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TYLERTON, Md. - The listing
of fourth-grade activities in
“Tylerton Times,” the
mimeographed monthly
newsletter of the Tylerton School,
sounds familiar to anyone who has
ever been around an elementary
school: “4th grade is doing column
addition with four-digit numbers,
is subtracting 3-digit numbers, has
a reading test Tues.”
There is a difference, though: At
Tylerton School, the fourth grade
consists only of 10-year-old Melissa
Tull. That’s all.
Welcome to Tylerton School, a
modem one-room school on Smith
Island in Chesapeake Bay, where
this year’s student body has 10
pupils and the faculty consists of a
teacher/principal and a teacher’s
aide.
Country Stalwart
One-room, one-teacher schools
once were the backbone of
education in rural America. In the
second decade of this century, half
of the nation’s schoolchildren were
enrolled in about 212,000 one-room
schools, and as recently as the
1947-48 school year, just over 75,000
one-teacher schools remained.
But increased urbanization and
suburbanization, the widespread
belief that large consolidated
schools could do a better job, and
improved transportation combined
to decimate one-teacher schools.
By the 1982-83 school year, only 798
remained, leading the federal
Office of Educational Research
and Improvement to conclude:
“The one-teacher school is
disappearing from America.”
Since then, however, the num
bers have begun to turn around, if
only slightly. As of the fall of 1984,
a study for Brigham Young
University’s Center for the Study
of Rural Education found 837 one
teacher public schools. Like many
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is a star in one-room school
other institutions whose demise
has been prematurely mourned,
the one-room school refuses to die.
In part, this is a matter of
geography. Most surviving one
room schools are in places like
Tylerton, sparsely populated and
isolated from other schools.
Most such schools are in the
wide-open spaces of the West, like
Cherry County, Neb., with 6,700
residents, 800 grade schoolers, and
20 one-room schools. In 1982-83,
only six states had 30 or more one
teacher schools, and those six
contained 81 percent of the
national total: Nebraska, by far
the leader with 354; Montana,
South Dakota, California, Alaska,
and Wyoming. By comparison,
only eight states east of the
Mississippi River had any
remaining one-teacher schools, 51
in all.
In mythology and in reality,
Americans venerated the little
one-room schoolhouse, which
usually was not red. Andrew
Gulliford, who directed a major
study of American country
schools, writes that the
schoolhouse “was the social center
of the community, especially in
remote areas. All groups met
there.”
“Rural people knew, however
instinctively, that to lose their
school meant to lose the focus of
their community,” Gulliford notes.
Not Necessarily Nice
Not that the one-room school was
necessarily such a wonderful
place. Fred E.H. Schroeder, a
professor at the University of
Minnesota, Duluth, wrote a few
years ago of the Sunny Crest
School in Wisconsin, where he
began his teaching career in 1952:
“111-lighted by three widely
separated windows on each side,
the crowded room reeked of
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kerosene, oil-mopped floors, chalk
dust, perspiration, damp wool, and
chlorine bleach that was poured
into the pit of the attached privy at
the rate of a gallon a day.”
Still, a one-room schoolhouse has
qualities that many Americans are
turning to today. Schroeder cites
“curricular integration, the
personal attention to each pupil,
the responsiveness to community
values.” Ralph Smith, dean of
Brigham Young University’s
school of education, says that these
remain in today’s one-room
schools.
“Many of these schools now have
all the modern characteristics an
urban school would have: com
puters, television, field trips,
speakers, and the like,” Smith
says. “Plus they have peer
tutoring, the upper grades
teaching the lower, individualized
instruction, and so on. I think
they’re better now than they ever
have been.”
Some of the best qualities of one
room schools can be seen here in
Tylerton, a community of about 150
residents separated from the other
350 residents of Smith Island by a
two-mile channel, and from the
Maryland mainland by Tangier
Sound.
Smith Islanders make their
living by harvesting oysters and
crabs from the fertile waters that
surround them. They are a hardy,
independent lot, mostly named
Evans, Tyler, Marshall, and
Bradshaw, and they care about
their schools; the current Tylerton
School was built in 1974, replacing
an older one-room facility dating to
1919.
Posters And Projectors
The school is 50 feet long, 22 feet
wide. Light streams through the
windows, and the walls are
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The entire student body and faculty of Tylerton School
10 pupils, a teacher/principal, and a teacher's aide gather
in the playground behind the school. One-room schools
continue to serve youngsters in isolated communities such as
Tylerton, Md., located on Smith Island in the Chesapeake
Bay.
covered with drawings, to the mainland. Her school nms
photographs, posters, inspirational from kindergarten through sixth
mottoes, and the work of pupils, grade; seventh- and eighth-
There are motion-picture and slide graders go to junior high in Ewell,
projectors, a large television set, a across the channel,
photocopier, a mimeograph There are no kindergartners this
machine. A partition divides the year, but there are two first
area used mostly by upper-grade ' graders and two second-graders,
children from that used by mostly taught by the aide, “Miss
primary-grade pupils. Evelyn” Tyler; one fourth-grader;
Presiding over the school is Alice three fifth-graders; and two sixth-
Evans, “Miss Alice,” a main- graders. Many activities, such as
island native who arrives each reports on visits to elderly or ailing
morning on the school boat that (Turn to Pate bizi
takes Smith Island high schoolers 8
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