Rural NB community brings back one-room school
Editor’s note: The following is part one of a two-part feature story. Part two will run in our Oct. 19 edition.
About 20 miles east of Bridgewater in the small New Brunswick town of Knowlesville, a community of modern settlers are pairing new and old ideas in their quest to live happily and educate their kids.
“We’re inviting people to the rural area to take part in the land trust initiative and to consider this home,” said Tegan Wong-Daugherty, a teacher and director at the Knowlesville Art and Nature School, a charter elementary school with 20 students. “We really felt that we needed a school as the heart of the community,”
The school is a throwback to the old rural schoolhouse, and it’s also a new gathering place for Knowlesville, a town of less than 1,000 residents where a group of families in 2010 started a 130-acre neighborhood land trust, offering 2.5-acre plots for other people and families who wanted to be part of a sustainable, small rural community.
“A lot of the older people from previous generations say once you remove the schools from the communities, you really take the heart out of rural communities,” said Wong-Daugherty, as the school was holding its annual country fair fundraiser. “We tried to bring one back. It seemed like a pipe dream.”
The school reflects the values and lifestyle of the startup community. The multi-age classes spend a lot of time learning outside, studying the forest or working on projects, and in art, music and writing – inspired by the Waldorf and Montessori school systems.
Last spring, the students used their math skills to design and build a longhouse gazebo with former church pews as benches. They often make their own meals – also applying math – with vegetables they grow and cook sourdough bread in an outdoor clay oven they helped built. The renovated school building is powered by solar panels, heated with wood, draws on a large a community garden for meals, and is connected to homes and roads through wooded trails.
“Right now they’re just finishing a creative writing block where they’re spending every morning writing outside,” said Wong-Daugherty. “We start our days outside, we end our days outside. We have extended recess and lunchtime. Even in winter, everyday we’re outside. There’s a lot of art, activities, writing and music, all integrated with the academics.”
The students “have a main lesson in the morning, when everyone is sort of more academically awake, and that can go on for a month. The idea is that you can sink really deeply into a subject and learn it in full,” she said.
“It’s really given an alternative for some students that were struggling in the public school system and needed something different that met them where they were at.”
Throughout the year the school has 20 students from the 10 families who’ve settled on the land trust plots, and from the area around Knowlesville, located 10 miles east of Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick’s “French Fry Capital of the World.”
