One- Room School Snow

There is snow. The Kansas Woman tip-toed out with a yard stick and said the ground is under three inches of Georgia snow.

It was actually more sensational because the snow fell on a layer of ice and there was more ice on top of the snow so walking on crunchy snow didn’t feel or sound quite right.

That is a stingy snow fall compared to her home of Washington, Kansas. As of this writing they are slugging through nearly a foot of the stuff and not fazed by it.

She speculated that schools and businesses here would have a “snow day.” She was right. The whole place shut down.

People were slow to get on the highways but not because of a weather problem. It just seemed prudential to stay home and enjoy the snarled traffic on television rather than in person.

Her first eight years of schooling were in one room schools.

There were one-room schools everywhere, but in the media they seemed to be a feature of western states.

But on school snow days? “We didn’t have them,” she said about the Mount Pleasant school in particular where she started first grade. She and her brothers walked to school, rain, shine or snow.

“It was a mile and a half. I was there until April of my first grade. We were always out of school in early May.”

The teacher lived over a mile from the school and also walked. She arrived early to load and light the big pot bellied stove and get the school squared away and ready for the kids.

“There were eight grades, but there wasn’t always someone in every grade,” she recalled.

Her family moved and her next school was Hatch, only a quarter of a mile away.

Her brother David and a few other boys rode horses to school.

The Mount Pleasant and Hatch school buildings closed and were sold when the county consolidated schools and transported the students into town.

A local family bought the Mount Pleasant school, and I’m sure her grandfather bought the Hatch building and turned it into a shop.

Mid-westerners were frugal that way. They took advantage of surplus school buildings because they were well built and durable.

The only other one-room school building I know of is the “Frog Hollow” school, which was moved into town and became a residence.

I read how many thousands of dollars large systems spend per student and get nowhere.

The quality of an education couldn’t be measured by the number of rooms. Kids learned, and I’m not sure things have improved. We’ve learned more about teaching but maybe less about learning.

joenphillips@yahoo.com