I grew up hearing stories of my grandmother’s days in a one-room schoolhouse, working with one ear tuned in to catch the older students’ lessons across the room. Some local history group moved a tiny renovated schoolhouse (which spent part of its life as a chicken coop) to the field across from “the Farm,” my grandmother’s central New York state home. As a kid I imagined her sitting and scribbling away inside walls like those, back when the world was black and white and everyone was friendly (as it turns out, my imagination was not 100 percent historically accurate).
It wasn’t until I came to work on a Maine island that I realized multi-age classrooms are by no means a thing of the past.
Swan’s Island has a healthy school population of around 50 kids between kindergarten and eighth grade. They’re booted off elsewhere for high school; many make the brave daily commute on the 6:45 am ferry to Mount Desert Island.
As rough as this sounds to my fellow non-morning people, it’s a convenience compared to the days before the ferry came. Students seeking a high school education would usually board on the mainland and come home for holidays or weekends if they were lucky. It was a dramatic change to go from a life within an insulated, close community—where your teachers know not just your name but also the names of all your relatives—to an anonymous boarding school environment.
The daily steamboat run once forged strong connections between Swan’s Island and Rockland, so students often schooled there and boarded with relatives or family friends. Later students often went to places such as Higgins Classical Institute in Charleston, Maine. Some were eager for the chance to go to a new place while others (understandably) spent time being violently homesick.
Even with today’s relatively convenient ferry run, island students’ experience still differs from that of their mainland peers.
There are three classes in the school: K-2, 3-5 and 6-8. The teachers have the challenge of teaching every subject to students at three different levels. Brave souls! The combined grades create a unique classroom environment that is compounded by the close ties between the students. When asked what they liked most about their school, one of the kids cited being related to one third of classmates. It feels like a family.
Before consolidation in the early 1950s there was a different school for each of the island communities: Minturn, Atlantic and the Harbor (also known as “Swan’s Island,” “the Village” and other names a newcomer can’t keep track of). There are stories of people’s island-born parents not meeting until eighth grade graduation.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with the Swan’s Island kids over the past couple of years. Last year I started up a “History Detectives” club that met after school at the library. In the spring, we put together an exhibits based on an archeological dig at the old quarry (my favorite student-made artifact identification card read “Rusty Thing”).
This year I’ve been working on a multimedia storytelling program with the 6-8 graders as part of a service-learning project. Each student is creating a short movie clip to tell a story about an aspect of island life, from lobster fishing to video games. It’s fascinating to see how tuned in they are to the community that surrounds them—something I barely thought of as a middle school student in a small town. Each kid’s got a different story, but they’re islanders through and through.