Education: Way, Way Back to Basics

It bothered her not at all that Matt Hess, 6, read with his stuffed horse Floppy perched on his head. But Sevalstad permits no real classroom nonsense and gets little from ranch children raised to do chores right. Fifth and sixth graders give her a hand with the little ones. Said Erica Hess: "They ask me what words mean and what the directions in their work books say." Sevalstad takes pride in the Thanksgiving themes tacked to one wall. Wrote Vance Voldseth, age 10: "I am thankful for the Yamaha three-wheeler ... I am thankful for Fred [a calf] ... I am thankful for Mom and Dad."

To the surprise of many educators, the youngsters tend to score handsomely when they move on to high school. "Once there was a stigma attached to going to a one-room school, like you were a hick or something," says Ralph Kroon, field director of the Montana Rural Education Center at Western Montana College. "Now it's a back-to-basics phenomenon." Nowhere is the phenomenon more vital than in Nebraska, which has 300 public one-room schools, more than any other state, and where parents have collected 85,000 signatures for a 1986 referendum on stopping further consolidation.

Of course, all is not perfection in the one-room schoolhouse. November sport at Hanging Woman is a snow-swept game of croquet in a tiny school yard ringed by a wire fence that keeps out stray cattle but not, alas, bull snakes (Brown killed three of them earlier this year). At Lennep, science lab may be watching Alka-Seltzer tablets dissolve at varying speeds in glasses of cold, warm and hot water. Socially, too, youngsters nurtured in the gentle intimacy of a one roomer may tend at first to be loners, and lonely, when tossed into a big high school.

Nevertheless, most pupils and their parents would not trade the experience for anything. A particularly staunch supporter is Montana's Governor Ted Schwinden, himself a one-room alumnus. "I have nothing but good memories of it," he says. Another is Salund's Herbranson, who sounds like anything but today's unappreciated, burned-out teacher, despite a 1983 salary of $6,300, which the National Education Association certified as the nation's lowest (her wages have now soared to $6,800). "The feeling of being needed," she says, "that's something worthwhile. Many of my former students are married now, but we're still close. They still call me 'Teacher.'" --By Ezra Bowen. Reported by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Hanging Woman