Anna's Philosophy

My dreams are usually pretty odd; they have sparked more than one of my books, and sometimes they feed them throughout. Once in a while they hit kinda close to home and this one hit it on the nailhead. Last night’s dream took place in my home town. I was walking around, kinda walking down memory lane, except for going past my mom’s house. As I understand it, it’s a rooming house of some kind now, so I can’t bring myself to go see what they’ve done to the place.

As I walked past the grade school, I thought about going to see the new-since-I-went-to-school-here high school, but that complex is way down the road not too far from the football field. I didn’t have a car and I didn’t want to walk that far. I’m not sure how, but somewhere along the way, I learned that the junior high school and the high school were now closed. I was stunned. What will all those kids do for an education? Whatever possessed the school board to close those facilities? Too few kids? Surely not.

The issue got me to thinking of all those families that my home town supports. I don’t know the ratio, but there are both farmers and ranchers. My own brother is mostly a rancher, but he has a couple fields too. Mostly, our land is too lumpy for good farms. As far as I know, the vast majority of the ranches and farms are family run businesses, and most families have kids – kids of all ages – kids that need to go to school.

If you take away school, what can those parents do? Home schooling is an option – I’ve done that, and as I understand it, the system has improved since then. Things like breeding season and calving season or planting season and harvesting season might get in the way of that. Unfortunately, home schooling still follows the public school schedule, so, while they won’t complain too much if you can finish early, they’ll dox you if you don’t finish on time.

Another home schooling option would be to buy your own books and structure your own lessons. I’m not sure how that works exactly, but I think the kid has to take a test to see if they pass on to the next grade.

A more drastic option would be to send the kid off to some boarding school, but that seems a little drastic to me. The worry would be – can they afford to do so?

My thoughts took me to a much easier option – move to somewhere that had a school. If you’re lucky, you can continue to be a farmer or a rancher, but moving would be such a wrench in their lives.

So let’s look at the effect of these families selling out and moving. #1 problem: Who would buy if there’s no school? Certainly no one with kids or hoping to have kids.

So families leave or they go broke trying to educate their kids and what happens to the businesses in town? If the only people left in the district are those without kids or whose kids have grown and gone off to make their own way. that cuts the business overhead in half at the very least. So, nothing new coming in, and old folks growing old, what do you think will happen to the businesses in town. It won’t take but a few years for the entire town to become a ghost town – all because some bureaucrat wanted to save a few buck on the school budget.

I was just thinking about going to the board and arguing the sense of opening those schools when my husband got up, and being daylight, the dog got up and greeted her day with a floppy-eared head shake, and the dream was gone. But it’s still a good issue so I’m arguing it here. Thanks for reading