COUNTIES WITH MOST SCHOOL DISTRICTS
FANSHAWE — Somebody has taped a list of numbers, more than 50 pages long, in doublespaced, large-point type, to the front of the lockers. And now half a dozen grade-school girls, straining on their tiptoes to reach the top pages, are listening to the superintendent call out the numbers one-by-one and racing each other to find the number he calls and cross it off the list with a Magic Marker or a pink highlighter.
“Hey, no fair,” one complains as a taller girl elbows her out of the way. “I haven’t gotten to do any.”
So the older girl stops, picks up the younger one and lets her cross out the number. This, after all, is a friendly competition.
The Fanshawe Public School District, one of the smallest districts in the state, sold more than 700 tickets to this annual raffle, which is more than 3.5 tickets for every man, woman and child who lives in the town. So pretty much everybody has shown up for the chance to win one of several gift baskets or the grand prize of a zero-turn riding lawn mower. Or, actually, a lot of residents seem most excited about a .22-caliber rifle and a Remington shotgun that are up for grabs.
The simplest, quickest way to do the raffle would be to hand out a prize for the first 10 or 12 numbers drawn, until the prizes run out. But then, this whole dinner would be over in half an hour and that wouldn’t give people time to finish off heaping plates of barbecue. So the superintendent puts every raffle ticket in a bigger spinner and will keep drawing number after number until the spinner is empty. An hour into it, with the crowd going back for second helpings of brisket or taking a look at the potluck dessert table, he is only halfway through the numbers.
“Yes, there’s probably an easier way of doing things,” says Casey Osterhout, a local dentist who has served on the Fanshawe school board for three years. But he’s not talking about the raffle.
He means the school district itself, with only 76 students this spring from pre-K through eighth grade. A 10-minute bus ride would take the students to a larger school in Wister, east of Fanshawe on U.S. 270. Or another 10 minutes could take all the students from Fanshawe and Wister to an even larger school in Poteau.
“But that’s not what we want,” Osterhout says. “We like our school and we want to keep it.”
With school consolidation a perennial issue in the state, Le Flore County in eastern Oklahoma would be prime target for eliminating several districts.
Le Flore has 17 separate school administrations, the same number as Tulsa County despite having roughly one-twelfths the population.
“There’s an argument to made for consolidation, and I understand that,” Osterhout says, standing in the school building’s foyer, which is decorated with class photos dating to the 1950s. The old black-and-white photos have a dozen or more students in them. The most recent color photos have five, six or sometimes 10 students in them.
“But I can tell you,” Osterhout says, “there’s also a good argument for a small school district like this.”
In fact, people at the raffle make at least three distinct arguments for the school, starting with the benefit of small class sizes.
“You want to talk about individual attention?” Osterhout says. “In some schools, the teachers can’t even remember every student’s name. I mean even in their own classes. But here, a school board member knows every student. Nobody is overlooked.”
Secondly, with state dol- lars allocated per pupil, closing a small school like Fanshawe wouldn’t necessarily save much money, just change where it is spent, says Doug Horne, who’s president of the Fanshawe school board.
“Everything is as tight as it can be,” he says. “I can’t see how we could be any more efficient, even though the state Legislature may not see it that way.”
County Adair Caddo Canadian Cherokee Comanche Creek Grady Le Flore McCurtain Muskogee Oklahoma Osage Pittsburg Pottawatomie Seminole Sequoyah Tulsa 10 11 10 12 10 14 12 17 13 10 23 (8 are charter/virtual) 12 14 14 10 12 17 (3 are charters)