This story (declining population due to low birthrate and migrating recent college grads) is repeated throughout the country. To do something about it we need to add population to these small towns. Seems to me that should not be difficult. We have at the borders a mass of emigrants that want to build a life in this country and we are jailing them and taking away their children. Why are we not opening some of these small towns to immigrants? People will argue they will take away my job at the cheese factory but that factory is going to close anyway if there is not new blood. New populations will do just what new populations have always done in this country, have babies, find simple work and live frugally until they build a community.
I have heard the guy that is chief of staff to Trump saying 'these immigrates are not the type we need, they have no education, they are acclimated to poverty and drugs' but that is not how we should judge them. It is their children that will be educated, that will have ambition to make a better living, that will end the Rx drug problems. We just have to get the parents a simple place to make a meager living.
Even in small dying towns those opportunities exist, cutting grass for seniors that can't walk any more, being home health aid, opening ethnic stores and restaurants, etc. Why do we not put our organizational expertise to work instead of just paying big dollars for immigrant jails?
9
I live in a middle class suburban town. Our population is dwindling. The reason? Housing is so expensive that the children grow into adults and have to move out to afford housing. We never did have a high school and at the height of our population about 15 to 20 years ago, when housing was still affordable, we built a new middle school with a big theater. Now there are not enough students to keep everything going. Communities change. It is not something new. These people are like the ones who cling to working in a coal mine because their fathers and grandfathers did rather than recognize that coal, like papyrus, is a product of the past. People need to adapt. There is also no guarantee on anything...certainly no guarantee that your decisions are always going to be correct and that the rest of us have to foot the bill to make those decisions right.
2
Our community, Martha, Oklahoma, lost its school some 20 years ago. By that time, it had fallen from a complete K-12 school to a 1-8 school. Since the school closed, students have been bussed to 4 other school districts in the county, the nearest being 7 miles away. Also, the town has lost its two churches, Methodist and Baptist, and the last remaining business, a gas station/convenience store. The only business left (since I retired and closed my pipe organ business) is the cotton gin, and they had a fire two months ago which burned down about a dozen houses.
Small towns are a thing of the past. The only thing left of rural America are farms dotted around the countryside.
This is so very sad. What it will lead to can only be imagined.
1
" You can't have 4 teachers for 40 kids".
Here in Vermont, the ratio is 1 teacher for every 4 kids.
2
Keep electing con men who steal from the public purse, then expect to keep closing schools. This is the future no tax, but spend, but not on education Trump is bringing to small towns near you. Yet another reason to move to the coasts...
5
I have always felt that local control of our public schools creates most public school financial problems as well as curriculum problems. An alternative system of financial support of public schools should be considered.
School taxes are voted for locally. Why should one expect education in low income communities to flourish?
1
It seems tragic to lose the local elementary school or a K-12 school. But when total enrollment for the K-12 school is 320 students, how can you keep it open? My HS graduating class had over 400 students. I am glad the article mentions music, the arts, extracurricular activities and AP classes. Schools need these things to give students opportunities. I would have voted to keep a Pre-K through 2nd grade close to home!!!! Maybe there will be some shifts in towns and the outlying towns will move closer to the more populated ones. I understand folks want their own small town and local stores and schools, but that is not always realistic. And yes, young people do move on to areas with more opportunities and a hype lifestyle and you cannot really blame them. This is not an unfamiliar situation in many rural places in the US, but also other countries. Rolling hills of countryside (or flat desserts) sparsely populated with farms.
My oldest son was the last kindergarten class in this school. When the votes were held, it was mainly voted down because Spring Green has the most people and they couldn't care less about the other schools in the district. Also, there was a lot of behind closed doors things that were going on that no one knew about until it was too late. From what I heard the Arena school had the most students for their grades. Businesses have wanted to be in this area but the village president turns them away. It's almost like he wants the town to close.
2
Interesting that the views expressed are those of the adults, who appear more motivated by nostalgia for times past or fear of what will become of the community (and their home prices).
What about the views of the students? They can largely be inferred by what they want for their future and for that of their offspring: greater class selection, better equipment, more diverse and healthy sports programs. They are voting with their feet, though admittedly, there’s little to hold them even if they wanted to stay.
So, for whom would the schools be kept open?
1
How about instead of deporting all of those hard-working immigrants we asked them to settle in the small towns in the Midwest, thereby keeping them alive?
11
Although I grew up in Milwaukee and have lived in Virginia for 20 years, I know the area well (rolling hills, lots of turkeys). The problem is that Wisconsin is far too inward looking. They have gutted their state's education system in the name of saving a few tax dollars. They have gutted UW-Madison, which used to be one of the finest public universities in the country. There is very little to be excited about. These small towns are just a harbinger of a spreading decay. Foxcon will not save Wisconsin. Education will, and there is no appetite for making this difficult investments. The fact that Walker is even running for a third term tells you all you need to know. Sad.
14
A long article about rural American schools closing due to de-population of their communities, but not one mention of the words "immigrant" or "immigration" as a solution to stop the population hemorrhaging in these areas. If immigrants from decades past originally built these communities, new immigrants can revitalize them. The presence of more people plus the vitality immigrants bring, over time, will encourage more investment from inside and outside of these communities.
7
The story writers ignore this: Arena is just 30 miles from central Madison, WI, a growing "creative class" and university city of 640,000 - one of the most desirable cities in the US. The town is just 15 miles from the western suburbs. Arena is not a poor rural community in the middle of nowhere. History shows that such small towns become distant suburbs in time. Its also in the Wisconsin Hill Country, which is noted for superb cycling roads and quaint farms in the wooded hills.
8
Nostalgia is worse than drugs.
1
There are many smaller schools closing throughout the country. A few years ago it was Neshkoro, a tiny hamlet of 400. The school closed and the few kids there were were shipped off to Westfield or Wautoma.
Sad to lose a school but what about losing an entire town? What kind of draw is there these days to live in rural America, in run down towns whose main street is mostly vacant storefronts?
Are small towns even necessary anymore? Gas prices are higher as are groceries. The car mechanics and builders still command good prices but who can truly afford these since most who seem to live in our smaller towns have mediocre jobs at best and poor salaries?
The times are a-changin', that's a given, but how many people are willing to change with them?
1
Why does any one move to or away from anywhere? Usually for a job or to retire. The rural Midwest has no jobs and a cold desolate prairie setting could make for a challenging retirement. there doesn't seem to be an obvious reason that the population would increase in the Midwest for the foreseeable future.
Furthermore, not too far away in North Dakota the truck drivers make $140,000/yr in the shale boom. Regrettably, no one will ever move to Arena again.
Articles like this are why I cherish the NYT
10
I've taught at both of these schools, so it hurts, but this story has been in play for decades. Many small rural schools closed before these and many more will close in the coming years.
5
The swath of states from Oklahoma up to North Dakota have the same number of frontier counties today, almost the third decade of the 21st century, as they did at the end of the 19th century, a frontier county defined as 6 or fewer people per sq. mi. density.
This is the high cost of nostalgia that robs peoples' hope, especially the hope of the nation's youth.
Between the electoral college, the US Senate and gerry mandered districts, the people described here have way too much of an over sized influence in our national debate, as the increasingly revealed flaws in our Constitution become manifest.
12
A reflection on reality.
The concepts and desires of the huge swaths of rural America that got enough votes to swing the Electoral College to elect President Trump believe that these peaceful and non-threatening lifestyles are much better than LA and Chicago and NYC, since most of the noticeable news are things like gang violence and criminal Democrats and illegal immigrants and ... just being made to feel uncomfortable by Trump's self-centred approach to HIM providing peace and justice and THE American Way.
But times change.
And all the tariffs on steel and aluminum against Canada will not reverse this.
2
All of this caused by trade deals backed by Establishment Republicans and Democrats that have increased rural poverty, deindustrialized the heartland, and made bankers and senior executives rich.
This is a man-made disaster inflicted on hard-working people by malefactors of great wealth and the politicians who toady to them. It is DISGUSTING. None of this had to happen.
100% of all the new income since 2007 went to the top 1% That means every percent of GDP growth, whether from trade or anything else. NONE of it went to the middle and working classes. And it has been the same story for 30 years. And even though all of the new income went to the rich, both parties cut the taxes of the rich, while cutting schools, universities and basic services.
3
This is a good argument for why schools should be funded at the state level and not locally, IMHO. But that would of course depend on whether or not the state cares about the education of all students or just those in the well off districts.
8
Gordon thinks these changes have
happened overnight. Guess what,
Gordon—I’ve watched the small
northwest Indiana town I was born
in decline over many decades. I’ve
also watched nearby towns thrive
and grow. They did so by welcoming immigrants. Immigrants
open businesses. Immigrants work
hard and want their children to
succeed. These towns also welcome “outsiders”, such as
people of color and gay couples who come from Chicago to enjoy
a break from the city. The funny thing is many of the citizens of
these thriving towns are christians.
They’re just not the kind of christians who judge others. They
also work hard and try mightily to love their neighbors as themselves.
That little town I was born in loves
guns and whiteness and some strange god I don’t recognize.
Fear is what they use to keep it that way.
16
The indiscriminate budget cuts by the state also compounded the problem for the schools and left fewer choices for the teachers and parents. Most of the good teachers and young families just moved where the schools were better funded
2
I grew up in a town in western Massachusetts of 850 people in the 1960's and 70's, and my town closed their last remaining school (K thru 5th grade) in 1975. So, I know firsthand what happens to towns when they close their last grade school. The town dies. A town can get away with closing their high school or even the middle school, but one a town no longer has a grade school its game over. Young families will not move into a town that has no grade school. And young couples move away after they begin their families. They will not put their 1st grader on a bus to a school 20 miles away. In time my home town became a childless community where you are today considered young if you are under the age of 50, and a once Norman Rockwell bucolic vibrant tiny town goes dark at it is reabsorbed by the woods.
6
If ever there was a case for Federal government intervention and support - surely this is it. Education is not a privilege - it's right...it's also essential for a nation's well being and future. While American tertiary education is arguably the best in the world - getting there would seem to be a rocky road. Betsy DeVos (or any future Secretary of Education) should be in Wisconsin waving the flag supporting education for all - so where is she? The GOP notion that funding community schooling is one-step away from Soviet-style collectivism or socialism is so 1970's. We shouldn't be surprised I suppose - not when things as simple as pencils and paper being paid for out of a teacher's pocket - are regarded as normal. The wealthiest nation on Earth can surely afford to be more generous when it comes to educational essentials...like writing materials, teacher's salaries and indeed schools.
4
Rural America has been in a state of quiet crisis for the past 20 years, declining economic development, and population and rising drug addiction in the form of opiates and methamphetamines.
The irony here is with the exception of declining population many of the economic problems that are plaguing rural America are also plaguing inner-cities. It's rather unfortunate that racial and political barriers prevent these two segments of the American population from seeing that they share a common plight and prevent them from working together to find solutions.
2
Why do you think the GOP promotes racism and xenaphobia? They dont want populations of different areas to realize they suffer from similar problems caused by the same people. If you dont see the source of the problem, you wont work with others to try to change the political landscape that encourages or allows the causes of the problems. All you do is blame the "others" for causing the problems.
2
This is my hometown: My parents live just north of Spring Green, and there are no kids left in their neighborhood. None. There used to be big farm families--five, six, seven, or even eight children per household. Now there are emptynesters. I was shocked to read they had reached class sizes of 160 recently. My graduating class started with 120 students, and about 100 of us graduated together.
6
Omer's (Omer, Michigan) school just closed it's doors as well. My stepfather's family of 6 kids graduated from this school. Very sad that it closed.
1
What this article proves is that the country needs innovative lawmakers who see the future and the economy that will lead it. Renewable energy, buy local, grow micro economies, parks tourism, specialized skills and education. Also, immigration keeps renewing the population with hardworking earnest people eager to reinvent themselves.
Instead, governors like Walker and Republican nostalgia candidates like Trump are elected. they sow fear instead of joy in creativity and possibilities.
Invest in a liberal, progressive political system with your vote. Uncle Sam needs you to say yes to optimism and investment in the future. Tell Washington and state capitals that you want to go bravely into tomorrow; not sit on the sidelines while the rest of the world rolls on.
14
In France small farmers are subsidized. Rural life in France is steady state, populated and well maintained. Small, sustainable, and stable, with farms at the most 135 acres on average. We can have this in the USA if we have the sustained courage to bring it about.
Xtfr
5
When rural towns become too small to have their own schools, they join with other rural towns to form consolidated school districts.
1
Yes. Hardly a remarkable occurrence. It’s been happening for decades in North Dakota. Kids in small rural schools also take classes over interactive TV networks and the internet and routinely drive 20 miles to play a sport with a neighboring school’s team.
1
Arggh. Another so-called human-interest story where we learn far more about strangers whom we will never hear of again than we want to know.
1
Two quotes struck me. One, “At times it can pit the so-called country folks against the village or city folks,” Mr. Kaukl said. “Over the last 10 years, it’s unfortunately become a way of life.” It is perpetuated, in part, by Walker. To override the Democrat's votes, Walker has pitted the rural residence against the so-called liberal elites of Madison and the minority voters in Milwaukee. The GOP has created the idea that rural voters are sending money to support those living in cities, and it often gets repeated by rural voters even if the data isn't there.
The other, “You can’t have four teachers for 40 kids,” he said. Well, you can if that's what you prioritize. I'm not saying that's the best ratio but it does reflect current values.
Immigration would revitalize many communities here in Wisconsin, but it isn't going to happen. There is too much resistance to outsiders. As I was told by some sympathetic people when I moved to a particular Wisconsin city, they weren't accepted because their parents hadn't grown up here. And those sympathetic people had grown up in this city!
3
It's a bit hard to take America in the 21st Century seriously. A dying rural community whose only elementary school tries to stay afloat by invoking the magic word "STEM" and securing a $350k grant for ipads and laptops despite there being no high-speed internet. Add to that the "consultants" which came with it, and you've got another example of how collective delusion has gripped American life.
I'm curious how proponents of saving Arena's school think that producing STEM H.S. graduates will stanch the out-migration of young people from the community. If Johnny has been primed for a college Engineering degree, he'll only ever be coming back for the holidays.
My grandmother died last year at the age of 94. She grew up on a farm in central Illinois owned by the family since before the Civil War. They didn't get electricity until the mid 30s. She hated it. She told me all she wanted to do was get off the farm and she pitied her sisters who couldn't or wouldn't. At the age of 17, saddled with a child and a lousy husband, she settled in Chicago and never looked back. It's been like this for as long as humans have had cities.
9
this was not about money.
No mater how much money here is no way you can educate children in a school if you have almost none of them going.
If the total population is under 900 and most of them are older and do not have school aged children then the total number of children who go to school in this town must be under 100.
That would mean fewer than 14 children in a class and only 7 classes and probably less in the future if that trends continues .
School isn't only about education.
It's also about socialization and that can't be done in a school that has fewer than 100 students in the entire school.
Even if they had all the money in the world they should close this school because of the above.
The children will benefit
So much finger pointing at the rural townies as if they brought this upon themselves because of poor voting choices. Democrats turned their backs on rural America a long time ago to embrace corporate capitalism and to concentrate on urban voters. In fact, democrats are now openly hostile and condescending towards rural America- just scan the comments here. Hillary couldn't even be bothered to campaign in WI. If Dems want to win votes in these places, they need to stand up for workers, family farms, and small business. Don't see it happening though.
4
The wonderful small town life in rural communities vanish, much of what we have always valued in what we mean by community. It is the consequence of being by a society whose bottom line is market forces. Jobs have been exported, human life marginalized as a commodity in the market is all that matters. It is a version of social darwinist Ayn Rand with its Corporate Jesus overlay.
2
Nine miles is not that far, and you can get education in your home or in small groups over the internet.
1
Many of the comments here are well meaning but mostly impractical suggestions for how people in underpopulated and under-resourced areas might maintain a public school system. Other comments criticize the choices that some people have made in politicians and political philosophies. While almost all these comments are points well taken, they miss an unavoidable larger issue.
Rural America is in decline, in population and resources. This decline is abetted by social and political policies, but mainly is part of a larger demographic shift that is affecting the whole world. The decline affects education, business, medical care, and pretty much everything else. Richard Florida has written about the very same phenomenon in Sweden. What is different there is the existence of a much larger safety net for individuals were caught up in such a decline.
We would benefit from considering the example of others, and develop support and safety nets ourselves for individual people who are caught up in an inevitable demographic change. As it is, our policy seems to be everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost.
14
Nearly two years ago, I had to make the choice between voting yes or no on a school funding referendum in Madison, WI. I was curious why anyone pro-education (even childless, like myself) in Madison would not support the schools, so I did my research. The reasoning goes: Gov Walker can tout lowering taxes all he wants, but the fact is schools are getting less money because of it; only the communities that step up in a referendum can make up that funding difference.
Well, in Madison, we are paying more because we voted yes, even with lower state taxes (and yes there's tons of nuance because of changes in property values and wages increasing, so I'm aware it's not a direct relationship, and yes, in Madison, our population is growing.)
In Arena, we see what happens when state taxes are lowered (a win for the Governor who gets to campaign on how he 'saved' the people money) but the community does not step up to make up the difference.
I'm not worried about my neighborhood elementary school being shuttered. Then again, I don't live in Arena.
9
Arena should put in a bid now for the Scott Walker / Donald Trump / Kim-Jong-un Museum and Water Park.
How about some cheese and a Lite with that?
3
Don't be mean. You are making a lot of ignorant assumptions about people's political views. These are very kind people. They did not cause the global population migration to cities. They did not destroy the US social safety net. It's historically been a very progressive part of the state. I doubt it will be again, though, with Times readers gloating about people's pain and making "dumb cheesehead yokel" comments like this one. Heck, I'm to the left of the left, and you are alienating me.
3
A school district on the border in Western Pennsylvania did not have enough students, so they ended up attending school in Ohio. Then someone in the "school district" decided to create a cyber school. After a few years, it was discovered that the founder of the cyber school had stolen millions of dollars from the school. Maybe it should been called embezzle district. I always wonder if the founder woke up in the morning, and thought about what he could steal from the students that day.
7
Well at least they kept the terrorists, i meant immigrants from coming to town. Congratulations, this is the future of %MAGA.
My own guess is that Kansas/Wisconsin/Ohio will over the next 20 years lose population and become economically irrelevant to the USA (think Portugal or Hungary).
6
Who needs school? We have our guns, our god and our president, we are set to succeed in a flat world.
15
WOW! Are you a bigot of the first order!
CHange that to
"we have our rap music, drugs and our president (former), we are set to succeed in the global world"
ANd your sort will go NUTS screaming "racism"
But then it takes a bigot to know a bigot doesn't it?
3
This is happening all over the Midwest. Farms sell and are consolidated, support jobs and work disappear, like farm equipment and repair. The shops close, the schools consolidate, finally the grocery store closes. Usually the last to go is the gas station and the tavern. Houses are abandoned because they can't sell. Nothing is coming in to replace it all unless you have a tourism attraction - lakes, skiing, whatever, (which is seasonal), or some other asset like mining.
Last year we took a little day trip from northern Wisconsin into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We left early thinking we would have breakfast on the road. It took most of the day to find an open restaurant, finally, in L'Anse, where we had a very late lunch. There was nothing out there.
12
Politicians in Washington work hard to cut taxes, or so they say. So for years they have whittled away at education funding so when they campaign they can say "look what I did!" All they did was pass the burden down to the states who play the same game. The last stop is the local taxpayers. Eventually they say enough is enough, and that is what happened to Arena.
We could fix this by demanding that politicians everywhere show that any tax saving measures they pass are not just cans kicked down the road. Is it really a tax saving if the taxpayers just have to pay it on another tax bill?
5
The quote in here: "You can't have 4 teachers for 40 students" - why not? That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would help students succeed. It's ridiculous that we've come to expect classes to have 30-40 students each, and now come to believe that anything else is inefficient.
4
It’s all about money. The ritzy private schools around here have a 10:1 student to teacher ratio with mostly easy kids to teach and get $20-25k/year tuition (plus what donors contribute). The public schools in rich suburbs have a 15-20:1 ratio, and the city schools make do with 30:1 or worse for a needy population. Everybody knows that student to teacher ratio matters, but most people don’t want to put the money where their mouth‘s are.
America: better and better for fewer and fewer.
3
THere is an opportunity in all of this, conversion of many of these small rural communities to affordable retirement centers.
4
This is not political problem , but strictly demographic and financial problem but as usual people with agendas push bad choices
1) Detroit had a changing demographics with loosing population. unions and government did not want to close any schools/lay off administrators or teachers. we all know what happened to Detroit
https://www.watchdog.org/michigan/reasons-for-detroit-s-historic-failure...
things change and governments need to make hard decisions not political decisions
2
There are so many immigrant families who want to come into the US to get a better life for themselves.
These schools are closing because there are no kids coming in.
Why can't we put these two things together? Seems logical to me.
5
And the immigrants (typically illiterate or poorly educated) do WHAT in a town that has no need of workers?
Live on welfare?
3
What will they do now that they are without a school? Hopefully they will rethink their naivete in supporting trump and his drones. This is what you get, Wisconsin.
2
From the article:
"Over five school years, ending with the spring of 2016, 71 percent of rural districts in the state saw a drop in enrollment, said Sarah Kemp, a school demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison."
That decline lands squarely in the Obama administration.
4
Gee what an example you are of tolerance and NEVER being a bigot that makes assumptions about people....
Oh yeah - and a hypocrite who does not practice what they preach
1
I live in a rural Wisconsin town, the problem isn’t just the declining enrollment, we are paying for upkeep of a big old building built for a warehousing industrial model of education.
It is difficult to ask us seniors who don’t have kids in the district to pay more in property taxes and state taxes, when harsher winters and hotter summers have led to soaring utility bills. Our income is not increasing. Everyone can see that schooling now consists of students sitting at computers and IPads, and unfortunately the smaller building needed for this type of schooling hasn’t been built in time.
5
The GOP loves to say the best, richest, most powerful country on the planet... yet we can't afford to keep schools open. Meanwhile China is investing heavily in education and infrastructure so that by 2025 they can be the world leader in AI and high tech, and the Republican's response, to ask China to please not do that. Really!!! How about they get over their day dream of no taxes, everyone on their own rhetoric and realize that we can only get ahead by working together and yes paying taxes for the common good of all Americans.
5
Tragic, why don't we experiment with Remote School like they do in vast expanses of Australia. Answer: no vision. While the rest of the world is thinking of connected cities, solar power and industries of the future, we are obsessed with resuscitating the coal industry and abortion. Why not take our minds off below the waist issues and deal with real problems like this? How can a country be great if we are all illiterate and ill?
5
Yet the availability of high speed internet is severely lacking and sporadically scattered.
If you don't have cable, then you may be one of the very few with telephone company provided internet services.
When AT&T dropped the very few DSL offerings it had, if you were beyond the limited reach of where cable had been strung, you were out of luck. One would thing that old Ma Bell with their sophistication would have provided this intermediate speed connections, especially when little Ma and Pa phone companies were able to hook up their subscribers within a few hours. It's this kind of variability that keeps innovative ideas like remote cyber schools from even being an option. Of course not having physical interaction and developing social skills is yet another concern.
5
"“We basically have a bank and a cheese factory,” Ms. Schmid said. "
That can't export to Canada, that shuts out US diary products with 270% tariffs
They might still have their school, could the Wisconsin dairy industry compete on equal footing
" Canada, when it comes to dairy, acts like China when it comes to trade,They’re unfair. They put up barriers. They treat us bad.”
Charles E Schumer, D (NY) leader of the Democratic Party in the US Senate
1
Since when was education about money ! I am baffled and sad. What is the future for us.. yes there is closure in inner city schools but they do not have to bus teh kids for hours to theier new school.
I believe money is taking away our future amid the great and continuous entertainment at the WH with no value for the people.
2
We live in a town of 500. The grade school closed long ago. Life Goes On.
2
U.S. citizens hate to pay for anything - except for their own personal aggrandizement. They especially don't like to pay for their neighbors kids education. As a society, we are doomed...
8
Not true.
When this school is closed the children who would have went there will be gong someplace where the cost will be picked up by their neighbors,
1
Not true. This US citizen does not like supporting dependents such as Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, S. Korea, Japan. Cut out welfare, food stamps, housing vouchers other give aways and you'll have LOTS of money left for schools.
Just when I’m convinced America is full to capacity and certainly has no more accomodaton, especially for immigrants and refugees, all these spare rooms pop up. Me thinks that perhaps the No Vacancy sign is blinking only because there’s a short in the circuit somewhere. This country doesn’t need politicians, it needs a good electrician.
13
All the parents have to do is start their own school. It would be much better and less expensive. You would not have to have "diversity" coordinators, layers and layers of bureaucrats in Madison and all the other waste public schools have.
2
The parents should start their own hospital, too. No need for doctors or nurses and all the other waste professional hospitals have. Let Jimmy's dad do your gall bladder surgery.
I'd love to see parents teaching AP Physics or Digital Circuit Design or Computer Science.
So tired of people who disrespect expertise. I'm hearing of people applying for attorney positions with no J.D. They argue that they know just as much as an attorney without going to law school because they watch Law & Order.
6
Isn't this what immigrants are supposed to help out with?
When your native population ages and dwindles, you either
absorb new people or become a rural large retirement community.
And what new people you might ask? Funny thing that. Since natives (aka citizens) are not so interested in rural life in Wisconsin, would it not be a terrific idea to organize immigrants (aka non citizens) to move in, become
citizens and repeat the American story all over again?
Exactly how dense have we become not to adopt this enthusiastically and en masse all across rural parts of the country?
7
Well, at least a few children will be saved from being murdered there by a school shooter, so that is a good thing at least.
1
But they voted for Trump! This must be fake news!
6
We have read about immigrants, documented and undocumented coming to small towns in the Midwest and invigorating them, opening businesses, becoming civic minded, and then being arrested and deported by ICE, leaving those towns poor and failing again.
Rural communities are very conservative, and vote Republican, this time they voted themselves into failing, while worshiping a liar, swindler, adulterer for president. This is the result of the GOP and those parsimonious conservatives.
16
This has been going on for decades—closing community elementary schools in favor of consolidation. What does it do? It removes a central point of interest. It moves children away from family. It takes impressionable kids and throws them into a pool—distantly removed from interested parental eyes. It does some good things: probably a more diverse group of children introducing “others” as normal; more $ money means more equipment that provides a wider, richer education.
A compromise: leave pre-K-4 kids in smaller community schools where parents have easy access. Let kids get comfortable in school before shipping them off. Maybe let those schools have blended classes where new things are introduced but repetition forms a solid foundation. Kids help kids when they struggle.
By fifth grade, those kids are ready for the kind of school that has the latest technology and methods.
1
A couple of problems with that though are that this is Wisconsin. If kids were sent to a larger county school at fifth grade, they would not be getting schools with the latest technology or methods, and there would be no increase in diversity at all.
I recently moved back home to extremely rural northeast Montana after nearly 40 years away. The numbers of people in the towns and students in the schools are different, much smaller than those in Wisconsin mentioned in this article, but the trend is very much the same. When I was growing up, my hometown had 100 people in it. There are now 17. My high school was tiny, 34 students in grades 9-12 my senior year. It closed a decade ago. The county seat, where I now live, had 1500 people in it when I was a boy. There are now 1000. In the 1920s-1930s, there were about 5,000-6,000 people in the entire county. There are now around 1700. As mentioned in the article, there are many fewer small family farms and far more large family/corporate farms. With crop prices remaining fairly static for many decades and the price of farm machinery reaching staggering heights, the only way for farm to get and/or stay profitable is through economies of scale. You go big or go home, so to speak. Most people just go away, unfortunately. We're moving inexorably toward a world in which the small or mid-sized family farm is a historical artifact, one more likely to be studied in history books than lived on. And the towns and villages that helped support all those outlying farms appear to be disappearing as well. It's part of progress, but the country is losing something, too, in its race to a more urban way of life. And I hope those things will be pondered by the historians as well.
7
Raymond, note my post immediately below. What makes Montana and other parts of the Northwest plus much of Alaska different from other parts of the U.S. is that the population is do sparse we still must support one-room or very small schools; you don't have the option of busing kids down the road. But here again, especially with one-room schools, we need to consider the option of providing a much-improved model for our kids through a shift to personalized learning enabled by new, powerful technology, and we need to develop and refine this nationwide.
5
Yup, that sounds like a good idea. I neglected to mention that I did, indeed, go to one of those one-room schoolhouses myself. Did Grades 1-4 at the Butte Creek School by our family farm. The school closed in 1971 when we got down to 7 kids in grades 1-8. However, I did just read an article recently about a one-room schoolhouse down in southeastern Montana somewhere that currently has four students. Again, I believe your idea for an approach to education in rural areas is a sound one, especially since all kids coming up nowadays have tech woven into the very fabric of their lives. They're much more adept at tech-related stuff because it's already second nature to them. Personal mobile devices are nearly everywhere and most kids have them; it only makes sense to push education through already-utilized channels. Cracks me up, these days the technology is there to do this sort of thing. When I was a kid, our family and our neighbors still had party-line telephones. It was a huge advance in technology to get our own dial-tone service!
I am from Wisconsin. Both the article itself and the commenters have been articulate in lamenting the damage such a closure would do to Arena or any similar town.
But there is a possible two-part solution. One part would be statewide and possibly national support for a new model that would depart from the traditional one-class-per-grade model. The graded model drives costs up as enrollment drops and/or drives the attractiveness of the school down as grades have to be combined. The new model would involve different forms of personalized learning, enabled by the powerful new technology that we didn't have until a few years ago.
The second part would be recognition at the state level that these small town schools are a special situation and they simply need extra funding. And they have a bit of a twin—the urban schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools that serve a very disproportionate mix of disadvantaged kids. In both cases, the state leaders need to recognize that all school situations are not created equal, and at least these two simply need more money.
Except as commenters have pointed out, our current state leaders have put a stranglehold on school funding, and our once-excellent school system is in a downward spiral, with MPS already enjoying a fiscal crisis. So do we want to invest the money in our kids that will repay itself many times over in a wonderful future for all of us, or do we want to pander to the don’t-raise-my-taxes-ever-again grouches?
11
@Jerry S.
Very interesting post with excellent analysis. I have just one question re: the "new model" you proposed in your scenario in the second paragraph. Isn't what you are postulating a variation on the already established Montessori model? That method of education is based on self-directed activity, hands-on learning and collaborative play in classrooms where children make creative choices in their learning, while the classroom and the teacher offer age-appropriate activities to guide the process.
2
Marge, I have to confess that I'm not as familiar with Montessori as I'd like to be, but I'm sure that could be a factor. I should say I suggested personalized learning both because I think it's better for the kids and also because it could be better from a financial standpoint, since it frees you from having to have one teacher and one room per grade, which would be great in cases like Arena where you only have 12 kids per grade rather than 25. But I know a Montessori model could do the same thing.
There's a school district near us in CNY that has only about 125 students K-12. People have romantic ideas about small schools, but there is plenty of evidence to show they are less effective and very costly. The identity of the community is at stake and I guess people think it's worth it.
Other communities here have chosen to centralize or tuition out their students. They already know what happens when the school goes away. This is not something that happens only in other states.
6
Something doesn't add up here. The town of Arena, Wisconsin is growing, up from 309 in 1960 to 834 in 2010. So I don't understand how this population growth, almost triple in 50 years, translates into too few students to support its school built in 1952. I would have hoped that this article would have explored that glaring inconsistency.
1
Young people have kids. Older folks do not, even though their property taxes pay for the schools.
No kids, no enrollment in the school.
1
Yes, it's in the orbit of the bustling, high-tech Madison area, and it's only 29 miles from the state capitol! The Arena population mini-explosion is probably explained by new residents who commute to Madison and its suburbs. So yes, if we can't keep a school like this going that doesn't say much about us.
1
I spent my high school years in a rural environment also in a state that's losing population. Five towns decided to join their school districts and they created a centrally located school. That was a nice thing for many reasons.
1) Education is an absurdly high percentage of a town's budget.
2) Lower populations mean consolidation is necessary
3) Kids got to meet other kids from neighboring communities.
4) The administrative cost of schools was apportioned better. A school with 100 kids the administrators are not used adequately. They can better support a school with 400 kids, about. That lowers overall costs.
5) we still had kids coming in from lower grades who were in one-room school houses on the outer islands. That just added to the mix.
6) Arts thrived because we had more people and therefore more money to spend on those things.
7) Keeping the communities alive: By noting that the town has this vibrant school district centralized, this is a net draw for most parents. Their kid will have a good school experience.
I'm wondering if these towns in Wisconsin and other rural areas could possibly join together in a similarly cooperative spirit and create new schools that work well for all involved.
3
This is so sad. Being from Wisconsin used to mean something good about America. Bob La Follette was a giant in this country, standing for the working man and fairness for all. And now we have this pipsqueak Scott Walker leading the charge to the bottom. He sold the state to the Kochs so he could run for president. Soon there will be no difference between Wisconsin and Kansas.
20
Too bad the Trump electors for these regions can't disappear when the schools close.
7
Sing with me:
Walking in a Republican Wonderland!
7
Life under our Governor. Pit side against side, strip the schools and public institutions of funding, then call teachers and other public workers fat cats. We're just starting to reap the bitter results.
19
I grew up in Wisconsin and have many great memories of it, this is a sad article to be sure.
What I have heard from many young people, is that they not only leave rural areas permanently because of job opportunities, they also see these rural areas as politically backwards, and stifling.
Good luck being gay, or atheist (or worse, Islamic!), or socially progressive, or non-white. The internet now allows these young people to see that there are more inclusive places to be, and they want to be there. It's not the only reason, but from what I've heard, I think it's a contributor.
21
Why must the "New York" times constantly do articles about others places when all they need to do is drive north a bit.
All of "upstate" as you love to call it is this article.
The demographics of the housing crisis created a reverse bubble in births and everywhere the kindergarden is a shadow of the senior class.
Where jobs are lacking, aka , where we farm, its even worse.
Its only going to get worse.
Unemployment may be down, but underemployment is just getting worse, so its hard to start a family.
Just wait until the AI's and robot steal the remaining jobs (just look at how few people are needed at any farm these days to get an idea of the future).
Toss in public policy meant to favor those already with money and power and its not a pretty picture.
8
My Canadian great grandfather immigrated to OUR United States of America during the Lincoln Nebraska land grants. Of course, BIG money managed to most of the land so many of the immigrants had to work for them and farm "sections" of land to make money for BIG owners.
However, the immigrants took advantage of the one thing OUR United States offered and valued most - education.
I visited my ancestors' Nebraska home a few years ago and wondered how they managed to educate their young people when they had to travel such great distances - in horse and wagon - to get to a town. The historical museum had the answer. They have a school district map from that time and it shows a school at every 4-section juncture. The map was dotted with them. People hired the teacher for their school. I'm not sure how the schools were funded but OUR government probably helped. In those times - the Good Old Days - schools were a main gathering point for farmers and their families and a vital part of their communities.
It is sad to see the last school in this town close. Perhaps the Good People of the town can take a lesson from our ancestors, join forces and open a new one that serves their community.
8
I have spent nearly all of my life living in Flyover America. My family still farms north of Houston, TX. This story is nothing new to me. I did not flinch when new neighbors with school aged kids said the kids were on the bus for 2 hours to get to school. My sister teaches in a rural district where travel time to get to school is 1 hour or more.
Mechanization and automation has ended millions of jobs and millions more will be leaving for good over the coming decades. We need a new economic model that will allow Small Town and Flyover USA to be a vital link in the Farm-to-Table chain. We also must move to a more sustainable environmental model than packing everyone in a city.
One solution is to go back to much smaller schools and far fewer school districts with far fewer administrators. It would also help to locally source things. I have no beef with Lamers, but it is a multi-state transportation contractor and they do not always hire locals. Many of their drivers live far away from their routes. Solutions are out there, we just don't like the look of them.
6
Dear Skramsv,
Thanks for your perspective, but I have a quibble with it, in fact large cities are the best sustainable environmental model we have yet. Moving the resources for millions of people at once actually does less damage than moving those same resources to people spread out over several states instead. And it's easier to enforce recycling and other things in cities than when people are spread out.
1
I live in rural Wisconsin not far from Potosi or Spring Green. I grew up on our family's farm, graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Masters degree from Clarke College, lived and worked on the East Coast for a number of years and back here was a teacher in a rural district near Potosi for 28 years. My farmer parents sent all three of their children to good universities and wrote the checks. It was not easy, but they did it with pride. Today's state of Wisconsin's Public Schools, urban or rural, and the reasons for their successes or failures could fill a very thick book if someone wants to write it. The little school in Arena was turning out amazingly well educated students thanks to grants and innovation that teachers, parents and School Board members supported and valued. But my actual comments are directed at two commenters. Reid - PLEASE stop with the "down on the farm" line. Commenter Swami's comments make it clear that he considers all of us rural residents appallingly ignorant. They are Times Picks? We are mostly white, that is true, so you can say anything you want about us. If you described people of color with your comments, Swami, you would not be a Times Pick.
13
This story has nothing to do with taxes. It is about a secular change in where people want to live. Nothing in the article says anything about not paying for the children’s education. We simply cannot afford to do everything we once did in exactly the same place we once did it. That makes no sense. In between chanting your mantra “Must resist, must resist”, try reading the article.
1
I think you are the one who didn't read the article. It certainly has everything to do with taxes. They floated a ballot measure to raise $9.3 million in taxes. It failed. So every time you hear about how the blue parts of this country have high taxes remember it's because we value services, like education.
6
While I feel for the residents of Arena losing their school. I am reminded of my school years attending a consolidated school in a mostly rural Arkansas town of less than 1,000 population in the 1960's. I graduated in 1970 in a class of 46, only 30 more than my mother's 1942 class of 16. In her day, the school district served the town and close-in rural residents; by the time I entered school in 1958, a number of smaller communities within a 20-mile radius had consolidated their schools into my school, with one hold out which closed and consolidated 6 years later. I recall that by my senior year, there were more students in the school than residents within the town limits.
While it hurts, the overall benefits to a consolidated school, particularly for early childhood education, are greater than trying to hold a small group together with limited resources. I don't believe in or support Charter Schools in any shape, form, or function, but pooling limited resources into solid public education is the most cost effective way to maintain our schools and our independence. Gifted programs are possible, with some form of vocational training also available. This is probably the only way the rural schools will survive.
BTW, we had a good number of Phd's from such schools as Rice and Baylor in my high school, still do. Small isn't limiting.
9
While I sympathize with the various citizens from Wisconsin for their school is closing, I also think they are being a bit unrealistic and don't realize how lucky they are. The schools described in this article have a student enrollment that would be quite enviable in several South Dakota towns. But when you have to co-op with four other schools (some of the schools being an hour apart in travel distance) in order to be able to have a football team, don't have enough students to have a band, or cannot provide classes or teachers that may allow a student to go to their dream college, then what experience/education are you actually providing the student? Yes, closing a school affects the town population, but the lack of jobs, opportunities and housing have already hurt these towns and are part of the reason the student enrollment numbers are going down. It is a vicious cycle, but spending millions to save a school for a couple more years is not the solution.
6
The two biggest forces propelling the depopulation of rural America are the rise of industrial scale farming and the national effort to urge everyone to get a college degree.
Big farms are more efficient, they make more money, but the family farm of old fades away or is crushed by competition. In the farming that prevailed for much of the 20th century, family farms meant that everyone in the family was directly involved in farm work. Without small farmers, who care about what they produce, we get more industrial type food with less nutritional value.
With machines doing much of the work, with even robots milking cows, fewer people are needed and those who are hired work long hours at low pay (which is one reason so many industrial scale farms need foreign born labor: who is going to move to a rural area for low paying, seasonal work that, on top of everything, is often very dangerous and always dirty?).
If someone gets a college degree, forget the amities of the city, the job comes first. There aren't enough jobs requiring that status in rural areas and those who have them, like the bank president, often stay put for decades. Once people have college, they want to give the same opportunity to their children and come to realize that rural schools are generally not the best preparation.
It turn, small manufacturers and other businesses don't want to relocate to areas where it would be difficult to find employees. It is a perfect storm, ever downward.
12
I have lived in rural Iowa and Pennsylvania. I have seen dozens of schools close and consolidation take place. It was necessary because you can't have a high school class of 8 students and be fiscally responsible.
Some places planned for down sizing and did it well. Other places resisted the school closures and spend large sums on court cases that did not slow the change that was inevitable.
Some politicians aid in the transition from the past to the future and some like Scott Walker polarize the situation.
Change is hard, but it is the nature of America. Ghost towns dot the landscape all across the country It started in the 1800's and continues today. Why are we surprised. The mine runs out, the industry changes, the technology is different, the need is different. It is to be expected.
12
This is so sad. It is a result of politics, but also of societal changes. The huge factory farms require fewer employees than family farms and those have been enabled by state legislators. On the other hand, you can see why an aging farmer would sell to a large corporate farm if there is no family who wants to remain on the land and if they can't compete with the factory farms. I know family farmers who value their illegal immigrant workers and could not survive without them. Current state and national politics may not be the cause of some of this, but they certainly haven't helped any.
2
I've lived in my rural Nebraska community all of my 68 years. The trend of what's happening with depopulation is irreversible, but the pace could and should have been much slower. The trouble is rural America stopped voting with their head, and started voting with a grudge. They refuse change and stopped investing in optimism. It all became about clinging to an imaginary past.
25
Sometimes the obvious is difficult to accept:
Communities thrive when there is economic activity, a vibrant business cluster, a solid tax base and an educated population. All of these key components tie together to make things work.
Arena, WI and thousands of other similar towns simply do not have the economic basis to enjoy any "fringe benefits" they once had.
I'm afraid all I can say is: too bad, so sad. It doesn't even matter what your politics are. If you're living in an economically compromised place and you want "more" for yourself and your family, you'd better pack your things and go where opportunities exist.
Pick up a copy of "Who Moved My Cheese" (a favorite of tough-love managers) for a refresher course on what to do when you can no longer depend on the past.
6
Its one thing to close an elementary school. Lots of reasons why this happens all over America. But clearly, there is a war on education in the state of Wisconsin right now. Look at the cuts to the University system in Wisconsin, just as serious and troubling. Especially at UW Superior and UW Stevens Point.
26
It happens. In New Mexico, we have six four-year state universities serving a population of ~2 million. Arizona, with a population of ~4 million, has three four-year state universities. However, NOT closing small universities is something that united Democrats and Republicans in rural areas since some small universities are in Republican districts and some are in Democratic districts.
3
What to do about the root cause of this problem (which we already experienced twice, following both World Wars)? There aren't enough people to support small town institutions in general ... there is an insufficient customer base to entice a Starbucks or a Sonic to these places. There appears to be work opportunities, but no self-respecting American wants their kids to work on a company farm, right? Where, oh where do we find the people to work those fields and open small businesses and buy goods from one another? As we speak, we as a nation are filling federal prisons with the solution to this problem. Closing the doors to immigrants is already beginning to eliminate the base lubricant which powers our economy - hungry people willing to work ... willing to sacrifice ... willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. We are as dependent upon the refugees for survival as they are upon us. Refusing to accept this symbiosis is madness. All we are doing is creating a brand new type of enemy, while diminishing our own capability to defend our borders.
11
Small towns, we know, are not good at producing educated people fit for the 21st century global economy. But, we are told, they're still valuable places because of their great sense of community. They are, the Republican party tells us, the repositories of "the best of America", where you'll find old-time values of neighbourliness long forgotten by immoral big-city folk.
Really? I live in a big city, and my childless neighbours would never vote to defund my child's education just to save a bit of money. They understand that children's education is an investment that pays off, even for them. They see that we're all in this together.
It's called a sense of community and it's alive and well in the big city. What small-towners call a sense of community is really just irrational hostility to outsiders.
37
Seriously, small towns are not good at producing educated people? Maybe in the UK but not here in the US. I did experience England's sense of community when I lived in Hursley and I have been blessed to live in several other counties. I also have an Environmental Engineering PhD. I went to rural in the US and two in Canada. I also went to a few inner city schools. The rural schools were better academically.
I will forgive you believing stereotypes. My grandparents expected US streets to be paved with gold when they left Ellis Island. You are confusing the Party dogma with reality much in the same way that everyone believed every Russian was a Card Carrying, Party loving communist. Poor people cannot pay out money that they do not have. It is the top 5% that refuse to pay for "your kid's school" and many of them call themselves democrats.
2
This is NOT a new phenomena.
There are hundreds of ghost towns. America is vibrant because it's people go where the jobs and opportunities are.
As you point out, it's not in many rural areas.
A list of ghost towns... http://tinyurl.com/oyz4dne
5
I live 20 miles east of Arena in an urban setting. I don't think Arena has a stop sign on Hwy 14 - you blink and you miss the town entirely.
Wisconsin has 425 school districts in a state with near flat population growth. Many of them like River Valley are in shrinking rural areas. I've repeatedly suggested dragging these depopulated lands into the 21st century by having one school district per county, or 72 instead of over 400. You'd think I advocated euthanasia. Arena was a thriving community 100 years ago but that century ain't coming back.
21
So many commenters have read this article and immediately concluded--"mean Republican budget cuts shortchange students." That's a legitimate charge, where it applies, but some of these communities just don't have the scale to support schools where once there were more kids. It shortchanges students when you send them to a hometown school that doesn't give them the instruction and resources other students get. Wisconsin still has an inordinate number of functioning schools with rather small enrollments, so it's not like they are being shut down en masse. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense to operate a school anymore.
7
The only constant is change. 250 years ago there was no European rural population. The world changed and the Indians world disappeared. Now the trend is towards the cities and declining rural population. I doubt these people’s pain is any more or less than the Indians, but the trends will not stop. The loud shouts of blame of the government or the “other” will be silent in a generation or two.
2
A perfect example of the effects of years of the political focus on small government in a state. Reduce taxes equals a reduction in public services, add to that a shift in population and you get a total elimination of services to these Americans. Which of course hurts our children and our future.
But no harm to the donors or the political office holders responsible for this travesty. They are doing great with all those tax cuts. The only trickle down here is suffering of average hard working Americans.
9
This is a very familiar story. There are no jobs in a lot of rural America, so families leave, and schools close, and towns empty even more. It makes sense, there are more houses than families, but it must be really hard on a small town when the vote to keep the schools open is so close. The voters chose to shutter the town, and let it die.
8
They brought this on themselves. Rural voters voted in a corrupt anti-intellectual governor. He put down and demoralized teachers and cut funding for education. Their town will dwindle and they will bemoan their fate, but they have only themselves to blame.
22
I spent a lot of time with relatives in rural Kansas as a child and have always lived near, just not quite in, farm country, so I empathize with the residents of small town Wisconsin who just want to see their communities remain vibrant. One way to do that, of course, is to welcome immigrants, who have completely revitalized many smaller communities in the Midwest and South, not to mention larger cities. The good people of rural and small-town Wisconsin should think about that the next time they're asked to support politicians who seem intent on making America as unwelcoming as possible for immigrants who just want to work hard and contribute.
23
One factor not mentioned here is the dairy crisis and the impact it's having on these communities. I live about an hour away from the communities profiled and grew up in a rural community with a lot of similar issues. This part of the country is reliant on farmers, and dairy farmers are struggling. They cannot afford higher property taxes to support their community schools. They can barely afford to feed their cattle. There are a lot of issues at play here - from corporate farming to a lack of rural economic development, but it needs more attention than it is getting. This is a huge loss.
10
They want high speed internet. That says it all. As long as rural communities cannot have the same digital access as more populated areas we will continue to see the decline of rural America. With high speed internet access I believe that there would be a resurgence in many of these small towns.
6
This has happened quite a lot in Nebraska. They consolidate schools to save money, and kids get bused longer and longer distances.
The solution, of course, is what happened in Tecumseh, Nebraska. A chicken processing plant brought in scores of immigrants, who revitalized a dead town. The crumbling town center was full of businesses again, the school had increasing enrollment for the first time in a hundred years, and the town avoided the decline suffered by most of its neighbors.
Of course, long-time residents weren't so happy. The students spoke Spanish. Some were those "illegals" we had been warned about in the scare media. Culturally, they didn't always follow the long-established but unwritten rules.
My 90-year-old grandmother lives next door to a family like this. While my family largely ignores her, they treat her with respect and dignity. I found them to be incredibly friendly. Isn't that what idealized small town life is supposed to be like?
50
This story reminds me of the now-ghost-town of Ashwood, Oregon. It had been a bustling community in the early 20th century, due to some gold and silver mining, but a combination of played-out mines and having the railroad built on a different route hammered it. In the late 1960's, it hired a recent grad (friend of my family) to be the sole elementary school teacher for the proverbial one-room schoolhouse.
I don't know if any kids lived in town (if one could call it a town, even then). Kids from neighboring ranches went into town there for elementary school, then went to nearby Madras (30+ miles away) for junior high and high school.
I gather that the last child left that little schoolhouse some years ago and the town was largely abandoned other than its church and post office. With better roads and faster cars, it became feasible to ranch there and live in a larger town.
1
I graduated in a class of 48 students in a village in the Adirondacks. Every few years there is a push for a merger with another school 15 minutes away. Some rural students are in buses an hour a day as it is. Part of the problem is that long time residents are being replaced by retirees who do not share the common history and emotion for the school. They see it as a dollar figure on their tax bill. I have witnessed the closing of one K-12 school and that community turned the building into a community center that continued to build a connection between residents. I don't blame Scott Walker for the problem in Wisconsin, but I do see that he has demonstrated a lack of leadership in providing a reasonable solution.
9
One-room schools with as few as one dedicated and properly trained teacher can still work very well. Students can actually benefit from helping each other. There appears to be a serious lack of imagination involved here.
1
I grew up about 50 miles from Arena, in another small town on Highway 14. When I attended my youngest niece's high school graduation there last month, she graduated in a class of 80, while my class numbered 135. However, our community is growing. What's made the numbers difference is the addition of two Christian schools, a private school and many parents who home school. While my sympathies are with Arena, my guess is there also isn't the support for the public school system there once was.
8
Removing the last school in a town is akin to taking someone in a vegetative state off life support, it's only a matter of time until the end. The extinction of small-town rural U.S.A. has been going on for decades, and it's not going to end soon. City and suburban life is just more appealing to most people, and with the vanishing population of family farms, small towns use as a hub for dozens of outlying farms is becoming moot.
Someday this could easily reverse itself. When people can get most of their needs met remotely, there will be people who prefer the wide open spaces, the dearth of interaction with other people, and so on, who will repopulate rural America. Won't happen for awhile yet, and it won't be the same kind of people who live there now.
For now, when a town loses its only school, it's time for the residents to decide if they want to be the last hermit-like occupants of a ghost town, or whether it's time to move to Madison or someplace. With no school, there will be no new young residents, no returning children, no future for the town at all. Maybe in the 22nd century a new homesteading trend will start up, but right now, these tiny towns are just no longer viable.
8
This isn’t new at all. For decades, small schools have been closing everywhere, even since before I was a kid in the 50s. This is NOTHING NEW. I find it hard to believe it is reported as something new. Slow news day?
3
What this trend illustrates is that conservatives have to choose between conservative values, i.e. valuing and nurturing family, culture and community, versus crony capitalist values i.e. choosing corrupt monopolies which concentrate the wealth and treat people as cogs in a machine. Had the farmers not sold out to factory farms, and kept the intergenerational farming alive, they could have nimbly adapted to emerging food trends in organic/pasture raised arena, kept their incomes high, had children and prospered. The tragedy of middle America is the confluence of moral bankruptcy and family destruction brought forth by progressive left with the crony capitalist and dollar worshipping right. Quite a lethal combination.
5
The solution to this problem is immigration. Immigrants bring entrepreneurship, good work ethic and children to a community. Rural communities would be revitalized. But alas these are the same communities with the most animus towards immigrants. It's sad really.
19
Not trying to take too much away from this story, but the depiction of Arena is a bit off. Besides the decent cheese store with the big mouse out front and Grandma Mary's restaurant you also have Lake Louie Brewing one of the better craft brewers in the region. The loss of the school is certainly bad, but I do not see Arena as a declining town.
3
So grand dad and mom sold the farm to agribusiness. The kids went to the city. Those few left won’t pay for a school. Which part of this has to do with community?
8
There seems to be a lot of additional costs for public schools that private schools don't have. The public schools I attended years ago are unrecognizable compared to when I attended, from - mostly useless - additions and upgrades. The private school looks pretty much the same but has had really good maintenance over time.
When my children's public elementary school cut art education due to a lack of money, a number of parents volunteered to come in and teach it. This wasn't allowed by the teacher's union. We had an after school art club instead. Funding for high school sports teams remained in place.
A lot of this has to do with overly generous pensions for teachers who retired years ago. Pensions that weren't properly funded at the time. It is also is a result of the I-got-mine attitude prevailing in the US these days. We're seeing the culmination of a decades-long Ponzi scheme where younger people will be left holding the bag.
1
I agree with Sam, that this is not all about tax cuts and republicans - but what most rural voters (who overwhelming vote republican and vote to gut taxes) don't seem to understand is that when taxes are slashed, they are the ones to feel it first. Their schools, post offices, etc. will be the first to go.
23
The regional merging of public schools and other municipal services, (EMT, fire and police), is a growing trend in smaller towns. It's the only way they can survive. Especially with the continuation of shelling out exorbitant pensions to retired town workers. Not that pensions are a bad thing but they are draining the tax payer's coffers. Many areas of the country are also becoming unaffordable for young families with children. Cape Cod is closing schools due to the lack of children to enroll in them. Death of the middle class here and all about second home ownership/vacation rentals.
Kids aren't staying down on the farm in rural places anymore.
Why should they?
5
Please don't blame the young people!!! The jobs aren't there for the younger generation. As Ms. Schmid described the town - there is a bank and a cheese factory. The world was a different place 100 years ago - not many cars, few corporate farms, etc.
8
To say this is Walker's plan coming to fruition gives him way too much credit (he probably couldn't spell the word "plan"). It's deployment of his owners', the Koch brothers, plan to create a less educated population willing to work for lower wages and continue to vote Republican. The GOP here has systematically demonized educators and the educated for the last several years, while reducing as much state aid as they can to public education at all levels.
The system is working as designed.
29
When my mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Iowa she not only walked 5 miles to school, but had to start the fire to warm the building before her (20 or so) students arrived. Her Dad was incredibly proud of what he learned regarding the latest farming techniques brought in by the WPA.
If rural America takes pride in its ignorance it will pay the penalty - and so does the rest of the country. If you don't want something badly enough to support it, it will disappear - as we are seeing happen across our country. Heartbreaking.
18
I'm surprised a depopulated area like that had THREE elementary schools for so long. The enrollment numbers fail to support 2 schools, let alone three. This move is WAY overdue just based on reality.
The result isn't bad at all - they probably drive at least 9 miles to get groceries or gas already. Waxing prosaic about memories and such is fine - get it out of your system. It was an unsustainable situation that was going to change inevitably. Happens everywhere all the time.
7
Migration was the natural human state of being even before Industrialization and the modern tech shift. People must move in order to seek new opportunities whether they be job related or otherwise. We have somehow gotten stuck into the notion that staying in one place is the normal way of living in the US, when it's clear that isn't working. This conservative nostalgia about roots and such is part of what fuels this. Sitting around and mourning for dead schools, dead towns and dying ways of life is a fast track to nothing. Make your own futures, isn't looking forward supposed to be an American strength? When did we become so maudlin and closed to new ideas?
14
Jobs are not heading to rural areas any time soon. Technology permits remote work more now than ever, but US business culture has been slow to embrace it. Perhaps one day people will be able to work remotely and move to more rural areas. Until then, more communities will fade away, taking their schools with them.
7
All over the world young people seduced by noise, entertainment, the 24-hour news cycle and the deep hypnotism of electronics, are fleeing the countryside. It is too quiet, too boring, there is nothing to do. Most of all it is way too slow. In our technological madness we have truly remade our society. As an older person I value friends and family, peace and quiet and the cosmic beauty of nature. The kids around me never see any of it, their faces pressed to the screens of their smartphones. I will be content to go, and no doubt they will be pleased to show me and my prim disapproval the door.
10
Driving 9 miles to school in a rural area is not so bad
8
I just looked at a map, and Spring Green is a 10 minute drive from Arena. I get the point this article is trying to make, but it's worth noting that it's not exactly an unbearable commute.
10
From the center of Arena, yes. But Arena extends pretty far beyond that, and getting a school bus down a rural route in a Wisconsin winter can be a trick.
1
This situation is a wonderful opportunity for Governor Scott Walker and his Republican administration to demonstrate their concern for their constituents' little rural community and their commitment to providing a high-quality public education for that community's children.
I wonder what they will do? Actually, I know what they will do: nothing. Perhaps they will send "thoughts and prayers", but that's about it. This is what you get when you elect people who don't believe in government or actually governing.
RIP, Arena public schools.
11
Whether it is a rural school or an urban one, America's public schools have always been vital to the social fabric of America life. Yet education reformers and budget cutting politicians have chosen to dismiss this reality ignoring research showing that the cost savings often do not materialize and the devastating impact on rural communities and urban neighborhoods of losing this vital anchor institution. Advocates at the Journey for Justice and the Rural Schools and Community Trust have been fighting this battle for many years , as has the Coalition for Community Schools. We cannot continue to turnout backs on schools as places for social and civic life.
3
Its hard to stop history, and individual choices have a way of aggregating to the detriment of large populations. In the 80’s Rust Belt cities like mine lost half their population with the closing of steel plants. Children moved away, schools closed, it’s an extremely painful thing to watch, and after 30 years we are only NOW starting to see some real economic progress and the return of our young people.
So I have not only sympathy, but empathy, for what is happening in these towns. We’ve lived it.
But I’m not entirely certain what can be done. Children leave to find opportunities and jobs, and farming is one of the industries that has become more and more automated. As individuals they leave to find opportunity, and in aggregate they empty out entire communities. Buffalo has benefitted from enormous Government investment on the part of New York State. But I don’t think Wisconsin’s government is inclined to invest in it’s communities in that way.
8
I moved around quite a bit during my elementary years. Some of the fondest memories and best academic moments came to fruition during my often brief tenures at some of these rural schools. Classes were smaller, relations with teachers often closer, and more individualized teaching strategies were often utilized.
I wonder if technology and ultimately more widespread telecommuting will make it possible for us city folk to emigrate back to rural America. I would do it in a heartbeat.
6
I was raised in Iowa county, WI, until the age of 12, and Arena Elementary was my school. Whenever I return to this part of Wisconsin, a flood of memories overwhelms me. In my opinion it is the most beautiful place in the world, and will forever be cemented in memory due to the wealth of sublime experiences had during my youth there. I am forever grateful for the time I was allowed in this place. I can remember recess on the cold snowy days, and hot summer ones. School lunch with rectangular slices of pizza, and playing in the school concert band where somehow I ended up being the lone Tuba. I wasn't a popular kid, and got picked on lot due to my awkwardness, but never in a million years did I think this town, and its school, would be mentioned in a major newspaper from a far away city. Nor did I think it would mention Karen Wilkinson, whom I believe was a classmate of mine when I was in school there (Hi Karen?). I'm sitting high up in a skyscraper in downtown Chicago, keeping tears from welling up in my eyes.
I agree that the politics of the state of Wisconsin is in an ugly place, particularly with the erosion of a once magnificent public school system, but I'm sure the closing of Arena Elementary was a long time coming. It is one of those a cold facts of life. Things come, and things go. Nothing more. Thank-you for this article.
109
I had a similar reaction to yours while reading this. I grew up in a small town in upstate NY that could easily be in WI. We left when I was 16 because my father saw the writing on the wall and he wanted to take us to a place with more opportunity. I'm grateful every day for his wisdom and forethought. I would have left the moment I graduated and never gone back, because there is simply nothing to go back to. I still have friends and family in the area but when I go back to visit I'm just sad for all the people who got stuck there, many of them angry and bitter about it. That said, I would not have traded my rural childhood for ANYTHING. It was downright magical. I know times change and we must change with them but I'm sad for all the kids that won't grow up the way I did.
4
Two thoughts:
1) I just moved back to the Midwest from a New York's North Country, a rural, isolated and poverty stricken part of the state, where property taxes were sky high (think ~7K/yr for a house valued at 135K), pricing many people out of the housing market, in large part because all the little villages refused to give up their independent schools. As a former Wisconsinite who had gone to a consolidated school district, I marveled at how ridiculous it was to have a complete K-12 school in five different villages in my vicinity, each within 10-20 miles of one another, each graduating classes of ~50/yr.
2) On the other hand, the trend of people moving to cities & suburbs is real & here, in large part because many rural areas are so devoid of opportunities to make a decent living. If we as a nation want people to continue to populate & care for rural areas, where a bulk of our food supply comes from, & where many from cities enjoy taking vacations, we need to support those who make sacrifices to live in those areas, & I agree that over-consolidation of school districts, resulting in long bus rides for kids, among other considerations (lack of medical care, lack of community services like libraries, pools, parks with playgrounds, lack of snow removal services, etc.), are the opposite of that support. Perhaps it's time for the state &/or federal governments to step in to support the rural school districts & rural people they all fetishize each election season?
33
I don't disagree with your comments in principle, but I do have a problem on the idea that we need to somehow subsidize those choosing to live in rural areas because they are making a sacrifice. While I totally respect those who make that decision of where they live, the idea of picking and choosing who we subsidize and which area(s) we should be subsidizing, sounds very problematic to me. Do we start creating pork-barrel projects to produce jobs? Do we keep the schools open where number of staff and teachers exceed number of students? Where do we draw that line to cut the loss?
11
"Fetish" is correct. The sacred local school is one of the points on which the GOP manipulates and extorts voters over and over again. Gotta have these little schools and support them even when registration is well below viable. But it is an issue that Republicans can and do use to pander to the public. Then, when people do cling to these areas, and find there are no or few opportunities, the GOP points to Democrats - of course - as the reason that life is so hard in the hinterlands. The fact is that the move into the country and then the move out of the country to urban areas has been a fact of human life for, oh, maybe 2000+ years. Yes, it hurts to be "left behind." But the savvy residents surely can and would and will speak up, show up and launch their own responsive reps and seek new business and endeavors. Right? Sadly, we know the answer: No. The days of complacency and "our elected reps will take care of it" are over. Have to be over. Both in urban and rural areas.
1
Funny, private schools tout their small size as a selling point. I’d be thrilled if my children’s large urban elementary school had 94 students instead of 550. Many kids feel more connected in a smaller environment. I wish this could be seen as a source of strength rather than a liability. Hopefully the tax cuts are worth it.
5
Don't think tax cuts have much to do with this. It's mostly demographic. The tax base is also much smaller, therefore less money coming in.
3
Perhaps these are communities which should welcome immigrant families who might like agricultural work in which they are experienced, a community where neighbors know each other and have small schools, and there's lots of space to create a home. Well vetted immigrants and refugees might be allowed to stay in U.S. on condition of settling for a certain period i- say 5 years - in towns like Arena.
14
This has already been taking place, in a way, since the 1970’s. The Hmong fled Vietnam and Laos war to establish new roots in rural Wisconsin towns. In fact they may be among the largest ethnic group in the state.
As you might suspect, given some knowledge of Wisoconsin’s -ahem- cultural broad-mindedness this has had mixed results. But I think overall it has been successful...or at least peaceful.
1
Amen. Hate to mention it, but remember 40 acres and a mule. We need more legal immigrants (fewer illegal, please) and maybe giving them a stakehold would help both us and them. As someone born there who moved to warmer climates, I remember the beauty of the state.....but those winters were daunting, and farmers work incredibly hard. All those cows getting milked at 5 am!
Schools and infrastructure cost money. This money usually raised with taxes. I see that they voted down a property tax increase. If it had passed the school might still be open. The moral of this story seems to me - if you want infrastructure you pay for it with taxes. And so it goes in republican america....
69
In this case it was childless taxpayers that voted down the bond. If you have no ties to the school why would you care if it stays open? Especially if the student population is shrinking.
Yes, they can (and still might) vote for tax increase, but if voters can't afford to pay the taxes, and/or property values continue to fall, then the property assessment will go down, and your idea of "tax increase" would just end up a wash.
I don't necessarily see this as a partisan issue (hence we can drop the blame game that it's all GOP's fault). The world has changed. US was top of the world 50 years ago, but no longer. Americans rushed to spread out and ran away from inner cities in the post-war era, but the trend is going in reverse since cities and urban areas are where the well-paying jobs and fun are. Those are trends that have been long time coming. Trying to pin it on any specific political party or governor, is fool's errand.
1
Well said.
This cries out for problem solving at the federal level, where they have been mired down by congressional posturing and inept meddling for decades. Now the Department of Education is consumed with transforming our education system into a machine that will funnel money to private interests, and places like Arena and Lone Rock are markets that are too small to bother with. Trump predicted we'd get tired of winning, and I suspect some people are already there.
9
Forgive my igorance, I'm British, but is not Wisconsin famous anyway for cutting education? Isn't it notorious for victimising teachers, under its governor who is himself notoriously uneducated?
Do rural Wisconsinites really want their children educated? Don't they disdain education? No? Then why did they vote for an anti-intellectual party that clearly does? Why did they vote for a governor who never went to university and a president who can't construct a sentence in his only language? Why did they help install Betsy de Vos?
When I hear of small towns dying, in Wisconsin or in Yorkshire for that matter, I think: "Good." It's good for the world, and good for the people trapped in them.
Small towns brought us Brexit, they brought us Trump, their stupidity risks destroying our civilisation. School or no school, the people in them are clearly learning nothing except xenophobia, the default ideology of the utterly clueless.
A woman in this article claims that her town has only a cheese factory and a bank. Not so. Every 'left-behind' small town is itself a highly efficient factory, manufacturing vast quantities of stupidity and evil.
220
I am an Indian-American and I lived in rural Wisconsin before moving to New Jersey. When I moved to Wisconsin, it was a progressive upper-midwest state or at-least that was the expectation. When I lived there, I realized that many people (outside Madison and Milwaukee) were parochial. Many took pride in not having traveled to Chicago or even outside their state border. In fact, some well meaning colleagues, asked me if India was OK after the US invaded Iraq. I suspect that some of them thought that the countries were arranged alphabetically, and that India was close to Iran/Iraq. They usually took pride in their anti-Science views. This included some very senior people within GE's healthcare business. I still view Wisconsin very fondly but it is utterly depressing to see the bad turn of events.
243
Thank you, OD.
It's famously difficult to fix stupid.
Might as well just let it wither and die.
8
Sorry, OD. No stupidity or evil in Arena, or in Wisconsin. Just a slow and relentless demographic dirge in place long before Gov. Walker burst upon the tax-cutting scene. It's called outmigration.
6
Arena sounds like a wonderful community, and was a great place to live, work, raise a family. It was also an area of family farms, allowing inter generational connection to family owned land. Then, in came the consolidation of family farms into factory farms. Not surprisingly, jobs, the same jobs that family farms required, became unwanted by the local population. As the article said, locals didn’t want “that”work, so in came the legal and illegal Latinos to work the factory farm jobs. Life is full of unintended consequences. First, farmers selling out to big businesses. Second big business turning the farm into a factory, offering wages and working conditions unacceptable to the old (dare I say white) guard.
Forces inside that community orchestrated their own demise, and as a Republican stronghold, they better look to themselves,not government, for the solution.
55
That could well be. But your description of what happens ignore one fact: If Latinos (legal or illegal) are coming in to do the factory farm work, surely their kids need the school too; yet, the numbers are not showing up. School enrollments are on the decline. The only logical conclusion one could draw is, families are simply moving away, leaving behind the increasingly aging population in place. That's why there is no more kids to justify the school's existence. Your narrative sounds "neat," but it doesn't ring true.
4
Legal immigrants or farm workers, tend to be on short-term growing season visas and send money back home. Illegal immigrants are not sending their kids to school in droves in the US. Especially where they will draw attention. ICE Raid!
This is sad but it is not, altogether, a terrible thing.
The world has too many people. Our aging, and potentially dropping, population is a good thing. Climate change and global warming is going to devastate this planet.
Fewer people is a good thing. We will go through some pains as we automate our economy and find new ways to care for our aging population- but future generations will thank us for finally coming to grips with population growth.
Now we just have to control our urge to import the entire world as economic immigrants.
4
Might Arena put out the welcome mat for immigrants?
Oops, sorry, that's not allowed by Washington.
23
Closing public schools is like closing public libraries, it's one of the most poignant signs of decline (even demise) of a town. It's sad, not just for the loss of the old way of life, but a sign that town is no longer rejuvenating (with insufficient numbers of kids to justify the public service for them), thereby accelerating its decline. This is not to mention the job loss to faculty and staffers in the closing schools.
I don't mean to sound flippant, but in a rural area, a school nine miles away does not sound too far away. (We are not talking about 90 miles, but just 9 miles. With school bus still operational, at least kids are still getting an education.
Going forward, I can see a world in which online education coming to the rescue (for the true purpose of educating kids), coupled with home-schooling. That would mean broadband needs to be available to these rural families, not just for educational purpose, but to allow them to stay connected.
Bottomline is, times are changing, the world is evolving, and we have to roll with it. We could cry our guys out and drown our sorrow with alcohol and opioid, or we can do something about it.
24
The school I went to as a kid closed as well and reopened as a charter school catering to a very select group. (with religious criteria)
I remember not being able to have my bus pass paid for since I was literally on the wrong side of the street where they had the cut off. It was 5 miles away, so I don't think 7 miles (in the story) is that far at all.
Having said that, governments from the top down (republican) are prioritizing their budgets for such privatization (charter schools) whether it is obvious or not. The pressure on communities to keep up with the tax rates increases as the tax cuts for the wealthy continue.
It is just a matter of dollars and (non)sense.
25
The low-tax-at-all-costs mantra misleadingly popularized by Gov. Walker, and other like-minded, low-information politicians has devastated public education everywhere. Sadly, Wisconsin voters used to know better and had, until a generation ago, one of the most robust public systems in the country. Yes, the demographics are dauntiing and educating tax-paying residents is a continuing challenge. Solutions, long- and short-term, are out there. Lowering taxes is not among them. There is more than enough wealth in Wisconsin for a strong and growing system for all students in every district. Enough ultra high-wealth residents in this state have drafted behind the workers, farmers, teachers, accountants, and nurses who have been pedaling as fast and hard as they can for longer than enough.
75
It isnt just schools are closing, so are hospitals. It looked like the ACA would reverse that, but it is being torn apart. There are work arounds if people are willing to make changes. Rural areas started with one room schools and they could go back to them, or, they could set up boarding schools. I wonder how many immigrants send their children to school? I lived in rural Ontario where they had a tiny hospital at the airport where a pilot lived on site so emergencies that couldnt be handled could be flown. But then, Canada has an organized single payer health care.
My father and mother both came from rural areas and moved into the suburbs and built a house. I couldnt wait to get out of the burbs and into the city.
24
The hospital in North Adams, MA is now basically emergency care now and people now have to travel 10-20 miles for hospitalization. It's truly frightening and disgusting. We're becoming a backward thinking third world country.
Decent high-speed internet access is more important than many may imagine. It's absolutely critical for fully participating in society today. It's a basic human right.
Too many rural communities have substandard or no internet access. The REA and NTCA brought electricity and telephone access to rural America in the mid 20th century. But there's been little to no similar effort to bring modern internet access.
Imagine for a moment how *your* life would be without access to the internet.
30
Robert, excellent post. Many communities such as these all over WI have vigorously advocated for high-speed internet for some time. State of WI pays lip service to this need as their 'political owners' have a different agenda. An REA type structure would be beneficial, but won't ever happen. Telecom and big donor political contributions are more important in Madison than the educational advancement of Arena, WI.
11
You're absolutely right Robert.
Just imagine how many parents now living in apartments in big cities, struggling with high real estate & other costs, dream of being able to raise their kids somewhere with clean air, yards to run around in and a close-knit community.
High speed internet won't allow them all to do so, but there are many people that now have the flexibility to work from almost anywhere if they are able to get online with good speeds. It could revitalize some more remote towns like Arena, whilst helping take growth pressure off of the bigger cities. Win, win!
5
I have seen the same hollowing out in southeastern Ohio, as farms consolidated, nearby businesses closed, and small villages shriveled. A very sad story that may partly explain the unreasoning fear that seems to motivate many these days.
15
Several commentators in other articles have spoken about the "true" America, the heartland, away from the evil, liberal coasts. It looks, however, as if most of the young people are moving away from the heartland to the heart of evil!
Yes, I feel sorry for the folks losing their school, and this will only hasten the demise of the town, as no young family will move there.
42
Not me. The voters in these areas drank the Republican "no taxes!" kool-aid, and now they have to deal with the heartburn.
One of the (many) reasons why hometown is a "high-tax" area is because we make an attempt to care for ALL residents, not just the white racist ones.
33
Maybe this is a northeastern bias, but reality check, this is not an isolated rural community -- it is within commuting distance to Madison -- where there are plenty of starbucks and thai restaurants. Perhaps not the best example for the point of the story.
33
Arena is 29 mi , 44 minute drive to Madison.
15
In DC, people commute every day from farther away than that.
I agree. If they were smart they would tout their inexpensive real estate and build bedroom communities. Then they would get their strip malls, retail chains, fast food and Starbucks. That would provide local employment for young people and increase the tax base. Someone after reading this article is going to snatch up the homes that have lost value without a school or hospital in the vicinity. This seems like a prime opportunity for Jared Kushner.
These people keep voting for the past -- why are they surprised when their children move away for a future?
262
This is not a sneer. Democrats have ALWAYS supported public schools, money for drug prevention, gun control, and public health care.
These rural voters, who absolutely refuse to vote for democrats or pay higher taxes for their own towns, will lose the children's public schools. They refuse to consider gun control to protect the children from being slaughtered, will not support funding for the opioids that some of the kids will eventually become addicted to, will not support Obamacare or any iteration of it to protect their health and family. The towns will continue to fade and die.
It is not a stretch to say that they would rather die than vote for a democrat -- and so they will, and their children, and their schools.
309
Both Sauk County where Spring Green is located and Iowa County where Arena is located voted for Clinton over Trump. Don’t be so quick to stereotype rural voters.
1
Amen.
2
This is not an issue about taxes or Democrats vs Republicans. It's a symptom of the decline in rural communities. During the Great Recession the town where I live lost 20% of its 1,200 population. The school is down to 400 students K-12. People don't want to close that school, but I don't know how much longer it can go on. If schools acquire a reputation for not being great, young families don't want to move to that community. Put that together with no jobs except in healthcare and tourism and you have big problems.
5
How many kids went to Arena's school before it was closed? How many people worked in this school? It's amazing how fact-free this article is.
16
The school district had only 66 incoming Kindergartners. It seems, the school is too small to be affordable for the community.
1
My question was about Arena's school itself, not the district.
https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_detail.asp?Search=1&Scho...
114 students, 10 teachers, 16 Kindergartners and recently converted to a Magnet Charter school.
On the other hand, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin is expanding with a Taiwanese tech company.
1
Not sure how this is germane to the situation in Arena and other small towns across Wisconsin. Mount Pleasant, while near farmland is far closer to larger cities like Kenosha and Racine. Mt. Pleasant and the surrounding area is home to other industry and has become a bedroom community for Chicago. Bringing large, foreign companies to our state, giving them obscene tax breaks and worse allowing them access to one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world is not a viable solution for any community. It is folly.
13
An outer suburb of Milwaukee isn't exactly the same as an isolated dying farming community.
1
The same thing happened to my elementary school in rural Ohio, northwest of Dayton. Built in 1921, the Phillipsburg School was one of those glorious red brick, two-story piles with the tall windows that many Baby Boomers will recall with great fondness from their childhoods. During the 1950's and '60's, Phillipsburg School educated several hundred students annually, all from surrounding farms and no-stoplight towns with more dogs roaming the streets than cars. Very much like Arena, Wisconsin, I suppose.
Like Arena, Phillipsburg, and the countless thousands of others like them across America, belong to another time, other demographics. A time when students dressed up for autumn harvest festivals and May Day dances---little mini-me eight-year-olds in tuxedos, dresses, crewcuts and bouiffants. The playground slide where I fell and cut my chin (the scar persists to this day); the gymansium where my sister Cindy overshot the basket, hitting the wall, breaking her arm. The principal's office where I received spankings. Twice. The house on nearby Route 49, where little David Conklin, 5-years-old, was rushing across the street the first day back after Christmas, to show off his new G.I.Joe to waiting friends, was run over and killed by the school bus in which I was riding, and our dear bus driver, Mary, inconsolable, as we kids filed off the bus and walked the last block to school. Poor David, his mother kneeling over him
It may be closed, but my school will never be forgotten.
19
Thank you for rousing memories. Route 49 was what we drove to get from Dayton to the relatives around Greenville and on past Union City to a farm in Indiana. My great aunt Zeona and her husband Harry lived in Phillipsburg. Sometimes we stoppped there.
2
I am sure it was special to you but I wonder how many kids of legal-immigrants would be harassed in a rural school like this. I am a legal immigrant (my wife and I have advanced Engineering degrees) who lived in rural Wisconsin for 15 years. Once when our family (my wife, myself, 2 kids and my in-laws) were walking a white kid out of the blue uttered obscenities and the made a mock action of shooting at us. His father, who was nearby was just admiring at him.
I wonder how many kids of background similar to us would have been bullied in schools such as Arena for not looking pasty white, or for not being Christian (every neighbor in Wisconsin tried to convert us), for not playing American-football and for placing emphasis on mathematics and Science.
5
I am sure it was special to you but I wonder how many kids of legal-immigrants would have been bullied and harassed in your school for being vegetarian or for not looking pasty white or for not playing American-football or for being good in mathematics!
This is just the beginning folks. Because the school will be far away, many students won't attend. They will not receive an education. They not learn the basics. They not keep up with their peers. They will become isolated. They will not be engaged citizens. They will not vote. See the pattern. What happened to our country?
25
What? No. There are such things as truancy laws, you know. Those aren't going away. The concern isn't about whether the kids will get an education (other than the sometimes frustrating logistics associated with travel to and from school, which I admit exist but in all but the extreme cases, don't actually suppress attendance). The concern is about the school as a center of these communities, and where that center can exist without the school in it. I speak with confidence on this point because the same exact painful process is under way in my home state of Vermont (for example: https://www.boston.com/news/education/2018/01/21/with-just-3-students-a-....
7
EJW- you know these things based on what verifiable information? Simply because this isn't a hip metropolis DOES NOT mean these people are uneducated, unengaged, etc.
While they may live in a rural area (Madison is relatively close), you're making presumptuous assumptions that are wrong.
1
I know this because I live it. I teach in rural Colorado. Truancy Laws you say, what a joke! We call, we write---nothing. We need the student numbers because that is how we are funded. Our district is fearful of lawsuits too. Do either of you teach in a rural area? Let me know. Parents do not value education either. Both of these replies to my comment are way out of touch with reality in rural areas.
Q. What happens to rural town after it loses its only school?
A. You get more trump supporter.
76
All this is brought to the rural residents of Wisconsin by the very man they elected Governor. Nice to see the trickle down to the K-12 arena; the flagship university, UW-Madison, is already being destroyed in the conservatives' war on higher education and critical thinking. Can't have people with brains and knowledge walking around. Them is liberals.
254
A way of life is passing away.
4
One solution could be allowing refugees to come and populate these towns. Or helping the immigrant workers hired for the farms become American citizens and settle permanently. Most refugees and immigrants come from rural areas in their own home countries and they are in desperate need and within a generation they will all consider themselves Americans.
Once upon a time in our early colonization of this land our government encouraged immigration to fill the void of labor needed to build a nation. Now it shuts them out because of their skin color or religious background.
But unfortunately it’s the very people in rural America who need this type human of economic revival, who vote conservatively and often are xenophobia.
104
Unhinged from reality, my medium size sanctuary city's school district is bursting at the seems with immigrant children who require a rash of extra services (ESL, free meals, paraprofessionals) that have pushed the city's finances into freefall
1
Shessh ...did you - ya know - READ the article?
There is NO SHORTAGE of workers
THey do NOT need your refugees or illegal immigrants.
They need more and different businesses to develop an economy
A bunch of migrants whose education is around 4th grade and show skill is picking fruit is not the answer
Nor is filling up the town with refugees whose religion oppresses women
It ain't 1850 anymore. We do NOT need uneducated illiterate peasants to plant crops.
ANd yeah the average total education in El Salvador, Guatemala & Honduras is 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 years with an illiteracy rate of 17-23%
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“You can’t have four teachers for 40 kids,” he said
The teacher's union would LOVE for that to happen.
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So would the parents of the students - it would be like sending one's child to private school!
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I'm sure many parents of school age children would LOVE that too.
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I am 71 years old. I started kindergarten in Hudson, Iowa, a tiny burg a half a dozen miles from Waterloo, the big city. There were fewer than 25 of us kindergartners. My parents went to school Battiest, OK, a hamlet that would have considered Hudson a metroplex. It didn't even have a kindergarten.
What I and my parents considered, from our young perspectives, Paradise or something close to it, the parents of today's future Americans, the vanguard of the "smart" phone generation, call "Hell." I have news for them. They are wrong. Oh, so very wrong.
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I say good ridance to this school. I am mortified by the words on the paper tucked behind the flag in the illustration. All about being subservient. Nice beats smart. I grew up in a small city, not a small town, but much of my extended family lived in small towns. Some small towners were witty, truly good and genuinely likeable. Others were either snarky in private or unable to conform and as a result excluded from what passed for polite society. When school districts were consolidated people found out that students could read while riding a bus. It could actually be good for them.
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I know Arena quite well. It is a beautiful place with some darned wonderful people. I would be very happy if I could live there and raise children there, but as the article says, there are no jobs closer than Madison or Fitchburg. It makes me sad to see this town dying.
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Although the shift from rural to urban has been happening for some time, American cities have become increasingly expensive putting that option beyond reach for many. As populations age these communities will disappear. One way to invigorate rural America is through immigration but there seems to be no appetite for this despite its proven effectiveness.
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yes immigration will solve everything, school districts already strapped for cash can easily afford all of the extra costs associated with non-english speaking immigrants
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Perhaps you should read the post more carefully. Never said immigration solves everything. What immigration can do is increase the population of rural towns . Also, immigrants are more likely than existing residents to start small businesses thereby increasing the tax base.
The old rural folks voted for Trump to deport immigrants and destroy immigrant families. Let those old rural people rot in their valueless homes and trailers, with no home help, and nothing near by. They get what they deserve.
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This is another great example of how our society is rapidly changing before our very eyes. This shift from rural to more urban/suburban areas has been happening for decades but seems to be accelerating lately in our internet connected age.
I thank my parents all the time for moving our young family out west in the early 70s - where there were more opportunities and promise for the future. It was scary for them to move across the country with limited money, but they did, and were successful thanks to a lot of hard work.
I often wonder who I would have grown up to be if that move had never happened.
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My parents left a very poor part of the South after WWII for my father to attend college in DC on the GI bill. I am very thankful that they did this because it allowed me to have much more life opportunity.
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Most parents want the best for their children. Without quality local schools parents must homeschool, subject the kids to a morning/afternoon commute or move. Economic opportunities and educational opportunities are far better near large cities then in bucolic rural America. I regret my parents never moved when I was a child. This dying coal town declines every year.
Without young families and children communities take on a different reality. There is a strong likelihood that slowly the population will decline, local businesses close and real estate values plummet. Hospitals and government become major employers.
America must face facts and accept the harsh reality of its own creation. The priorities established by our elected officials are military and corporations. Who elected these people? Most likely the same people who are losing their schools.
Corporations need quality workers. Quality workers want dynamic communities with diverse opportunities & quality education. So the vicious cycle slowly grinds away at the very soul of rural America.
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This is happening all over Wisconsin. A referendum for a new school in a local community to replace the one filled with asbestos has failed three times. It has pit neighbor against neighbor. What's the solution? What Scott Walker is doing isn't working.
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Au contraire K.
What SW is doing is working PERFECTLY for the wealthy repub donors who put guys like him into office. It is lowering their taxes, which is always their goal.
Their kids go to private schools, so they don't worry about the state of public ed. The less education folks have, the more likely they are to vote R. Leading again to more tax cuts. See how that works?
As I said, working PERFECTLY.
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Scott Walker is a high school graduate who was bought, paid for, and installed as governor by the Koch Brothers.
Tells you something, does it not?
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The village of Arena isn’t losing just a school; they are also losing their sense of community. This elementary school kept families engaged with each other. Their kids grew up together and developed lasting, safe and familiar friendships with one another. There will be irrevocable damage to this village because of the decision to permanently close this school. It will become a ghost town faster than it will take for dust to accumulate in the school’s hallways. I came from a tiny rural area in Wisconsin. The school I would have attended closed because of no money. The next closest school was 15 miles away. Due to no busses, parents drove their kids to school. This was back in the late 1950s.
I wish this article provided a map with legends which indicated population & enrollment numbers of the schools and the distances between Arena, Lone Rock and Spring Green to give the reader a more complete sense of the entire picture.
I am hoping that at least something like a 4-H Club or scouting troops exists or will develop because at least they provide avenues for these kids to learn together, to have fun, to share exciting activities, and to continue to have some semblance of a community.
I was extremely dishearten by the attitude of some Spring Green residents for being unmoved by Arena's school closing so more money would be available for their schools. So much for smaller communities pulling together & living that Midwest attitude of "caring is sharing".
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Two things--
First, rural areas are emptying out world wide--from Mongolia to Nigeria to Alaska. "Super cities" are being created, all because it's easier to make a living there. So Wisconsin is the rule, not the exception and is a part of a planetary-wide change in our species.
Second, I discovered first hand in my own small, stable neighborhood that the community support system, social support system, neighbor communication and cooperation system--social gatherings, everything--was based on parents, mostly mothers, but fathers eventually also, who made friendships with their children's friends parents in kindergarten and remained friends or in close contact even after their children grew up and enrolled their own children in the local school's kindergarten.
Schools do create strong cooperative social structures in stable communities. We are losing that stability due to economic globalization, a collapse in wages, and intense competition for resources.
The GOP that decries loss of "community" and social mores and blaming those who are irreligious and women in particular for wanting an education and taking contraceptives, ignore the root cause--economics.
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GOP Economics...
And now we need to concentrate on designing better cities with better walkability, easy access to parks, less cars, less sprawl, more bike paths and healthy neighborhoods.
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It is the same scenario in Central Wisconsin, even in moderate sized towns. We live in such a town but with a large medical clinic and hospital so parents's expectations for their chidrens' education are high and referendum to raise property taxes for the school district always pass.
But the demographics are not promising. I know of three children among dozens who left for a university education and who returned home incuding our children. People including the farm families, excluding the Amish, are having fewer children and the poulation is aging. Only the large dairy farms and meat packing plants have attracted immigrants to work since few of the locals will take those jobs.
All of this has political consequences. The people who are left are increasingly older, if young are mostly without education past high school and most polls show these people tend to be Republicans.
While the emigrants to metro areas already swell a Democratic plurality. The social ills that were once confined to the inner cities such as obesity, unwed mothers and drug abuse are now endemic in rural areas.
This is a trend that started years ago in the Plains states and now has spread to the dailry lands. I see nothing on the horizon to reverse these trends.
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Living near this area, I can say that this is not unique, as the author has pointed out. Schools are extremely expensive, and with a handful of students and the surrounding areas seeing changes in populations, it is inevitable, as is the domino effect on the people in the area.
It is NOT due to lower taxes, for sure. It is NOT due to one or another governor in office. It is due to changing times, and had generated the same feelings as when I was a youth and our scattered one-room school houses (now considered a quaint artifact of the past) were closing.
Keeping 'em down on the farm is an enormous problem. Much of this country has no choice but to farm for a living and that has been changing for decades.
My family and I vacationed in the west a few years ago, and driving across Montana, North Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma and other vast states, I was struck with being able to sense the health of the town very quickly. Shabby stores, shuttered stores, old folks on the street gave an immense sense of sadness and dread for the people calling them home. On the other hand just down the road we sometimes entered what just felt vibrant. New businesses, neat yards, fresh signs, more people (and younger ones, too) on the streets. A completely differnt feeling with bustle and energy.
I have thought of that experience often, thinking it was avoiding my state, but in the smaller areas it has not despite those who wish their town to prosper doing their best. But it is inevitable.
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It seems a lot of commenters on this article either didn't read it or have no experience with rural areas. They only saw "Wisconsin" and "school closure" then decided to rage about tax cuts and Republicans.
Living in rural areas is no longer feasible for those who want decent paying jobs. This reality is seen in every state no matter what the political milieu and there is no easy answer.
The problem is especially acute in farming communities because large-scale factory farms simply require fewer workers. Even in a hypothetical situation where the town welcomed immigrants, it would be a drop in the bucket compared with the labor required for family farms 50 years ago.
However, these places still exist and have residents. The growing disparities between urban and rural needs to be addressed.
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Nice parry. Very convenient to blame it all on economic change. The whole underpinning of the system, the economy, the society would be different if there were more resources devoted to building up rural and urban communities, not placating the rich. But that's not the Republican way. Sorry. What you see across the American landscape is the result of years of siphoning people's income, livelihoods and tax dollars, for the benefit of rich people. Had it gone into wages (as it should have), the wages would have been spent locally and built up the economy; had it gone into tax revenues for the people (not the rich), those tax dollars could have built up the schools and community. What could have helped keep that town and countless others alive is sitting in the bank accounts of a gilded handful.
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While the declining number of children may be due to other factors, the Republic campaign to defund public education has greatly contributed to the feasibility of continuing to provide schools. It then becomes a vicious circle. America needs to change it's priorities. We need to pay enough taxes to support a vibrant public education system in rural and urban areas. Vote the Republicans out if they won't get on board.
4
This story could have been written about Upstate NY north and west of Albany (such as Washington County). Since moving up here in 1979, not only have we lost our industrial and manufacturing base (GE was a major employer in Fort Edward), but most of the small dairy farms have ceased operations; there are only a few mega-dairies around here.
Scott Walker's Wisconsin: Older, Poorer, Less Educated. Wisconsin is now number 10 in outward migration. Gone are the days of strong support for public education, our great heritage of environmental protections and clean government. He has pretty much trashed it all to save a few dollars in taxes.
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It's back to the old days of "Escape to Wisconsin" bumper stickers being changed to "Escape Wisconsin."
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Cool! Excellent!!!
People voted and they got the government they deserve.
Congratulations!
A state that has/will elect him for a fourth time (including the recall) and that rejects Russ Feingold twice and is soon to kick out Tammy Baldwin gets what it deserves.
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This hurts so bad. I grew up in Wisconsin and still love it, despite the backwardness and corruption of the Scott Walker-led Republican Party. When Walker is busy giving away $3B - $4B to Foxconn, there is going to be less money for 'niceties' like education for rural Wisconsin communities. The Kochs demanded lower taxes and Wisconsinites forfeited money to corporations for education.
Quality education requires a commitment by civic leaders to make the investment in public education and probably will mean higher taxes. When I think of what's happening in Wisconsin I keep seeing the Goya painting of Saturn devouring his son. It's a tough choice and Wisconsin voters have decided to cede their fate with Walker over the future of their own children.
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I also love Wisconsin and had considered moving there. As a teacher I passed. Scott Walker is running for his 3rd term. He is still in office because the citizens of Wisconsin have chosen to elect him again and again. I lived in a rural area in Ohio and we went from 4 elementary schools to one large one . 3 towns lost their home school and as a parent my kids and I were sad when our school closed but it was a good decision. Instead of a school built in 1919 my kids got an updated building with useable toilets. As a tax payer I couldn't see paying to build 4 small schools in 4 small towns.
2
This is a truly tragic story, no doubt. But remember that school closings and student reassignments are a far more common thing in inner city areas and we don't read nostalgic, tear-jerk articles about them. Very similar to the opioid crisis, which was a crime story when the victims were inner city minorities and became a tear-jerk public health crisis when the victims became rural white people.
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Actually, through the "local" press like the The Chicago Tribune, you do read those stories.
For the CPS schools, it also includes a lot of debate and disputes over demographic and racial claims.
But it is indeed happening to bastions such as Roman Catholic schools and churches.
A school built to hold 2,000 that has an enrollment of 600, or a church built to hold 2,000 that has a congregation of 300, don't have a great ROI potential.
wow, how meanspirited can you get?
Everybody - no sympathy for the rural whites- they probably voted for Trump too, so they deserve everything that's coming to them.
And thinking like Joel's is precisely why we have a divided country, that doesn't take care of, nor care for, each other.
Or maybe calling that out for the shameful callousness that Joel's note embodies is just a Red State "Christian value" that's sadly out of step with the Joels of this world, and his 56 "recommenders".
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This is a sad but predictable story. I grew up near a Midwestern town like Arena, on a farm. The population there has not increased in 50 years, and shows no signs of growth. Years ago they consolidated several small school districts into one, covering about 400 mi.² and graduating 120 seniors a year. But there has been no growth, no new construction nor major curriculum changes in many years, and regular defeats of school millages. About 20 of my high school classmates went on to college, and only two or three came back. Many others never finished high school.
These communities served an agricultural system that has disappeared - small farms don’t make it any more. The towns were established typically 10 miles or so apart, to make it possible for farmers to drive wagons to and from a railroad stop in one day. That’s all gone, and it’s not coming back.
To some extent the residents of these areas are both victims and self-destructive. The times changed and they didn’t. OTOH, they felt they had good lives and did not imagine that they might have to give them up. They identified with their community, as humans are wont to do. If they would move they would likely end up among the urban poor, and they and their children would be no better off.
Rural to urban migration is happening everywhere. I see no good solution to this inevitable socioeconomic change, and little help for individuals left without a safety net in today’s dog-eat-dog society, abandoned like their homes.
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So now in America, children are not even entitled to free public education in their neighborhoods?? Seriously, what makes America great anymore?
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Nothing. Nothing at all. And I say that through tears. But you know it. I know it & until we all say it - nothing is going to change.
It seems the very folks who think I am deranged for saying this and are rah rah rah - God Bless America, are mainly the very folks getting hurt.
They certainly helped elect the worst person to defend their values possible, yet won't admit it for a second.
4
According to the article the kids will have to attend a school 9 miles away. Oh the Humanity!
While I did not grow up in this area, my mother did, and both her parents, and their families, back to the time they emigrated from Germany in the late 19th century. I would like to have more empathy for the people of the River Valley School District.
But this story - and many like it - are too often filled with well-meaning rural folks who consistently moralize about the value of self-sufficiency. Yet when their school districts ask them for additional revenue so they can continue to operate and staff these small schools with declining enrollments? Time and again, the answer is no. Just as it was here. The school district went to the voters. The voters said no - let the schools die.
Undoubtedly rural America is on a declining course that is dictated predominantly by the cruel indifference of economics, and little else. There are no government policies that will change the fate of communities like Arena. Workers who fuel the knowledge economy prefer urbanized areas with great schools, well-educated neighbors, and diverse cultural offerings. Companies that make goods to be shipped want proximity to interstates, and rail lines, and major airports. In the modern world, there is little demand for zero- and one-stoplight towns along two-lane state highways.
The irony is that those who have consistently moralized to urban dwellers about the great rural ethos - hard work, self-sufficiency, caring for your own - are slowly hoisting themselves on the petard of their own hypocrisy.
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