Recently, third- and fourth-graders at Leyden’s Pearl Rhodes Elementary School engaged in a ritual memory transfer, as their elders came to share tales of learning “back in the ol’ days.”
Today’s youngsters were surprised to hear that there were no snow days back in the early 20th century. They learned that schools were heated with wood-burning stoves and that older students would arrive early to start heating the building. Students brought in drinking water, swept the floors, washed the blackboards and clapped felt erasers. Besides doing chores, older students helped teach the younger students, which strengthened everyone’s understanding of the material.
Similar rites of passage happen anywhere there’s a saved old one-room schoolhouse, which, around here, is practically everywhere: In Northfield, there’s an old schoolhouse, now a history museum, on Pine Street, to which students from the modern elementary school on Main Street troop in the spring to inspect its chalkboards, multi-grade classrooms, and rudimentary plumbing facilities. In East Charlemont, the “Little Red School” with a 116-year-long history of educating children has a place of honor on the National Register of Historic Places. Conway has its one-room Boyden Schoolhouse, adjacent to the Conway Grammar School and overseen by the Conway Historical Society. New Salem has its Old Academy building and the Swift River Valley Historical Society’s Prescott Museum has a restored classroom in its “village” of buildings. One of the most popular rooms in the Bernardston Historical Society Museum, housed in the former Powers Institute, recreates an old classroom where visitors can consult voluminous records of yearbooks, class photographs and ephemera from a proud learning tradition that ended with the construction of Pioneer Valley Regional School in 1956.
Most every town can point to one or more old schoolhouses — some restored, some repurposed — because we can hardly bear to part with them.
Thus, it’s no surprise that emotions run hot when it comes to closing a school. Warwick residents recently aired feelings on the potential school closing of Warwick Community School. Pastor Dan Dibble lamented, “We’re sending them down to be among a lot of kids who don’t know them, among a community that does not know them, and we’re doing that quickly. How does that advance the education of our children?”
Warwick Community School Principal Elizabeth Musgrave questioned a perceived assumption that small class sizes are less than optimal for children, adding that there are intangible benefits to small, mixed-grade classrooms like Warwick has – a sentiment that is borne out by many who either taught at or were educated in very small schools.
Megan Desmarais, principal of Northfield Elementary School, the purported destination of Warwick students, said, “If this happens, it’s not about closing this school and having Warwick’s kids go to Northfield. That’s a loss. If it happens, the conversation needs to be about how to join two communities in one building.”
Gail Healy, who retired as assistant superintendent of Pioneer Valley Regional School District in 2018 after 39 years in education, began her career as one of three teachers at Leyden Elementary School, where she worked directly with the school’s teaching principal, Pearl Rhodes, who had been a one-room schoolhouse teacher “forever,” Healy said. The building then was half its current size. The three teachers ate lunch with their students; Healy taught second-, third- and fourth-grade students. Working with Rhodes gave Healy a taste of what you could do in a small school as the principal, and Healy’s path subsequently broadened.
What will school look like in 50 years? Will all of Leyden’s students travel to Bernardston? Will all the district’s students travel to Turners Falls? Will students everywhere learn online through virtual classrooms? Will they all get a brain transfusion through little electrodes attached to their skulls?
One thing is sure: One day, 50 years hence, some of these Leyden schoolchildren will return to impart to a younger generation what it was like to go to Pearl Rhodes Elementary School in 2018. We wonder, what will they remember?