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Keeping the Old School Open

On a Sunday afternoon, my son, Silas, and I were putting up our last sign eight miles north of town, on the edge of U.S. Highway 1 where the road to the school crosses. Across the road lay cotton field.

“Where would the most people see the sign? There at the corner or along the highway?”

“I think here,” Silas said. “It stands out better.”

Silas, nine, struggled with his end of a four-by-eight sheet of plywood. We dropped the wood and Silas took up the posthole diggers, which were a good foot longer than he, and started grubbing a hole beyond the right-of-way in Dave Sellers’s clearcut.

I looked out at what was left of a forest. A year ago, this had been fifty acres of mature longleaf pine, with evidence even of red-cockaded woodpeckers, the endangered bird that nests in old-growth pines, especially longleaf. Now another precious piece of that diminished ecosystem was gone. Four or five of the trees with woodpecker nest cavities were saved. They were ugly and gnarled, stark against the sky. Around them the land was freshly disked, plowed into wide beds and replanted in rows of slash, a quick-growing “improved” pine.

Across the clearcut, a third of a mile away, I could see our rural, red-brick school that would soon no longer be a school if our county school board had its way. This time it was not forest we were trying to save.

“Don’t Waste Taxpayer Money,” our sign, the one my son was helping erect, said. “Vote No to School Closings.” It was two weeks before the county referendum.

What we learned soon after arriving home was that in order to fund a brand-new elementary school in the county seat, a school board almost a decade before had agreed to close two rural schools, one, Altamaha Elementary, eight miles north, the other, Fourth District Elementary, fifteen miles south. Those facilities were obsolete and hadn’t been maintained. Altamaha’s roof leaked and the windows needed replacing. Entrance ramps had deteriorated and classroom walls were faded and smudged. For years the threat of the closure loomed. Now the time had come to let go of them.

Altamaha is a rural school of about 250 children, named after the wide, chocolate-milk river a few miles away. We have enough students for about two classrooms per grade, up to fifth; Silas is in third.

Altamaha has special meaning to my family. My mother went to school there, as did most of our neighbors in Spring Branch Community. Uncle Percy was a fourth grader the year the school was built, 1936.

It’s a pretty little school. The main buildings are deep-red brick, flanked by white-painted additions: a cafeteria, an art room, a gymnasium, kindergarten mobile units, two playgrounds. The older children’s playground has a track and a baseball diamond, a set of swings and a long slide. The little ones have a playhouse and a merry-go-round.

The school has a particular deep-pine smell, the smell of local history, that overwhelms me every time I enter its wide dim hall. This is the same smell my mother studied in, a fragrance that transported her back to a wide-eyed, drag-footed little girl when she came to eat with Silas on Grandparents Day.

“It hasn’t changed a bit,” she said.

Of course it has, but what hasn’t altered is that the school defines the community. The teachers know students by name; they know their parents and grandparents. After school the front lot is Grand Central Station—clay instead of asphalt—with farmers in pickup trucks fetching grandchildren and mamas milling around their vans, talking, and the uncle who’s out of work retrieving his nephew and the nephew proud to be seen in his uncle’s lipstick-red Camaro. Not to mention children yelling out the windows of the three yellow buses that are loading.

Down the road at the corner, there’s a gas station and convenience store. The storekeeper, Terry, used to own a mastiff named Rocky, who loved to visit the school. When the dog showed up, the principal, Ms. Smith, would put him out and close the front door, then call Terry.

“He wants an education,” Terry would say.

The principal ousted Rocky again one day, but the pre-kindergarten class was on the playground, so the dog lingered with them, craving their delight. He discovered, by following some tickled third-graders to class, that even if the front doors were closed, the back ones might not be. The principal heard the ruckus, hauled Rocky out again, and called Terry. Before the owner arrived, Ms. Smith lettered a certificate of graduation for the dog, which she presented to Terry, who laughed until he cried.

On certain days, Johnny Jordan would come by the school peddling cabbages, cucumbers, onions, collards. Off-duty teachers would slip out to buy vegetables from the back of his truck, because Johnny piled them high, a heavy sack of carrots for a dollar. Johnny battled cancer a few years ago. He had no insurance, but teachers took up collections for him. Once he was well, he wrote each person who contributed a thank-you.

The school is not all good. Our state is one of the last bastions of corporal punishment, and early on I had to visit the principal over the matter. “I haven’t raised my son using physical punishment,” I told Ms. Smith. “Likely he will never be sent to your office. Should he be, however, he may not be hit.”

She nodded. She and I had a lot in common; she gardened and liked the outdoors. “We would never spank a child against a parent’s wishes. But most parents want their children spanked if they get in trouble. Sometimes the child gets another spanking at home.”

“They don’t understand there are better ways to parent,” I said tersely.

There are other matters of educational philosophy and practice that I disagree with. Field trips aren’t allowed, for reasons of safety. Class treats are mostly full of sugar and artificial colors. Sometimes bullying goes unnoticed or unchecked by adults; disputes are not so much resolved as the probable offenders punished. The curriculum lacks art and music. But the school is serious about education, and it is small, close-knit, and nearby. I don’t have to worry about my child there.

One day I read aloud to my nephew Carlin’s pre-kindergarten class a story about a king. I paused to explain that in our country we have a president instead of a king. “Does anybody know who the president is?” I asked.

An elfin boy raised his hand. “Ms. Smith?” he asked.

Then Carlin spoke up. “I know who the president is,” he said. “God.”

I want a school like Altamaha for Silas.

For the past century, rural places have steadily bled people, mostly to big cities, where they migrate to find work. The falling apart of rural communities intensified during World War II. To rebuild our war-broken country, an advertising campaign was launched to entice rural people away from the farms to the cities. Industrial capitalism needed a workforce, and what it promised in return was certain prosperity. Jobs were plentiful in the city, and factory labor was much easier than the hardscrabble life of a farm. To leave the farm was as much an act of patriotism as a service to self.

The ad campaign worked. There ensued a mass exodus of rural people to the cities, looking for a better life, and this movement has not stopped. Now, four-fifths of the people in the United States live in urban areas.

Across the country, you see evidence of this “hollowing out” of rural America—abandoned small farms, ghost towns, country stores with dark windows. Rural places have lost their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists, along with the children of these people. In the wake of this loss, rural locales have suffered a loss of imagination that has led to a cultural poverty.

Recent decades have witnessed a new agrarianism, defined by Eric T. Freyfogle in his anthology, The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life, as a reinvigoration of ties to the land. Evidence of this is found not only in the trickling resettlement of rural farmlands, but also in watershed restoration groups, native plant societies, and community-supported agriculture.

We do not want to confuse rural reinhabitation with urban sprawl. Being in a country place while remaining connected to a city for work and entertainment, and demanding urban amenities in the country, is not a rural life. This simply increases urban areas.

Even now, knowing that we must rebuild rural landscapes and communities, not by destroying more wild places to build homes but by moving into the abandoned places, I hear many people say, “I would die if I had to go back there. I couldn’t wait to leave. Nothing’s there.”

Appling is a large county, as much as sixty miles from top to bottom. Of the more than sixty rural schools that have existed in this county over the years, all are shut down now except two. A few of the wooden schoolhouses still stand. Although 40 percent of our county’s populace hasn’t finished high school, education is important to us. Closing the last outlying schools doesn’t sit well with us country people, who don’t want our children hauled to town to sit packed in overcrowded classrooms with a teacher who might or might not know them. We don’t want our small children riding school buses for more than three hours a day.

When we look at test scores, we find that children in country schools consistently score higher than in-town children. Students at smaller schools can visit the school library daily instead of weekly, and classroom teaching aids, such as computers, are more accessible. Altamaha’s parent organization raised over $10,000 one year to fund school events and awards.

What amazes me—really amazes me, because I am from this locality, where many of us are too polite to fight or too scared of ostracism to speak out—is that a group of people said no. They decided to fight the school closings and started to meet together to strategize what might be done to keep the schools open. One parent called the state Department of Education. Another called our state representative. Someone was present at every school board meeting, lobbying.

The school board refused to cooperate. Its hands were tied, the superintendent said: it had signed an agreement with the state that couldn’t be reversed. The board simply needed to carry out a duty—close the last rural schools.

Then someone learned that Statesboro, Georgia, had faced the same dilemma and had organized a referendum to oppose the forced closing of their school. Friends of Altamaha Elementary and Fourth District could do the same. What was needed were the signatures of 25 percent of the registered voters supporting a referendum on the issue.

The county had ten thousand voters, so that meant collecting twenty-five hundred signatures. Petitions passed from hand to hand, neighbor to neighbor. Parents stood outside the grocery store or left petitions at convenience stores and other businesses in town. In two months they had the signatures.

In May, three months before I had returned, at about the time the school board announced the closing date of Altamaha Elementary, I was sitting on a chilly metal folding chair in the big barn at the Land Institute near Salina, Kansas, along with about four hundred other people who were interested in sustainable agriculture and rural community. Early morning of the first day of the annual Prairie Festival, Jim Lentz was speaking.

Jim was superintendent of schools in Howard, South Dakota. That morning he talked about educational food for a starving rural America and began by quoting Paul Gruchow, who wrote in his book, Grass Roots: The Universe of Home, “We raise our most capable rural children from the beginning to expect that as soon as possible they will leave and that if they are at all successful, they will never return. We impose upon them, in effect, a kind of homelessness. The work of reviving rural communities will begin when we can imagine a rural future that makes a place for at least some of our best and brightest children, when they are welcome to be at home among us.”

Jim started there. “A school and community cannot be separate,” he said. “One survives in direct proportion to the other.” He said that we need to reverse the trend of loss in small towns and work to rebuild them, and he told how his schools were doing that. While Jim talked, nesting barn swallows flew among the rafters of the barn. The sun rose higher in the sky, dried the prairie dew on the bundleflower and wild rye, and warmed the listeners.

Jim told us that Howard, South Dakota, has a simple plan with two basic tenets:

1. Our community must meet the basic needs of the people who live here. (A community is only as well-off as its most destitute citizen.)

2. Our community must grow and develop only within its ecological limits, meaning the people must inhabit it in ways that sustain it for future generations.

I was spellbound. What Jim was saying made sense. To live in friendly association—with real neighbors—was possible. By the end of the talk, Jim’s voice was breaking—he’s that passionate about his work—and tears were flowing down my cheeks. I could go home and try for that kind of tribe.

A couple of months later, driving cross-country from Montana and Georgia bound, I purposely veered through Howard. Jim was away, so I’d been unable to reach him by telephone. I parked in front of the bakery, bought milk and a homemade eclair, and sat on the curb in the sunshine. Silas had flown to Vermont, where his dad lives and where I would pick him up.

Howard was neither big—I could see from one end to the other—nor bustling. A pair of girls ranged by on bicycles and said hello; people strayed in and out of the bank. After awhile I asked the baker for directions and found the high school. It was summer break and no one was likely to be about, but I wanted to witness Jim’s work, to see if there might be a visible difference between this small town and those that were disappearing.

The school looked normal enough: long and brick, somnolent except for the football team practicing on the side lawn. The front door was unlocked and I entered the quiet hall. The light was dim and my footsteps made no sound. A sign directed me to the Rural Resource Room Jim had mentioned in his talk, a kind of local museum in which volunteers put together exhibits on the grain harvest or history of the town. Local groups meet at the long board table.

“Visitors must walk through the school to get to the Resource Room,” Jim had said, “which is as it should be.” I entered an unlit, deeply quiet room. The current exhibit featured rural schools in the county that had long since closed. Students had collected old primers, chalk holders, teachers’ grade books, antique desks, and black-and-white photographs of the buildings. Near the door were two guest books to sign, one for retired teachers, one for the rest of us.

Here, I thought, is the point where Howard, South Dakota, is turning around. Here’s where the new begins. It begins by honoring the past, armed with new information about how we can live better, more sustainable lives. We can reinhabit our rural farmlands.

At the rear of the school grounds I found the market garden and school orchard, rows of apples and pears, planted so that students, who paid themselves for their work and then deposited the profits into a scholarship fund, could sell produce to the local grocer. The strawberries needed picking.

By the time Silas and I arrived home, the signatures for the referendum had been assembled. I don’t like to remember the next couple of months—how busy they were and how scared I was that we would lose. I volunteered at the school on Fridays, teaching art to third graders. The children drew posters that said, “Keep Our Schools Open. Please Vote Nov. 4.” We hung them in businesses downtown. Sometimes we would return to stores where we had obtained permission to post signs and find the merchants had removed them. The owner of the tractor company wouldn’t let us erect a sign at the edge of his land, saying the issue was too controversial, that he had customers on both sides. People here are seldom vocal about their leanings, and it was hard to tell which direction political winds were blowing.

A group calling themselves Concerned Taxpayers organized to fight for school closure. Their arguments—that consolidation meant progress, that country schoolchildren were getting special treatment not afforded town children, and that keeping the schools open would cost taxpayers more money, especially for facility repairs—appeared in the weekly newspaper. The owner of the radio station was one of the concerned taxpayers, and he frequently aired his editorial views, couched as unbiased facts: “What You Should Know,” he called his editorials, then proceeded to list reasons to close the rural schools.

To make matters worse, the wording that would appear on the ballot had purposely been made confusing. The ballot read: “Do you agree to the school board’s decision to close the two rural schools?” People would have to vote “no” to keep the schools open, opposing the school board’s decision to close them.

We used Parent-Teacher Organization money to print bumper stickers. We bought full-page ads in the paper, and radio ads. We set up a save-our-schools booth at school carnivals. One night I manned the booth at the county fair. I stood in the flow of people wearing a VOTE NO button, clutching a sign that asked people to favor rural schools: VOTE NO TO ABANDONED FACILITIES. VOTE NO TO TEACHER LAYOFFS. VOTE NO TO CROWDED CLASSROOMS.

I had come back home to be part of a community, and I didn’t want, at this crucial time, to lose a vital element of it. Sending Silas to town school was contrary to every reason I had for being in that place at all.

We divvied up voter registration rolls and began calling people to ask them to keep the schools open. As many people seemed to be for as against. We had a chance, but it was only because—and this is the glory of it—a group of us were meeting and working together, having fun. One evening a week we met in Neil Eunice’s crop insurance office, small groups of seven or eight, hashing things over, planning. We decided to throw a party on election night whether we won or lost.

Election day found me stuffing fliers under windshield wipers in parking lots. About noon, I spoke to an elderly woman walking to her car.

“Did you vote today?” I asked her. She leaned tiredly against the car and said she was sick, that she wanted to vote but that she’d been to the doctor and was going home.

“I’m trying to keep the schools open,” I said.

“That’s the way I planned on voting,” she said. “If we close those schools we’ll have to build a new one in town.”

“We need your vote badly,” I said to her. We had seven hours to go until the polling doors closed. “I’ll drive you to the polls.”

“I just don’t feel like it,” she said. I pointed out my truck and said I’d bring her back to her car if she would vote.

“OK,” she said, and I ran to bring the truck around.

The voting precinct was located in the rear of the chamber of commerce, and it was empty except for five polltakers, who sat inside the small room gossiping, one crocheting a white afghan. They helped Mrs. Dixon through the protocol and into the booth, where she vanished behind a gray curtain. “There’s only one thing to vote on?” she called.

“That’s right,” one of the women said.

“I’m eighty-seven years old,” Mrs. Dixon told me on the drive back. Her mind was excellent, no part of it flaccid; only her body was failing. “I hope to be able to stay out of a nursing home.”

I was posted at one of the town precincts, in the Jaycee Building, at seven that evening, when the door was locked. Ten minutes later I had the precinct’s results in hand: yes beat no nearly two to one: 247 to 141. Close the schools.

When I came out the door, bad news in hand, it was dark, the sun an orange stain in the sky above the shadowy fairgrounds. I’d never been able to go to the fair as a child, and not two months before, Silas and I had gone for the first time. By now the carnival had packed up and departed for another town, but I remembered its excitement—lights, candy apples, rides, music you could hear at the courthouse. People carried big stuffed tigers and a woman in battered heels guessed weights and ages. I was a girl again that night, screaming at the top of the ferris wheel, eating cotton candy. We took Silas’s friend Caleb with us, and he ran ahead and got on the roller coaster alone. When we caught up, we stood at the picket fence watching him ride, a frightened wonder on his face as he held on, a look that left Silas and me doubled over the waist-high fence laughing.

That evening flashed through my mind as I stepped outside the Jaycee Building. I craved a candy apple. Double against. How could we win, even if this was only one precinct? I stood by the car and took a deep breath, looking up at a newborn moon in the sky, the stars following Venus out. Suddenly I was weary.

If Silas has to go to town school, we’ll make it work, I thought. I’ll volunteer a lot. We’ll make it work.

I folded into the truck and headed back to Eunice Crop Insurance. We’d tacked a huge chart on the wall for recording precinct reports, and I made the first mark on it: 247 to 141. Another parent, Rod, had the other town precinct, and he rushed in. “Double against,” he said. Surely we’d lost.

When results from the outlying precincts began to arrive, the number of noes began to creep toward the number of yeses, then to equal it, and then to pass it, and by the time our reporters in all voting districts had called in, the figures had reversed, unbelievably double in favor of keeping the schools open.

We had won!

People began to arrive at the insurance company, hugging and slapping each other on the back. We brought out homemade cookies, chips and dip, sausages, punch. Teachers drove up. Children ran around gobbling chocolate chip cookies. The two principals whose jobs had been in question walked in. I called the Savannah paper and the television station.

Because we live in a community that is, with few exceptions, Christian and highly devout, Neil, whose wife teaches at Fourth District, asked everyone to squeeze close and form a circle. The ring was two or three people thick. “We have fought hard to keep our schools open, and we have won,” he said. “It is time to thank God for hearing our prayers.”

The next day we paid the owner of the radio station to air our gratitude. “Yesterday was a great day for Appling County. Together we decided that our children and their education are important to us and that we will do the best thing possible to preserve the quality of education throughout the county. Today, Friends of Altamaha and Fourth District Schools want to thank you sincerely for your support and your vote. Without the attention and concern voters across the county gave this matter, a bad decision might have quietly been made, and our children would have been the ones to suffer. With that in mind, we have, for a minute, to appreciate the democratic process in this country—that it still works, that we still have a voice, a say, a vote. . . .”

When our school turned sixty, we collected recipes for an anniversary cookbook and planned a celebration. The fight to save our school had not made us complacent but more aware than ever of how lucky we and our children are. On a Saturday morning, in ninety-five-degree heat, about fifty parents and teachers showed up to build an outdoor classroom, complete with a split-rail fence. None of us had ever built a fence the traditional way before, but together, with a lot of joking and redoing, we figured it out.

My mother attended rural Altamaha School.