Of all the off-year elections coming up this week, the one that has my attention is the big vote in Jewell County, Kansas. That’s where the citizens of Burr Oak (pop. 265) and Mankato (pop. 975) will decide whether or not Burr Oak loses its school. If that happens, and it probably will, Burr Oak will die. Dozens are expected to flock to the polls. The election has everyone on the edge of their front-porch rockers.
If this were an isolated phenomenon, the fate of Burr Oak probably wouldn’t merit your attention, even though it certainly merits mine: It’s a town that has survived most of my cousins, where my grandfather worked in the hardware, and where my uncle Gerald, a hero to all of us and a veteran of Iwo Jima, still helps the Legion lead the big Memorial Day tribute to all his fallen friends.
But there are thousands of little towns scattered all across America’s reddest states and almost all of them are literally biting the dust. Their enemies: distant state education bureaucrats, modern demographics, liberal social programs–and a long reliance on the government to guarantee their survival. Like the farms that surround them, America’s agricultural communities have been sustained for years by an expensive system of subsidies that amount to regional welfare, and as a consequence they have been robbed of the spirit of energetic enterprise that not much more than a century ago first broke the sod around here and littered this landscape with schools. At the beginning of the last century, there were more than 9,000 little wooden schoolhouses on the Kansas part of the prairie. On the curriculum: Reading, writing, arithmetic, and Latin, including Virgil–no doubt for the cattle-breeding tips in the Georgics. Today, most American kids think that’s where the Braves play ball.
So what went wrong? I was thumbing through a history of Kansas, reading about the astonishing optimism of the people who came to these empty plains just over a century ago and saw fields of dreams and cities of the future. The railroad was the anticipated source of all abundance: Speculative communities popped up everywhere along the railway lines, just as virtual communities popped up everywhere a century later, along T1 lines. Neither model was quite right. By the 1890s, the economy had collapsed and the population of most midwestern hamlets, where the paint was hardly dry, began to recede. Many vanished–usually after going through a cycle that started with the arrival of the railroad and ended with the closing of a schoolhouse.
Little Blue Atolls in the Vast Red Sea
The schools that remained came eventually to mirror the schools in bigger towns and cities. Today, school administrations are little blue atolls in the vast red sea. I asked Larry Lysell, the superintendent of the Belleville school district, how many of the 301 school superintendents in Kansas were conservatives. He named two. The schools in Kansas, Nebraska and elsewhere in the Midwest have been inflated by the decades-long liberal impulse to make them into government facilities that provide an endless array of social services and loopy programs, none of which have beans to do with math and reading but all of which bloat the cost of “education” without actually educating anybody. While local efforts are often made to infuse schools with the excellence good teachers in small classrooms can provide, modern schools built to satisfy the whims of city and suburban folk just can’t be supported by small towns like Burr Oak. The result: schools are forced to close, usually on the grounds of financial expediency, and towns die.
The reactions of smallvilles in distress is strikingly similar. Just a few days ago, the school board of charming Cuba, Kansas (pop. 230–”Czech us out!”), in Republic County, met in their community center to negotiate the death of their town at the hands of their bigger neighbor, Belleville (pop. 2240). Of course, inevitably, a few years down the road, small nearby cities, like Concordia (pop. 5700) and Beloit (pop. 4000) will gobble up all those Jewell and Republic County students–despite the fact that we’re constantly being told that when it comes to “the children,” money shouldn’t matter, and that virtually every study ever done shows that sending a kid from a smaller school to a larger one invariably results in lower performance. One Kansan told me that his giant company is always on the lookout for kids who have attended small rural schools, because, he says, “they’re better students, and we like their values.” So good schools will close to make bigger schools that aren’t as good, test results will slip, more taxes will be raised and even bigger schools will be built. According to a report in the Salina Journal, all the state will save from closing its 100 smallest districts is less than 2 percent of Kansas’ total education budget.
Do these little municipal deaths have to take place? Nobody seems to know. At one point in the Cuba-Belleville meeting, one of Cuba’s school-board members turned to the guy next to him: “Do we have any alternatives?” Shrugs all around. The wrong time to ask, maybe.
Smallville Alternatives
Ironically, there are alternatives, but the search for them will have to start on Main Street. Every little village is different. Most roll over. A few fight back. When tiny Tipton, Kansas (pop. 225) was told their primary school would be closed a couple of years ago, the town’s citizens got together and built their own small, modern school in 47 days for $50,000. Today the kids are doing better than most students elsewhere in Kansas and a few new families have moved into town.
The state’s new conservative commissioner of education, Bob Corkins, explained to me that reconsidering the state’s charter-school laws and other policies might stimulate municipal imaginations and help small towns do what Tipton did and come up with a model for the kind of small, rural school that can work. “We should try to…give them choices and alternatives,” he told me. The goal, he said, should be to find something “that isn’t like these schools we have today.”
In this, he seems to have found an unexpected ally in one of his chief nemeses, Mark Tallman, the advocacy director of the Kansas Association of School Boards. “There may be alternatives,” Tallman agreed. “But…let’s see if [the school boards] can think outside the box.”
Republican legislators seem ready to help. “I think there are a number of us open to finding new solutions,” said state Rep. Kathe Decker, who chairs the legislature’s education committee, and the majority leader of the Kansas house, Clay Aurand of tiny Courtland, told me he’s got some ideas. The problem was nobody was asking him what they were. “You’d think they’d want the help,” he said.
When I asked Genna M. Hurd, the co-director of the Kansas Center for Community Economic Development at the University of Kansas and an expert in rural communities, what made the difference between a town that lived and a town that died, I expected her to give me the old saw about how it takes a school to save a town. Instead, she answered simply, “Local leadership and vision.”
Add a dose of old-fashioned optimism and Hurd is right, of course. In a place where the view is of the curving edge of the earth, vision should be the last thing you’d have to worry about. But the thing to watch this week, if you’re looking for a snapshot of the future of rural America, is that Burr Oak turnout.
–Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese. He is presently working on a book about midwestern politics