One-room schools feel ‘like family’
In stone schools, brick buildings, log cabins, prefab wonders and clapboard schoolhouses, children growing up in the most remote corners of the state get an unusual family-like education.
Such students are profiled in the book Chasing Time: Last of the One-Room Schools in Montana.
When school began in fall
2013, the USA had about 200 one-room schools. Sixty-seven of those were in Montana, more than in any other state.
A century earlier, the country had 212,000 one-room schools teaching half of American students. (Now it’s less than
1/100th of 1% of elementary students.)
Photographers Keith Graham and Neil Chaput de Saintonge visited a third of the active one-room schoolhouses in Montana during the 2013-14 school year, a project that took them from the northwesternmost school in Yaak to the southeasternmost school in Alzada.
Their book recounts the important role the schools play in educating country children while serving as a community gathering place. The pair saw how hard teachers, aides, clerks, school board members and volunteers work to keep the schools going, despite unfavorable demographics.
“My hope is they don’t vanish altogether but remain a strong, viable presence where teachers provide one-on-one mentoring, where older students help the younger ones and where each school feels like family,” Graham wrote. “I cannot imagine Montana’s landscape without them.”
The book explores how students in the North Harlem Colony near Blaine County balance their public school and German school, which employs a Hutterite teacher from the colony. At German school, they learn language, heritage, culture and religion.
Carter County teacher Marjorie Scott had been at her post longer than any other oneroom school teacher — 22 years — when interviewed.
“You get to teach each student individually. Each one is an individual person, and you design your program grade per grade,” Scott said. “You don’t have to teach a first-grader just first-grade stuff. A first-grader can learn third-grade stuff if he is ready.”