even were a teachers' lounge). She's not just the only teacher; she's responsible for everything from ordering textbooks to making sure janitorial duties get done. She does compare notes frequently with her own favorite teacher from Lavina, and whenever she gets together with educators from other small schools, she says, "We just talk and talk and talk."

Helping teachers like Mill overcome professional isolation has become a key focus of the Montana Small Schools Alliance. Last year, the organization brought together teachers from 16 counties for four workshops on aligning curriculum with state standards in math and reading. "They created sample multigrade units that tie to standards," explains Morton, who considers the workshops "a big help" to elementary teachers who typically have to teach all subjects to a range of ages. "The workshops are progressive. They are designed to let teachers share what works." What's more, Morton adds, "It's a chance to get together with their peers on an ongoing basis, which research tells us is the best kind of professional development." This year, workshops will focus on meeting standards in language arts, science, and technology. Another project will help rural teachers teach to state standards in the field of art. The Montana Small Schools Alliance is also a partner in an ambitious new project at Western Montana College that will prepare teachers to use technology in the classroom.

Although sound classroom practices are critical in small schools, teachers who take on these jobs understand that a special kind of learning takes place outside the schoolhouse, too. When it's time for recess, for instance, Mill's students race outdoors, grabbing baseball bats and pausing just long enough to pat the head of Lady, the black dog sunning herself on the school steps. Kaitlin divvies her classmates into two teams, balancing "big kids, little kids." But as the game gets underway, there's no sign of the fierce competition that can get kids riled—and tempers flaring—on larger school playgrounds. The pitcher warms up not only his fastball, but also the blooper pitch that he delivers to those aged seven and under. The fifth-grade boy playing catcher stops the action to give a batting lesson to a first-grade girl from the opposing team.

"They cheer each other on," says Mill. The cooperative spirit that's nurtured here tends to stick with these kids long after they finish at Nye and head to more traditional schools. The one-room school experience shapes how they learn, how they play, and the kind of adults they're apt to become. That's something Mill hears repeatedly from alumni who send letters and e-mail messages back to the little stone school that molded their lives. Years from now, the current crop of students may not remember their autumn lesson on bat biology, but odds are good they will recall the face and name of every other child who shared their world at Nye School. As for Mill, her long-term goal is clear: "I hope they remember that I loved every one of them."

PROJECTS OF PLACE
Up in the midsection of Montana, where mountain peaks flatten into the wide Musselshell Valley, the local economy has been on the flat side, too, in recent years. Drive down the main street of Roundup (population 2,000) and you'll see empty windows peering out of handsome old buildings built when the railroad first steamed into town. This is a place where coal mining boomed, then went bust after a few short decades; a place where ranching—a way of life for four generations—is proving too much of a hardship for many families to continue into the 21st century. Every morning, there's a parade of taillights heading away from Roundup as local folks commute 52 miles south to Billings, where the jobs are.

With many people going elsewhere to work and shop, "this is becoming more a bedroom community. The school is the main place where people still connect," observes Roundup High teacher Tim Schaff, 42. He knows the realities of small-town life too well to wax romantic about the subject. He grew up on a ranch 34 miles away, attended a "bitty school" with a graduating class of five, and married a woman with deep family ties to Roundup. He also serves on the city council and a county board on weed control, and coordinates the local school-to-work project. He's as deeply involved in his community's future as just about anyone in town.

On an autumn morning it's history, not the future, that grabs the attention of Schaff, four Roundup High seniors, and school librarian Dale Alger. They pile into Schaff's four-wheel-drive rig and head out Horse Thief Road to photograph what's left of a homesteader's cabin from a century ago. Stepping with care up to the wooden structure beaten down by time and harsh winters, Schaff tells the group, "Remember, this was somebody's dream."

The class is part of the Montana Heritage Project, a six-year-old effort that is forging strong alliances between rural schools and their communities. Although community-centered teaching is the hallmark of the program, each school's annual project is unique to its place. Students have produced videos, performed original theatrical productions, and designed Web pages as "gifts" to their communities. Leaving the classroom walls behind, students dive into the study of their home turf, "its history, its relationship to the land, its built environment, its folklife, its economy, its social arrangements," explains Heritage Director Michael Umphrey.

In Roundup, now in its fourth year with the project, students are working with their local museum to archive photographs and research the region's history through interviews with elder citizens. They've written about topics ranging from vigilantism to the county-busting movement. "Students come out of this changed," says Schaff, "even if they don't know it at the time. They are always surprised by what they learn."

Supported by clothing designer Liz Claiborne and her businessman-husband Art Ortenberg, New Yorkers who have sunk roots into rural Montana soil, the project has been a boon for cash-strapped schools, enabling teachers to invest in everything from literature to multimedia equipment. And the benefits extend well beyond financial. Secretary of Education Richard Riley has praised the project for "giving meaning to life," by having students use their own communities as the focus of serious study. The Library of Congress has embraced it as a national model and last year invited a team of Montana students to Washington, D.C., to submit a sampling of Heritage projects to the nation's archives.

Umphrey sees the project transforming the very way teenagers view themselves: "They see their families, classrooms, and neighborhoods not just as an environment in which they pursue their individual desires, but as communities of which they are members."

Along the way, students also polish academic skills. During the visit to the homesteader's cabin, for instance, Schaff reminds students that historians have to answer questions. How could they find out who had once lived here? Why did this homestead fail to "prove up"? Where would they look for records? What kind of detective work does the study of history involve? As they analyze what they learn, students sharpen skills in writing and critical thinking. Roundup High participants also use black-and-white photography to tell their stories visually and computer technology to create a lasting repository of information.

The 30 Heritage teachers come together twice a year to learn from others' classroom experiences and cheer one another's successes. "We become a family," Schaff says, while they learn how to use technology, how to prepare archives, how to use literature to help students understand the meaning of "place." In many schools, teachers cooperate across disciplines to guide students through learning that blurs the boundaries between history, art, English, science, and other subjects.

At Broadwater High in Townsend, a lakefront community of about 2,000 located a half-hour's drive from Helena, Heritage students last year drew on a variety of disciplines as they sought to understand the role of veterans in the life of their town. Guided by teacher Darlene Beck, they read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation to learn more about those who fought in World War II. They learned how to collect oral histories, then knocked on doors, inviting themselves in to hear the memories of older citizens "who had assumed we didn't care about them," explained a student named Kelsey. As they wrote about the interviews, Beck says, "Their writing showed an empathy and an authenticity that hadn't been there before." Adds Kelsey, "These weren't just stories in a history book. They were real—real emotions, real people." The project expanded to include a quilt, hand-stitched by a local quilting club, that features veterans' silkscreened photos. But the year's highlight had to be the memorial service for the community's veterans that the Broadwater High students planned and hosted as their way of offering thanks.

Although such projects can work in larger schools, they seem especially well-suited to small ones. As Schaff points out, "We don't have to have a department meeting to get an idea approved. A small school offers us more academic freedom. We can think of an idea in the morning, try it that afternoon, and change it the next day if it doesn't work out." Because he has the time to get to know his students well, he can tailor projects to their interests. "Small schools," he says, "are places where all voices get heard." Beck appreciates the "easy atmosphere" of her small school, where teachers and students know one another from life experiences shared both inside and outside of class. Getting students to participate isn't hard. "Activities are very open for kids," Beck says, without the competition or cliques that can hold back participation in larger schools. Schaff thinks about the boy who stopped after class to tell him, with no little pride, about his football injury. "In a bigger school, he wouldn't have had a chance to participate in sports—he'd never have had the opportunity to get injured!"

By involving students in unique activities of their own design, Heritage projects are creating lasting bonds between teen-agers and their communities. Sometimes, the projects even strengthen family ties. One boy never would have thought to tap his grandfather's memories if he hadn't been involved in the Heritage project. A week after the interview, his grandfather died. Says Beck, "He would never have asked those questions otherwise." Another girl had lived next door to an elderly woman for a decade, "but I knew nothing about her life. We'd never really spoken before."

"It brings the community closer to the school," Beck believes, "and builds harmony. People see these kids going out, doing interviews and service projects, and they realize these are responsible kids. Their spending on education isn't being wasted." Students, in turn, begin to understand their own role as citizens. Both Townsend and Roundup have managed to pass school bonds in recent elections. Roundup's came after repeated failures at the polls, but within days of a Heritage event that drew 32 senior citizens into the high school. Townsend's means construction can proceed on a badly needed building to replace the high school built in 1912. By focusing on a community's past, community-based learning can lead to a brighter future.

THE ROAD AHEAD
Content though he is to be an educator in the small world of Reed Point, Gary Wilz can't stifle a troubling thought. "Our biggest export isn't wheat or cattle anymore," he says. "It's young people."

Indeed, talk to the teens who are winding up their K-12 education in these small communities, and you often hear them describe plans for heading down the road after graduation. A girl who learned to operate a videocamera through her work with the Heritage project in Roundup hopes to pursue film studies in California. A student from Townsend says she just wants to live in a town "big enough to have a movie theater." When Wilz needed a new math teacher, he was dismayed to discover that only 20 percent of Montana's education graduates remain in state for teaching jobs. The rest head off to where the pay is higher. It took him three months of recruiting and the offer of district-subsidized housing to make a hire.

Wayne "Cork" Erfle, a prize-winning high school teacher from tiny Rapelje (where K-12 school enrollment is 87 this year), knows that the life of family farming—which has sustained his own family for four generations—is no longer a sure bet for rural kids hoping to build a stable future. Profits are slim, at best, and many of yesterday's jobs just aren't there anymore. "We need to show these kids something else," Erfle says.

In semi-retirement, Erfle has thrown his energy into the state's school-to-work movement. He chairs the state School-to-Work Advisory Board and has traveled to Washington, D.C., and across the country to work on behalf of the trend he sees as "the greatest thing to ever happen" in education. That's high praise from a man who spent four decades in the classroom, developed a computerized rocketry project with his industrial arts students that earned honors from IBM, and received the National Educator Award from the Milken Family Foundation.

Erfle's school-to-work efforts started when he lined up five kids from Rapelje with local employers willing to let them learn on the job site. Their successful internships sparked the interest of other small schools, and Erfle helped launched similar efforts in Absarokee, Reed Point and, by now, 117 schools statewide. The concept continues to expand. Rural students now start thinking about career opportunities as early as elementary school. By high school, they participate in job shadows, write résumés, practice interviews, and create portfolios. Internship sites have ranged from television stations to public defenders' offices, from John Deere dealerships to accounting firms.

Employers have a profound effect on students, Erfle believes. "Kids know that teachers are preachers—we're always telling them the value of an education. But when it comes from an employer, they believe it. An employer can convince them in two or three words. It's coming from the real world."

Absarokee Principal Mike Mullowney nudged his students into school-to-work projects "because we could see the value of this. Not all our kids will go on to college. And those who are in college prep will benefit if given a chance to take what they're learning in the classroom and apply it."

Once again, the small scale of rural schools has made it easier to get the idea up and running. Mullowney came to Absarokee after years of teaching college in Billings, so he understands what's different about small towns. "We know our kids well here. We know their families. We know what they're like outside of school. We know their total environment," he says, "and we can monitor them closely." What's more, Erfle finds employers particularly keen on having rural students as interns. "There's an understanding that these kids have done chores; they tend to have a good work ethic. And there's no discipline problems because they're doing what they want to do." Even the rare student who has a bad experience "gains something from it," Erfle says. "They saved themselves a lot of time and money" pursuing the wrong dream.

Helping young people find their dreams is a recurring theme in Montana's small schools. The teachers and community members working so hard to build opportunities for their students understand that a small-town future isn't for everyone. But they also know that, without the fresh ideas and energy of today's students, their communities may not survive.

During her 21 years of teaching, Darlene Beck has heard more than a few students itching to leave their hometown by the end of high school. When she took four Heritage students to Washington, D.C., last year to meet with the Library of Congress, she watched them get their first taste of the big city. Coming from a town with no stoplights, a couple students were almost flattened by traffic. They were awed by historic architecture but overwhelmed to witness a mass march on the capital mall. Before the trip was over, Beck heard a refrain that still brings a smile to her face: "Get us back to Townsend, Montana!"

"They may leave for a while," she admits, "but I think we'll see many of them coming back."

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