The first of two parts

The laughter and shouts from children at the Caratunk School have been comforting sounds to Sally York over the years.

From her neat, white house across the street, York frequently peered from her kitchen window on school days to watch the playground activities. She could often tell, without looking at a clock, what time of day it was by the sounds the children made at recess.

Next fall, York’s view from the same window will be of an empty building and there will be a stillness unlike anything she has known during her 18 years on School Street.

Because of declining enrollment in this upper Kennebec River community, SAD 13 directors representing Bingham, Moscow, West Forks and Caratunk permanently closed the one-room school this month. The 9-2 vote in January to close it was based on lack of need, since next fall’s enrollment would have been two.

To recognize the closing and to show how special the school was to the remote community, there will be a celebration from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, July 13, in the village. Former pupils from as far away as Arizona are expected to attend. There will be a catered lunch funded by the town, brass band music, school tours and videos shown of school activities over the years.

“It’s a good and bad celebration,” said Amy Bruce, an organizer and the mother of three sons who had attended the school. “We’re all going to miss it terribly.”

“It’s always sad when a community loses its school,” SAD 13 Superintendent Martha Witham said recently. Even though the district will save $60,000 from the closing, that was not the reason behind the move. There were just too few children to offer a quality program, she explained.

That wasn’t always the case in this once-booming timber harvesting community, a community that now caters to outdoor recreation.

Sally York’s husband, John, can remember a time when there were as many as 50 children in the former Lincoln School, the predecessor of the one-room school. His mother taught the last graduating class at the Lincoln School in 1941, a school that served both primary and secondary grades in Caratunk.

When the Lincoln School closed and the one-room school opened in 1948, it was to serve the older elementary population. High school students were bused to schools in Bingham and children in kindergarten through second grade attended the one-room school in neighboring West Forks. As the logging industry in the region died, so did the enrollment in both communities, and the two schools merged at Caratunk in the 1990s.

Last year, teacher Michelle Stevens had nine pupils. This year, she ended with four children, which included her own two daughters, Emily and Kate. Because Stevens and her family live in The Forks, her children attended the school under a superintendent’s agreement that provided SAD 13 with the state subsidy for their education.

The closing has created some anticipation among the children. Seated on the floor playing a board game during lunch break one rainy day, Joseph Pierce, the only boy in the classroom, said he looks forward to playing with boys his age. But the now third-grade pupil also said he will miss the school and the activities he shared with Emily, Kate and Paige Chadbourne. They are like sisters and his respect for them showed on a recent day, when he stepped back and said “ladies first” before entering the “reading room” in a corner of the building.

For Stevens, who served as an aide at the school for three years and as teacher for the past 10 years, the closing is “bittersweet.”

Even though everyone recognized that the closing was imminent, it didn’t make the announcement any easier to take. For many, the school was the focal point of this community. It was where youngsters bonded with the elderly, the community gathered for school affairs and pupils learned about their heritage.

For years, the upriver communities of Caratunk and West Forks were adamant about keeping their one-room schoolhouses open to avoid having the youngsters travel the lengthy bus route over the winding and busy Route 201.

“It just got to a point it just seemed unreasonable to fight to keep the school open,” Selectman Robert “Joe” Bruce said recently. “It was a very tough thing to do.” He noted that his three sons had received an excellent educational start in the school. Everyone was satisfied with the operation of the school, but a certain number of children are needed to make a one-room school work, specifically older children who helped younger ones, he explained.

Even though young adults are moving to the community to fill the white-water rafting and other outdoor recreation positions and are purchasing homes, they are not yet having children, according to Bruce.

Witham said there are no babies in West Forks and she believes there may be one preschool-age child remaining in Caratunk. “It’s not good,” she said of the void.

One mother who contributed her share of pupils in earlier years was Paula Rich. She said her five children were “blessed” to have had the opportunity to attend the one-room school. It was a tough decision to pull Shannon, her daughter, from the fourth grade at the Caratunk School when Rich and her forest-ranger husband, Darrell, moved to Bingham in November.

Rich said life at the one-room school was a time of innocence. “It was a wonderful opportunity for the kids; it was like living 50 years ago,” she said. They were allowed to be children and had little peer pressure. At the Caratunk School, pupils would don boots and snowsuits to play together outside during winter recesses. That activity and the outdoor wear is “not cool” among fourth-grade pupils at Shannon’s new school, she said.

Children at the one-room school also received more individual attention than is readily available in larger classrooms. “Everybody knows everybody in the one-room school; it’s like brothers and sisters,” which is missing in larger schools, she said. But having a successful one-room schoolhouse also hinges on good teachers, and the school has had them in Stevens and Rebecca Young of Caratunk, she said.

Young, who served as the school’s teacher from 1983-1993 and is now SAD 74’s technology coordinator, said pupils from the Caratunk School were much more mature and well-mannered than children from larger schools when out in public. The children are more caring of one another and there appears to be no pecking order. And, “because there was a real blurring of the grades, younger kids really excelled because they eavesdropped on the older kids, who were incredible role models,” she said.

The “most glaring ingredient” that was not in place at the Caratunk School compared to a consolidated school was the classroom interruptions, Young found. Regular schools have to contend with bells, a higher level of noise, and interruptions from children being pulled out of class for physical education, speech therapy, and band instruction. She recalled one week during her last year of teaching in a consolidated school when she had a total of 20 minutes with the entire class without an interruption.

“At the Caratunk School, we did things when we needed to do them and not according to any schedule,” Young said. “I think that just made a world of difference.” She left the small school when she realized how much she missed the camaraderie of other educators.

Just as Young did, Stevens included community involvement in the curriculum. Youngsters learned about the local businesses, and in turn, the local businesses helped support the school with donations for fund-raising activities. The elderly have been equally supportive.

“We’ve had tons of community projects, the elderly supported the school and town, and we supported them,” Stevens said. Pupils raked leaves for homeowners during Make A Difference Day, and one year delivered the leaves to York’s husband, John, for garden mulch. On Halloween, children marched in their costumes through the town and later made treats and handed them out to the elderly. The elderly were invited and visited school frequently for such events as authors’ teas, concerts and plays. After a local couple moved into a Waterville nursing home, the pupils corresponded with them.

In turn, residents would purchase the baked goods the children made for fund-raising events, supported field trips where they were exposed to the arts, theater, museums and other cultural events, and attended their school functions. It will be difficult for some of the elderly to continue that relationship because of the travel.

“It’s been awfully nice teaching in this small school because you become an integral part of the community,” she said.

At the last concert of the year this month, 27 of the approximately 50 year-round residents attended to watch three of the children perform. Jobs outside the community made it impossible for others to attend. But among those who attended, there wasn’t a dry eye in the building as the program progressed and as the bus approached for the last time.

“It was a sad day when I watched that yellow school bus pull down that little dirt road with the kids on board knowing that would probably never happen again,” Superintendent Witham said.

As for York, the presence of the children will be missed. “It’s going to be quite boring,” she sighed.