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,
