Nancy Wooten Blanchat was the youngest student attending a one-room schoolhouse near Stafford, Kan., when her teacher sent her outside while older pupils worked on their cursive handwriting.
As Blanchat recalls, she was supposed to study shadows as some kind of science project. Instead, the unsupervised 5-year-old found herself being stared down by a giant bull near the merry-go-round. She froze briefly, then ran back to tell her teacher.
“She had to call the neighbors to tell them their bull was out,” Blanchat, now a resident of Augusta, said.
Blanchat is one of thousands of Kansans who share memories of rural one-room schoolhouses in which students of all ages studied together. While such schoolhouses bring to mind scenes from “Little House on the Prairie,” set in the late 1800s, there were still several hundred such schools operating in Kansas in the 1950s and early ’60s.
Today, the one-room schoolhouse is making something of a comeback, albeit much modified. This fall, the Wichita school district started an experimental program called Creative Minds in which up to 20 students from kindergarten through sixth grade are being taught by one teacher. The program, located in the Union Station building downtown, is designed to appeal to families who have left or are considering leaving public schools. Similar one-room concepts have sprouted across the county over the past decade.
The original one-room schoolhouses were the product of rural communities wanting their children to have at least the basics of education. The earliest in south central Kansas date back to the late 1860s.
One-room schools generally offered curriculum for grades 1-8, with students ranging from ages 5 to 21. “There wasn’t someone in each of the eight grades each year,” said Darryl Claassen, who’s researched the schools in Butler County. “There might be only six students in a year.”
The earliest ones were usually built on land donated by a farmer. “Each family (of a student) would pitch in and pay the teacher some,” Claaseen said. “Often times the teacher was passed around among families in the school district. She would stay in a private home for maybe six weeks at a time.”
Eventually, local and state tax money was designated for the schools’ support. The schools might serve an area as small as two by three miles — about the distance a student could be expected to walk, ride a bike or horse each day.
Historically, Kansas had more than its share of these one-size-fits-all classrooms and kept them going longer than most other states.
A 1938 state report, for instance, estimated that Kansas had 2,500 to 3,500 more one-room schools than it needed. Another report, in 1942, showed that Kansas had the third-highest number of schools of any state in the United States, with the third- lowest enrollment per school.
By then, many communities were voluntarily closing their schools and sending their children to larger schools — called “graded schools” — in nearby towns or cities. Reasons included a loss of rural population, higher per-pupil cost of small schools and a belief that larger schools with more teachers and students offered a better education.
On the other hand, some believed teachers in one-room settings could better tailor instruction to the needs of individual students and that students benefited from the interaction of older and younger classmates. A community’s identity was also usually tied up in its school.
With encouragement from the state, rural school closings and consolidations continued, but there were still 2,800 districts in 1950, many with only one school.
Blanchat’s family moved from Topeka to Bethel, a tiny community outside Stafford in south-central Kansas, in 1960 so that her father could become the preacher at the Bethel Church of Christ. They lived next door to the church, about two miles from the school, which was known as C-14.
Blanchat’s sister, Cheryl, entered its third grade, her brother, Paul, started fifth grade and Nancy enrolled in first grade at age 5 because there was no kindergarten. The school evidently was on par or better with those in Topeka, as Cheryl came home crying on her first day “because C-14 was a bit ahead in their studies and already knew cursive writing,” Blanchat said. “Dad stayed up with her until she learned cursive so she could be on par with the other two third graders.”
Photo courtesy of Darryl Claassen
A 1952 photo shows horses and bicycles were used for transportation by students at the Hunter school in Butler County.
The students’ desks were arranged in a circle around a desk occupied by their teacher, Mrs. McCandless. “She would call each ‘class’ to her desk and teach them their age-appropriate lessons, then she would give the worksheets as she moved from class to class,” Blanchat said. “I don’t think there were ever more than three people per class.”
At snack time, Mrs. McCandless would pass each child a milk carton, then go around the room adding two tablespoons of Nesquick chocolate powder and shaking the cartons “so we didn’t have to drink plain milk.”
C-14 actually had two rooms counting the basement, where a stage had been built. It had a curtain that rolled up and down and had been painted with oil paints, like a carnival banner. Cheryl felt magical every time she stepped on stage.
Paul — “the top student in my class of one,” he says — got into mischief with two older students, seventh-graders, setting off bottle bombs in the outhouse and skinny dipping in a nearby creek during lunch.
All the siblings remember the great lunches — like chicken and noodles, yeast rolls and cherry cobbler — made daily by the cook, Thelma Sims.
C-14 even had a rival school, C-11, also located outside Stafford, competing with its students in potato sack races and tug-of-war.
Blanchat was the only first-grader although a 4-year-old friend, Colleen Murphy, sometimes attended.
In its heyday, the school had about 20 students, but the number dwindled. “My sister was the only one in her class, as was I, unless Collen Murphy visited. It closed after one year for me,” said Blanchat, who moved on to second grade in Stafford. “We had no idea what a special experience it was for us.”
