Reading, writing, dodging bison

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

By Sam Petri

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Teton County School District has three so-called outlying schools. Moran, Kelly and Alta Elementary are all small, with less than 50 students each learning in multiple-grade classroom.

Each school has a Head Teacher who teaches the oldest grades, and is in charge of day-to-day operations but is not, except at Alta, the administrator.

These unique schools benefit from their size – they enjoy a high level of parent participation, for example, as well as student interaction – but they also trace their challenges. Some students live in such isolation, they have to snowmobile to their car before driving to the bus stop. But judging from the Head Teachers, all of whom have been at their respective posts for over 20 years, there are plenty of perks.

Moran Elementary
In Moran the sky is big but the school is small. Currently, 14 children attend kindergarten through fifth grade, kids of Park Service workers and Buffalo Valley ranchers. There are two teachers: Caroline Ryan, who teachers kindergarten, first and second graders in one classroom, and Head Teacher Amanda Pinkerton, who instructs third, fourth and fifth graders in another classroom.

Moran Elementary doesn’t quite fit the mythic image of the two-room schoolhouse on the frontier, as it also has a gym, a library, a playground and Internet access.
Still, grouping different aged kids together in the classroom is out of the ordinary, in 2007. The school is as intimate as a family, and children learn and play together across age and grade boundaries.

“You hear everything before you have to do it,” said Pinkerton. “You aspire to be one of those kids with the big books.”

Living in a rural area and going to a small school, the children are less affected by popular culture. Ryan and Pinkerton noted that their kids are better at inventing their own games. On the playground all 14 students sometime play a game that they invented where they mimic different types of dogs. It’s unclear exactly how the game works, but both teachers say it has been going on for at least two years.
“The fifth graders here are different from the fifth graders in town,” said Pinkerton.

Kelly Elementary
Kelly Elementary has existed since 1896, when Kelly was first settled. The kindergarten through fifth grade school sits right on the edge of Grand Teton National Park, where bison often wander up to the windows.

With three full-time teachers taking on  two grades each, the 39-student school is larger than Moran Elementary but still distinctly rural in character. Head Teacher Dan Thomasma has been at the school 25 years. He began teaching there with his parents, getting his feet wet teaching grades K-2 alongside his father, the noted children’s author Ken Thomasma. After his father retired. Dan headed up the lower grades while his mother Bobbi taught grades three, four, five and six (there was a sixth grade back then). Later, Dan took over the upper grades. Bobbi still volunteers.

“There’s a lot of good things to it,” Thomasma said of multi-grade classrooms. “The real benefit is having the kids for two years. You really get to know them and their learning style and it makes your differentiation in teaching a lot easier.”

Only one bus is needed to service Kelly Elementary. Thomasma has set up a chart for the kids to record the wildlife they observe according to the changing seasons, as a way to incorporate their natural surroundings into the classroom.

When Kelly kids matriculate to Jackson Hole Middle School, they can be wide-eyed and a little overwhelmed, Thomasma said. “When they walk in there, it’s a big place. But they come back and say everything looks really really small [here]. You hear from teachers that they are hard workers, that they know how to work independently, are organized and cooperative.”

Alta Elementary
The Town of Alta is in Wyoming but you’ve got to go through Idaho to reach it. A lot of what happens in Teton Valley, Idaho, therefore, affects Alta. Right now, rapid development is taking place down the hill in the Town of Driggs, as well as a looming Targhee expansion up the hill. This is changing the rural character of the 50-student, kindergarten through sixth grade school.

Head Teacher and Administrator Bill Hunt still sees the school as constantly improving.
“When I first came 28 years ago here, we were really coming into our own here,” said Hunt, who saw very little of the school district administrators back then. “For the most part we were very isolated back in those days.”

Although Alta isn’t as isolated as it used to be, the school is still small with two grades per classroom. Hunt sees this as an advantage.

“Just yesterday I had a fifth grader – we were talking about something in math – and I said, ‘You probably haven’t heard this yet, or been taught this yet,’ and she said, ‘Yeah I remember that.’ And I asked, ‘Where did you learn that?’ And she said, ‘When I was in third grade, I overheard the fourth graders learning it.’ So she picked it up by osmosis.”
When the kids at Alta School graduate from sixth grade, they have the option of going to middle school in Driggs or of being driven to Jackson Hole. Last year, all 10 sixth graders went to Driggs, but that’s not always the case, so Alta teachers  prepare their students for both possibilities.

Although development is happening all around Alta, Hunt still sees a difference in the students at all of the outlying schools. “It’s interesting,” he said. “When you get the outlying kids together, tt’s a different feel. These kids are a little more protected, a little more innocent, not quite as worldly as the kids you see coming from the Jackson school.”
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Reading, writing, dodging bison | Planet JH News Article: Moran Elementary School

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