The letter arrived in the governor’s office in January, the request coming from students in a 104-year-old one-room school in one of the farthest reaches of Montana.
Would Steve Bullock, recently sworn in as Montana’s 24th governor, travel to the northwest corner of the state in May to serve as commencement speaker at McCormick School’s eighth-grade graduation?
Shelly Hosington, who teaches fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades at the school, had come up with the idea.
The letter-writing assignment itself wasn’t new.
“We do it every year,” Hosington says, “but it’s difficult. No one writes letters any more. All I hear is, ‘I don’t know who to write to, I don’t know what to say.’ ”
So this year, she told them who to write to, and gave them something specific to ask for. What they said was still up to them, and when the eighth-graders were done writing their individual letters, they combined what they felt was the best of each into one.
The entire eighth-grade class — all five of them — signed it. They mailed it off to Helena.
And that, frankly, is where Hosington figured the exercise would end.
“I was quite surprised when he said yes,” Hosington says.
Her surprise likely paled in comparison to the governor’s once he arrived at the remote little school on Friday afternoon.
You could hit every graduation ceremony, from kindergarten to college, in these United States this spring and we’ll bet you couldn’t remotely duplicate the one at McCormick School.
For starters, it would have to be at a one-room schoolhouse. McCormick school board chairman Terry Holmes — who graduated from eighth grade here 52 years ago, in 1961 – says he saw a recent statistic saying there are now fewer than 1,000 rural schools like this one left in America.
“It was something like 870,” Holmes says.
That narrows the field considerably. Then, thanks to Bullock, you’d need it to be another graduation ceremony featuring the governor of the state as commencement speaker.
That’s certainly possible. Bullock is far from the first governor to speak at a commencement exercise at a tiny school. Former Gov. Marc Racicot once delivered the eighth-grade commencement address to a graduating class of one in a little town north of Dillon called Glen.
However, you’ll have a hard time duplicating this:
You can see Idaho from the front steps of McCormick School, named for the family that deeded the land for it in 1909. The border is just a mile west of the little red schoolhouse; the mountains that provide the school its scenic setting are all in the neighboring state.
While the majority of McCormick School’s 24 K-8 students live in Montana and will eventually go to high school in Troy, nine of them — including all five graduating eighth-graders this year, it turned out — are Idaho residents.
So on May 17, Montana’s governor found himself delivering a commencement address 25 miles from the Canadian border to five eighth-graders from Moyie Springs, Idaho.
And that’s still not what made this so unique.
If Bullock, who was more than an hour late arriving for the ceremony, didn’t have time beforehand to figure out there was something special about this eighth-grade graduation, he quickly did when the five graduates followed him onto the school’s little stage to give their own graduation speeches.
Fifteen-year-old Karla Horton said it was only six years ago that she “lived behind four brick walls, wondering if I’d ever have a real family.”
Salvador Rodriguez, also 15, opened and closed his speech in his native Spanish.
In between, Rodriguez told the crowd, “I came here from Panama when I was 7, and I didn’t speak any English. I had to repeat kindergarten. But here I am!”
Denzel Tucker, 14, was born in the West African nation of Sierra Leone. He modeled his speech after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and after thanking his parents, teachers and Gov. Bullock, he thanked King as well.
“Without him,” Tucker explained to great laughter, “I would have been speechless.”
Yes, Hosington says, here in the forests of northwestern Montana, in this one-room schoolhouse, you’ll find a remarkably diverse student population. Students who arrived here from Guatemala, Panama, Sierra Leone — not to mention others born in states as far away as Louisiana, and adopted by local families.
“Salvador didn’t speak a word of English when he came here,” Hosington says. “We had another student who was bilingual, and an aide who spoke Spanish, and that helped us a lot.”
Tucker was another matter.
“He spoke in a Pidgin English that left us all totally lost,” she says. “He spoke a language unfamiliar to anyone here.”
These are not the types of stories you expect out of a one-room schoolhouse in rural Montana.
The graduation began with all 24 students not only reciting, but signing in sign language, the Pledge of Allegiance, and singing the National Anthem.
Later they sang the Montana state song — a song the ones from Idaho had never heard until they learned it for the graduation.
Bullock told them his job as their speaker wasn’t any different from one he held as a much younger man, when he drove a tour boat through the Gates of the Mountains north of Helena.
He wanted to give the tourists an experience they would remember, the governor said, and on this day, he wanted to say things that would stick with the young graduates.
“Figure out who the real heroes are in life,” he told them, and suggested it’s not rock stars, movie actors or people who can dunk a basketball.
“To me it’s police officers, highway patrolmen, teachers — people who make their communities safer, who do it without recognition and who do it every single day,” Bullock said.
Appreciate your parents, and your hometowns, he said. He remembered, when he graduated from high school, someone saying “happiness is Helena in my rearview mirror,” but give it time, Bullock said, and the place where you grow up will become special.
And, as they prepare to enter high school — the five will all attend Bonners Ferry High School in Idaho — and get their driver’s licenses, Bullock told them to buckle up, not only for their sakes but for their families.
“If the only thing you remember me telling you is to wear your seatbelts, I’ll have done OK today,” Bullock said.
No sooner was Bullock done than McCormick’s eighth-graders topped him, one by one, with speeches that elicited laughter and tears.
Fourteen-year-old Elijah Price, who attended the school for two years, talked about the wonder of knowing, very well, every single student you attend school with, from kindergarten on up.
“I’m the youngest of six children,” Price said, “but when I came here I was one of the older students, so that was a new experience for me.”
Thirteen-year-old Coral Tucker recalled how frightened she was when she arrived at McCormick as a kindergartner.
“In a one-room school, the only solitude you can find is in the bathroom,” she said. “I spent a lot of time in there. Now, I only frequent the bathroom when necessary.”
Horton, who was in an orphanage six years ago before being adopted, said it was unbelievably hard coming to America without knowing English.
“I went to four different schools,” Horton said, choking back tears. “McCormick made me feel like this school was made just for me.”
“You get all the benefits of a private school in a public school,” says Dawn Tucker, mother of Denzel and Coral, on why she chooses to drive her children to the Montana border every morning, where a school bus picks them up and brings them the rest of the way. “The kids do really well here — they’re never left behind, and they’re not pushed to go faster than they can. It’s very one-on-one.”
Holmes, the board chair, presented Bullock with a history of the little school written for McCormick’s centennial celebration four years ago, and signed by the five graduating eighth-graders.
Bullock accepted the gift, but said he was just happy he’d accepted the eighth-graders’ invitation to begin with.
“Believe me,” he told them, “you gave me more today than I’ve been given all week.”