Recess at Landaff’s Blue School
Guest post by Jeff Woodburn
LANDAFF – Our vast, complicated education system produced its annual results last week as high schools across the country held graduation ceremonies. In New Hampshire some ten thousand high school seniors were handed diplomas thus finishing a 13 year process at a cost of around $135,000 per pupil. Educating children has become a costly, centralized and specialized business, and it seems no one is fully satisfied with the results. Education experts and parents worry about the quality of instruction, class size and student safety, yet school districts have become large, impersonal institutions. Over the past 70 years, the number of school districts has declined from 117,000 to around 14,000 even though the student population has almost doubled reports the American School Board Association.
So there should be no surprise that New Hampshire’s once dominant one-room or tiny schools have dwindled to just two: one being Landaff’s Blue School (the other is the Croydon Village School, near Newport).
The path of preservation is never simple. It is usually a combination of circumstances and attitudes. Landaff is defined by a rugged, inhospitable or at least inaccessible landscape—most notably because of the prominent and protected White Mountain National Forest and the Wild Ammonoosuc River. With less than 376 residents spread over its 28 square miles, Landaff has the distinction of having the second smallest numeric increase in population of the any of the smaller communities in the state. Since 1950, the town added just 36 new residents, including Jason Cartwright, who moved here from Texas ten years ago to run the Tender Corporation in Littleton. Now as a member of the school board, he says the Blue School, much like the town, is not just an anomaly or a relic, but rather is “intentionally small.”
The Blue School sits on a small knoll of land bordered by a stream, a simple baseball field and the intersection of two country roads. There is not a house in view, and little room to park. Parking wasn’t a concern when the school was built in 1858, the year of Teddy Roosevelt’s birth; the Blue School was one of six schools that served Landaff. Over time, the schools were consolidated to one. Former one-room schools, which dotted the rural landscape, were routinely sold off as transportation became easier and were folded into the existing housing stock.
A closer view reveals the building’s antiquity – like the hard wood floors, the large double hung wood stash windows, the thimble that once served the wood stove, old coat hooks in a small ante room that lead to the two small sink-less lavatories (there is shared sink in the ante room) with old tin signs above each. A second structure, a modern, modular building sits behind the old school house. The two buildings are carefully joined by a roofed breezeway that ensures an actual and visual transition between the two. The newer rectangular building was added a few years back when there was a jump in enrollment. The numbers didn’t hold and the space now serves as the library and lunch room. Instruction occurs in the large main room of the school house thus protecting the school’s rare status.
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