Education: Way, Way Back to Basics

Morning on the high plains. Inside the red frame Hanging Woman school, 30 miles from the nearest paved road in the cattle country east of Sheridan, Wyo., Fifth-Grader Emily Myers, 10, sits at an upright piano practicing Silent Night for the Christmas pageant. Close by, a second grader starts her daily struggle with sums, while a fifth grader plays a geography game on a computer. Both seem oblivious to the plinking of the carol. Outside, snow is falling on waves of brown, sage-spotted hills.

At Salund elementary school in McLeod (pop. 50), N. Dak., Teacher Janice Herbranson, 51, has served breakfast to her three pupils. After morning lessons, she will cook lunch. At day's end, if the parents are away, she may take one of her charges home with her to spend the night. At the Lennep school near Montana's Crazy Mountains, Second-Grader Lee Cavender, 7, barges in to say that his sisters, twins who constitute the entire seventh grade, will be absent today. They turned 13 over the weekend, old enough for deer-hunting licenses, and, of course, their father has taken them shooting. With or without the twins, it is time for classes to begin. Erica Hess, 11, has the school-bell duty today. But the rope has broken, so she blows a whistle out the door. Her schoolmates troop in, put their snow boots in a neat row, then line up to pledge allegiance to the flag and sing My Country, 'Tis of Thee.

Unlike so many fossils of the frontier, hundreds of one-room public schools such as these not only survive but, in some places around the nation, are making a modest comeback in the face of a long-running drive to wipe them out. Between 1960 and 1982, the number of public one roomers in the U.S. shriveled from 24,000 to 798. Reason: a push for consolidated districts in which pupils would be bused to big central schools with presumably better learning opportunities. Recently, however, parents and educators have been working to save the one-room public school. Montana has opened three new ones this year, and nationally the total has risen to about 835--for some sound reasons. (Private one roomers, mainly sectarian, now total an estimated 1,000.)

Around a deeply rural place like Hanging Woman--so named, according to local legend, for a homesteader who used a noose to end her lonely life--school buses cannot get through the deep winter snow or spring mud. Therefore in 1981 the Kendrick Cattle Co., dominant ranchers in the area, provided the school building and a trailer to house Teacher Paula Brown, 28; the county came up with books, desks, the computer and Brown herself. "You have to take the school to the children if you can't bring them to the school," explains Audrey Cotherman, Wyoming's deputy state school superintendent.

Beyond such homely practicality lies a reawakened national concern for some faded educational verities, among them the close teacher-pupil contact that was much in evidence last week at Lennep. There, beneath pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Carol Sevalstad, 33, glided through the mellow buzz of a dozen children in six grades. When Lee Cavender tripped over his second-grade arithmetic game on Lennep's computer, Sevalstad untangled him. Then she turned to a Lilliputian table where two first graders were hard at their reading. "I want to spend a lot of time on reading with the first graders," she explained. "This is a critical age for them."