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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Guest post by Jane Aitken…

UNESCO says that the International Baccalaureate curriculum promotes "human rights, social justice, sustainable development, population, health, environmental, and immigration concerns."

But are parents being told about this political agenda?

Missing from the presentation on IB on the MVRSD’s website (http://fc.mvsd.k12.nh.us/ibpresentation) is the fact that taxpayers would be supporting the agenda of UNESCO. In fact, there’s a lot missing from both the website, and from last Wednesday’s article on the subject in the Concord Monitor. Allow me to clue you in on the rest of the story…

The International Baccalaureate Organization is one of many education "industry" groups of consultants and reformers. The industry recognizes our extreme desire to improve education and competes for the large amounts of taxpayer money we put toward that cause in NH. Promoters from the IBO (www.ibo.org) a Switzerland-based group in partnership with UNESCO (www.unesco.org) use words such as "rigorous," "prestigious" and "competitive" to sell the purported eliteness of it’s program. This self-laudatory language is suggestive of academic success, even when no track record exists to support such a claim.

After a school is authorized by IBO to use IB program(s) and pays the "annual fee," it can be accepted as an "IB World School." IBO charges for using their "programs" (curriculum, teacher training, instructional methods, assessments done outside the USA, coordinator, etc.) in our schools in the U.S.A., which are then referred to as their schools.

The 2008-09 Diploma Program "annual fee" has increased from $8,850 to $9,150 per school this year.

The various individual "per candidate" costs (covering registration with IB, per subject fees, exam registration fee, per exams costs, etc.) have also risen. Schools are also required to have an IB Coordinator. What is even more concerning than the extra inflated cost is that the school and its teachers must all adopt the IBO’s "mission."

In New Hampshire, the bulk of our local property tax bill goes to support public education and it’s assumed that we have some "local control".  If the MVRSD already employs the most qualified staff they can find, why would they need to buy a program that is run from another country to provide "rigor"?  Tests are sent to any number of places abroad to be graded by the IBO. How does a student appeal a grade and how is this local control?

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