Page 14 - Flathead Beacon // 5.27.2015

14 | MAY 27, 2015 COVER FLATHEADBEACON.COM
IN A CLASS
OF HIS OWN
Kindergartner celebrates graduation as lone student at last remaining one-room schoolhouse in Flathead County
BY TRISTAN SCOTT PHOTOS BY GREG LINDSTROM
W hen kindergartner Case Metzler dons his cap and gown at Pleasant Valley School’s graduation cer- emony on June 9, he’ll celebrate a
milestone all unto his own.
Case, whose sixth birthday falls just a few days
before the ceremony, attends the only one-room schoolhouse remaining in Flathead County. And while the entire rural community will turn out for a potluck party to observe the occasion, school of- ficials will award just one diploma – Metzler’s.
He’s been the lone student at Pleasant Valley since December, when the diminutive, red school- house lost 75 percent of its student body, a total of three students, one of whom, an eighth-grade girl, rode her horse to school each morning.
“We are going to have a graduation of one, and it will be a very big celebration,” Janet Monk, a school board member and Pleasant Valley School alumnus, said.
With an annual budget of $62,000 to run the school, keeping it open to educate one student isn’t sustainable.
“If you divide $62,000 by one that is $62,000,” Monk said. “We had three other students, but two were siblings and they went back to Libby and the eighth-grader transferred to Marion School.”
But in rural Montana, and especially the ranching community of Pleasant Valley, the tran- sient nature of the working ranches means that the student population is often in flux. By the time the other students left last winter, money for the 2015-16 budget had already been allocated.
School officials are expecting additional stu- dents in the fall, ensuring the school will remain open, and on any given day a new batch of kids might turn up at the door.
“It fluctuates a lot,” said Pleasant Valley School teacher Richelle Sheets, the school’s only instructor. “I could show up one day and there might be five kids outside the school because their families just moved here. It’s happened before.”
And while every student is entitled to a pub- lic education – and at Pleasant Valley, by all ac- counts, they receive a stellar one – the school has
at times been a challenge for the Flathead County school district.
“Things will change, but if they don’t change we can’t be open year after year with one stu- dent,” Monk said. “We all have nostalgia for the school but that can’t happen.”
If anyone has nostalgia for Pleasant Valley School, it’s Monk, whose family history at the school runs deep. Her mother began teaching at Pleasant Valley in 1927 after graduating from Flathead High School. Driving to the school at the beginning of the school year in her father’s Ford Model T, the 18-year-old got the car stuck on Gun- sight Pass and had to spend the night alone until a rancher could drag her out of the mud.
“She was a town girl and she wasn’t used to spending the night out in the cold, dark moun- tains,” said Monk, who was her mother’s pupil for five years.
Her aunt, Donna Monk, has owned land in the area for 62 years, and served on the Pleasant Val- ley School Board for four decades. In the 1930s, her husband Bob attended his junior high years at Pleasant Valley, and the couple’s four children fol- lowed suit.
Bolstered by the ranching and logging com- munity, the student population sometimes climbed into the 20s.
Established in 1904, Pleasant Valley is locat- ed about 20 miles northwest of Marion near the Lincoln-Flathead County line. It takes almost an hour to travel the mostly two-lane gravel road from Marion to the small schoolhouse and teach- er’s residence, and more than an hour from Ka- lispell.
A dwindling part of American heritage, one- room schools were once a prominent part of the rural landscape, used to serve sprawling ranch and farm communities. Today, their utility is be- coming a relic of the past as the country’s popu- lation converges on more urban centers, or better transportation allows students to commute.
There are fewer than 400 operational one- room schoolhouses in the country, and Montana has the most in the nation at 62, boasting at least