This month, more than 1 million Michigan K-12 students will go back to class. As the COVID-19 crisis continues, school districts are redefining the very concept of “school” itself, wrestling with how to provide a safe and meaningful education for their students.
In an earlier time, younger and older students learned together in a single room. On Saturday, a traveling display coming to Mason highlights the era of the one-room schoolhouse.
Carolyn Cooper still gets nostalgic whenever she steps onto the creaky floor of the small wood-frame school in Mason that still lives in her earliest memories.
“This school was on the way to my grandmother’s house as a little girl; we’d pass it by,” Cooper said.
By then, the building was more than 100 years old. Cooper’s father had gone to grade school here in the 1930’s.
When it was new, its Greek Revival style looked almost like countless other one-room schoolhouses that cropped up in America in the 19th century.
Almost. This school is hard to miss. It’s pink.
By the time Carolyn Cooper discovered it, the Pink School’s glory days were over.
“And it was sad because the paint had faded, it was boarded up, it was falling down,” she recalled. “My mom would talk about all the different activities that they used to have at the school, and it really was loved by the community.”
By 1975, the Pink School was destined for the scrapyard.
However, with the American Bicentennial on the horizon, a sense of history and heritage took hold in Mason.
The next year, the building was relocated to a new site, away from a road reconstruction project that would have otherwise sealed its fate.
The community rallied around the Pink School, donating $12,000 to restore it to its turn of the century condition.
Today the school is owned by the Mason Area Historical Society, where Carolyn Cooper serves on the board.
So does Marie Coughlin. She spent part of her grade school years in a one room schoolhouse in Canada, where her teacher taught eight grades each day.
“Everyone would have assignments on the board, and they’d start their work,” said Coughlin. “And she’d work her way up the grades. It was beneficial, actually, to the younger students because they could hear what was going on in the other grades and they learned faster.”
As students came up through the ranks, they became mentors and built-in teacher’s aides.
“The older students then would correct the papers for the younger students for the teacher; like their math and they’d do reading with the younger students. And it worked.”
Audrey Martini also attended a one-room schoolhouse.
It’s an experience she still treasures.
“I loved it,” Martini said. “I haven’t had so much fun since!”
Martini is a member of the Ingham County Historical Commission.
Her group has documented some 130 one-room schoolhouses in the county, but the information is sparse.
Martini is encouraging people to come to the Mason Area Historical Museum on Saturday with pictures and stories they’d like to share.
She’s hoping visitors can help solve the mystery of seven schools for which they have photos in the museum’s archives, but no names.
“We’d like people to walk away with an appreciation of how embedded education and how important it is and has been to the residents of Michigan since…forever,” she said.
After its stop in Mason, the traveling display of Ingham County’s rural one-room schools will be at the Leslie Area Historical Museum on September 11.