Close town schools instead of country schools

The post office and local school were once the center of community life in the rural areas.

The post office has done away with that option, which leaves us our schools.

Local country schools, like Naples, Mt. Hall, and Evergreen enable children to go to school without having to sit on a bus for an hour. They get home earlier so they can participate in the family and family businesses.

There is much education that takes place from working along side a mother and father. 

I learned the work ethic, team work, community responsibility, and so may basic life skills enumeration would take more space than available here, by working with my mother and father on the ranch.

I did not learn them in school.  When I stared high school in Bonners Ferry all I could do was go to school during those months.  The bus ride added two hours to my school day.  I had to meet the school bus at 7 a.m.  I do not think grade or middle school children should be subject to this.

I don’t care if the sports team doesn’t get to go to Boise.

The committees also use these school buildings for activities that are good for them.  A community is important to a child’s education.  Knowing each other, the family and the child, as is the case in small communities, makes the child feel worthwhile.

Kids get lost in big schools.  There’s no time for individual needs in big schools.  There is greater introduction to alcohol, drugs, smoking, thievery and all the vices of populated areas.

As I go through the country cemetery on Memorial Day, I think, “What will I do now that the people who saw something good in me are gone.”

I try to live up to what they saw in me.  This is the importance of a small community.

We used ti have a yearly tournament for grade schools in Bonners Ferry.  It was the country schools, Priest River, and in my sister’s day Creston was involved.  We didn’t have to bus our athletes to Coeur d’ Alene, Hayden and all over the country to teach them competition.  They got some of that in high school when they were more able to sustain the moral choices presented in those places.

It was quite demoralizing for me to face the big high school in my freshman year.  I cannot imagine what is like for sixth graders.  And taking first graders and bussing them that far and putting them in classes of strangers at that age is not conducive to the education and development of children.

The school district has worked and worked to get us to finance a new school because they said they didn’t have enough room in town.  So we pay taxes for the new high school.  Suddenly town has room to consolidate and add students in town, but no money to sustain the country schools.  Look at who’s paying the school taxes.  It is the farms and timber of the county.  Certainly you have high priced houses in town, and you have the home owner’s exemption.  I want that on my farmland.

I don’t have children in the schools, but I have paid school taxes since I was about 28 and bought this land from my folks.  I went to college to be a teacher and have always had an interest in education.

I will not vote to close a country school.  I will vote to close Valley View and the middle school and bus those kids into the country.

Billie L. Krause

Bonners Ferry