Little school, big day: We follow along as Deerfield School teacher educates young Hutterite students in rural Montana

DENTON — The cows were mooing and the sun wasn't far above the Moccasin Mountains as seven students of Deerfield School gathered around the flagpole for the Pledge of Allegiance.

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America..."

In the day ahead, they will study the Constitution, take math tests, play soccer, sow wheat, make art and read.

As they said the pledge, the Deerfield students took part in a ritual performed from Florida to Alaska, but their school is unique.

All the students come from the Deerfield Hutterite Colony and share the last name Stahl. They've already done a half-hour of German school on the colony to study the Hutterite dialect.

And while a century ago, half of American students went to one-room schools, now less than 1/100th of 1 percent of elementary students do.

With 60 of the estimated 200 one-room schools in the country, Montana has more than any other state. They stretch from Yaak in northwest Montana, which had 11 students last year to Alzada in the southeast with three. About 40 percent of Montana's one-room schools are on Hutterite colonies. 

Deerfield School is one of four Fergus County schools serving Hutterite colonies, and it has its own school district instead of being a satellite school for another school.

The youngest of the 17 students at Deerfield School are preschoolers developing their English skills.  The 51 people in the Anabaptist religious colony live, farm and ranch communally.

“It’s just a different way of life. I still teach them the same things, reading, writing, math, social studies,” Deerfield teacher Traci Manseau said.

Since the state requires students to stay in school to 16, but the school is a K-8 school, the older students take online courses. Some parents weren't sure about having technology in the classroom, but it's a state requirement — and useful.

“Their tractors are run by computers. Their combines are run by computers,” she said. 

The main struggle is trying to get fast enough internet to the school. Some other schools are trying satellites and that maybe next for Deerfield. For now the internet is so slow it won't even do the speed test.

"I want them to be successful people. Even when they don't go off the colony, I still see success in the children I have had at the colony who are cooking in the kitchen, riding horses, rounding up cows, doing the branding, the farm work," she said. "I feel like I accomplished something with them when they were younger," she said.

Manseau commutes from Lewistown, a 25-mile drive past a missile silo, farms and farmhouse ruins, mule deer and the Judith River breaks. This was a beautiful morning, but the drive can be difficult-to-impossible on the worst winter days.

"I truly enjoy coming out to the school every morning," she said. "You might have a bad day but the next day you start off fresh.

"The kids get me up every morning, knowing what I do will help them in their future life," she said. "The drive gives me time to think about what I need to do for the day and on the way home to think about what I need to do differently, what I need to change."

Deerfield School was built in the 1940s and is divided into a classroom and a library/science room. When Manseau began teaching at Deerfield, she had three students. Unlike many shrinking rural schools, Deerfield has grown. 

Now that she's up to 17, the school is too small and an addition is in the works. Aide Kylee Clark works with the students on science and teaches the pre-schoolers.

As the day begins in the classroom, one of Manseau's surprise extra tasks is figuring out how to help Timothy, a third-grader, figure out how to do his schoolwork with a cast on. He broke his thumb playing over the weekend.

“Do you want to try to do left-handed?” she said, stopping at Timothy’s desk. He nodded. “We’ll figure something out.”

As Manseau started calendar time with the younger students, the older ones worked on math, but they also were distracted by the questions and singing from the calendar corner.

Students in multi-grade classrooms must learn selective hearing with all the different lessons going on. On the plus side, students come into lessons familiar with concepts they’ve heard older students learn the year before.

Manseau doesn't have colleagues a classroom away, but she also has freedom and flexibility — two reasons she's taught in rural schools her entire, award-winning career.

The students go on a field trip in the fall, and she’s taken them as far as Mount Rushmore, and also to the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, ZooMontana in Billings and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls.

“We get to do a lot more fun things than a typical town school. We get to take more field trips, more hands-on projects,” she said.

Formal parent-teacher conferences are redundant because she gets to know the parents having the same students year after year. They’re in frequent contact and supportive.

“If I say their kid was misbehaving today, they won’t be misbehaving tomorrow,” she said. "I know I can call them with anything, and I will get their help."

Throughout the day, Manseau breaks students into different groups for lessons at a small table. Meanwhile, she's fielding questions from the other students and correcting papers in every spare minute. There's no batch correcting when you have students in so many different grades.

Midmorning on this day saw the students outside as they finish math, some are gathered around the tailgate of Clark's pickup to plant wheat in cups as the start of a science lesson and others are playing on the swingset.

When Manseau switches places supervising the playground with Clark, the children are all speaking German, except the ones speaking with her. Some lean against her for hugs.

"Sometimes there's problems because I don't speak German, but I trust them," she says. "I know a few choice words. I know when they're talking about me."

They have a rule to speak English at school and especially in front of Traci and Kylee.

"I just say please speak English in front of us," Traci says.

There aren’t any off-colony kids who go, though one did for part of last year. There just aren’t any other little kids in the area, and the Lewistown and Denton school buses run to the valley.

When she sent the oldest children in for a session with Clark, the younger ones raced for the swings and started pumping their legs, aiming to be the highest. Two chains hanged without a seat, so one of the younger students is left out. He stood with Manseau, and they talked. She put an arm around his shoulders.

Manseau wears many hats throughout the day: teacher, yes, but also the school nurse and janitor and occasionally a "Mom" role.

The nearest town is Denton, pop. 250, and 15 miles away. But the nearest hospital is 30 minutes away. The colony allows women to have driver’s licenses, which helps in emergencies.

Back in her school, Manseau helped Timothy visualize subtraction using blocks. Other students watched the lesson or worked on their own workbooks.

“Does that make sense now?” she asked. He murmured in agreement. She moved onto another student who was trying to find a missing number in his problem.

"My students are very independent. I can give them a lesson and not that they'll necessarily stay on task the entire time, but they will do their work," she said.

"I just want to see them grow in every subject,” she added. “I have to stay growing with them."

When lunch time came, Deerfield students walk back to the colony cafeteria, where they eat communally with other colony members. Meanwhile, Manseau took out a Diet Coke and a yogurt. She got on her computer and strategized how to upgrade the classroom's technology.

"I feel very respected," she said. "If I have needs in my classroom, my school board is good about getting me what I need to teach  the children."

Then Manseau called the students back into the classroom and picked up the book "Clarice Bean spells trouble." They recapped what happened in the last chapter. Many of the students rocked their feet, but they were quiet and attentive. They read a lot, and the school goes into the library in Lewistown every month to check out books.

The students are interested in what’s relevant to life on the colony. They can skip the chapter in kindergarten on farm animals because they already know them all. They were riveted by the 2016 presidential election.

Manseau has been a teacher for 23 years, all of them in one-room schools. She started in Warrick in the Bear’s Paw Mountains, 32 rough miles east of Big Sandy. Her starting salary was $15,000 and free rent at the teacherage. Then she taught at Loma’s one-room school. Both have closed for lack of students since then. This position’s pay started low, too, but with more students came more funding and her salary is now comparable with teachers in Lewistown.

"We are growing, and they're going down (at other Fergus County rural schools). It's almost like there's a 10-year generation gap in a lot of the colonies," she said. "It goes in waves."

Manseau was part of a graduating class of 31 from Choteau High School. That’s tiny, and it's more than the entire school she’s in now.

"It's not what I learned in college, so the first year in a rural school was a real learning experience. You have to learn to juggle the different abilities quickly," she said.

With so many one-on-one lessons, kids don’t fall through the cracks here. She can keep moving along a child who learns fast so he's not sitting bored at his desk while the rest catch up. But there's no specialized Title 1 teacher to help a student who is struggling. Manseau has to find a way to reach them and find time to help them figure things out.

"You can help the strugglers a lot more when you work one-on-one," she said.

The next lessons of the day centered on the celebration of Constitution Day. Students read, the youngest with Manseau's help, and answered reading comprehension questions. They wrote essays and listened to the Star-Spangled Banner.

As they colored flags, Geena, and 8th grader, stopped by Danielle’s desk to encourage her as she wears out coloring stripes. 

That’s one of the benefits of a one-room school, Traci said. “The students really benefit, and the older students help the younger students quite a bit."

“Look at this, come here,” Taya said. She points out a weird flag in the book. Girls gather around and realize she’s drawn the 48-star not 50-star flag.

The patriotic songs continued until recess. Her aide done for the day, Manseau followed the students outside. Please, no jumping out of the swings.

They grabbed a soccer ball and cones. They didn’t take to basketball, but soccer is a hit. The students always play girls v. boys, but with boys injured, absent and too small, Austin was running up and down the field against five girls and a girl goalie. Caleb was the boy’s goalie. The ball went into the cow pasture once, and Caleb climbed through the barbed-wire fence to fetch it.

The last project of the days was an agamograph.

Manseau wrote the word on the marker board.

“It’s like we’re doing a four-dimensional project today,” she said.

After her explanation, they worked quietly, occasionally calling out to her with questions, and she went to their desks to help, though mostly she corrected papers

“This was my first try at an agamograph. If you like them we’ll do some different ones,” Manseau said.

“I can’t wait until I’m done because I don’t want to color anymore” Danielle said.

Tonya was the first done and she went to Manseau for help folding it. She demonstrated an accordion fold, and Tonya starts folding.

“There you go. Good. Keep folding to the end,” Manseau said.

“So much blue,” Caleb said.

“Oh my goodness,” Manseau said.

“Would you rather be writing?” she said.

They decided coloring is just fine. Taya liked her map book instead.

“All I ever ask is that you try your best,” Manseau said.

Tonya glued her essay with her agamograph. From one direction it read “We the people” over a flag and from the other it was a spangled star. Tonya took it over to show Sophie and Geena.

Timothy’s dad called and said he needed his help moving cows. Manseau sent him out. He reached the road as his dad pulled up in a pickup.

Tonya fetched the mail from the mailbox along the road. Caleb went outside to lower the flag and bring it in. Caleb wraps the flag around his shoulders so it doesn’t touch the ground as he unhooked it. He brought it inside and he and Austin folded it into a triangle. Other students gathered scrap paper for the scrap paper bin.

“See you tomorrow,” Manseau said as the students headed down the road.

As for her, she estimated she had at least 40 minutes of correcting.

“The math is what takes me the longest. It’s hard sometimes to wrap my brain around first-grade math and 8th-grade math at the same time,” she said.

And she had an online course to take tonight. She’d put it out of her mind but a reminder popped up.

She wishes people understood "how hard it is, truly every day, the job we do to educate our children. It's a tough thing we do,” she said. "It is exhausting."

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