What a town will do for a school

To visit the Southwest Star Concept School is to experience an odd type of disconnect.

The World War I-vintage building - seated cozily across the street from a little church and within a stone's throw of a cornfield - speaks of a less-complex America, one in which rural schools doled out to the children of farmers the rudiments of a traditional, no-nonsense education.

But step inside the door, and what's evident is a very cutting-edge educational philosophy that has helped this tiny Minnesota school jump ahead of many of its more cosmopolitan siblings.

"We totally changed our focus," says Jackie Baumgard, a veteran math teacher at the 240-student school. "We used to compare ourselves to the little towns around us. We suddenly began to look at what's going on nationally."

What brought an educational revolution to little Okabena? This is the story of how a tiny agricultural hamlet of 100 households, tucked away in a rural corner of southwestern Minnesota, turned a bad deal into a new style that benefited everyone.

It also stands out as dramatic proof that school reform is reaching out to all parts of the United States, and that its best practitioners are not necessarily located in large cities. Propelled by the threat of consolidation, a number of rural schools in different parts of the country are in the process of rethinking what they teach and how they teach it. Few, however, have taken as brave a leap as this one.

Like so many of America's small rural towns, Okabena, hit hard by the farm crisis, has watched its school-age population shrink over the past few decades. In 1978, with only 120 children in the old school, the town decided to merge its school system with that of slightly larger Heron Lake (population 750) next door.

But between 1978 and 1988, the consolidated Heron Lake-Okabena school system lost 120 more students and began sending its high school students to Lakefield, a bigger town in the area.

The arrangement was less than ideal, but endured until the spring of 1997 when Lakefield announced its intention of merging with a larger, more distant school system.

For Okabena and Heron Lake students, the merger would have meant an even longer bus ride. For their parents and the town's other residents, it meant a growing sense of detachment from the town's youth and their daily life.

To many residents, it also seemed more evidence of numbered days for these small towns.

"If you don't have a school and you want the kids to come back, that's one less reason to do so," says Dennis Daberkow, a local farmer and parent of two school-age boys. "The town will dry up without it."

Head for the drawing board

So in an effort to keep kids in the town, the two communities joined together and drew up a plan to create a new school.

The elementary school for the two towns, they reasoned, could be left where it was in Heron Lake.

But the old Okabena school building - then serving as home to a handful of seventh- and eighth-graders - could be expanded to house a new facility for Grades 7 to 12.

That's when the entrepreneurial spirit really took over. The planners were firm in their determination to break the mold as they designed the new school.

"If we simply created another traditional high school, within three years we'd lose so many more kids we'd shut down," says Jim Schneider, community-education director and the business and social-studies teacher at the high school.

What they decided instead was to create and market a school so unique that kids from other districts would opt to enroll, bringing with them the $3,550 in funding the state allots to each child.

Faculty, parents, and other residents of the two towns came together and began researching their "dream" school. More than 100 community members organized themselves into five committees and began delving into school reform.

Through the help of the Internet and the Annenberg Rural Challenge (the $50-million arm of the Annenberg Foundation in St. Davids, Pa., set up to inspire school reform in rural areas), the planning committees gleaned a cluster of new ideas.

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