Each day we are given opportunities to interact with people. We take advantage or we don’t. Seemingly unrelated acts often pay big dividends.
When I arrived in Britton in November of 1991 I spent a lot of time reading hundreds of pieces of mail that the interim superintendent saved for me. I perused the trivial matters and studied in great detail those I deemed important. After catching up with current events, I reviewed three major studies that had been conducted in non-scheduled ten year cycles over the prior thirty-one years. Each of the studies reviewed the consolidation efforts within Lenawee County.
The three consolidation studies determined that students in districts like Britton-Macon and Deerfield would be better served if they consolidated. They concluded that a richer curriculum could be offered if a school served a minimum of one hundred students per grade. Britton-Macon and Deerfield had fewer than half that number. One study suggested that large schools should subdivide their student bodies into groups of four hundred. Schools with four hundred were seen as optimal. Each study offered several consolidation options for communities to consider.
During my review, I learned that a farmer who lived on the border between the two districts offered to donate forty acres if the districts decided to merge, so they could build a new high school. The offer was declined. Both Britton and Deerfield had traditions they wished to keep that had little to do with reading, writing, and arithmetic. They moved forward and maintained their separate identities.
One room school houses began to close in the 1950’s and did so until Lenawee County had twelve local districts, each with its own high school. Prior to consolidation, one room schools were associated with a local high school referred to as “mother schools”. Several one room schools paired with a “mother”. According to Lenawee Intermediate School records, there were 183 schools in Lenawee County in 1948 , 127 in 1954, 53 in 1955, 32 in 1954, and the number continued to decline until there were 12 public school districts in 1966.
Most of the schools were a mile, or so, apart and served students in grades K-8. As the schools consolidated landowners adjacent to school boundaries had the opportunity to choose which school district they wished to join. The Britton Agricultural School changed its name to Britton-Macon during the 1950’s consolidation movement. This was the result of a “deal” struck between Britton and the one room school in Macon. Britton’s board would add Macon to their name, if the Macon board aligned with Britton.
In the late 1980s the county’s three smallest districts, Britton-Macon, Deerfield and Madison established a Cooperative Academic Program known as CAP. Students from the three school districts traveled by bus to the Lenawee Tech Center to take part in shared classes like physics, chemistry, calculus, trigonometry and Spanish 1-4. Each school sent three or four students to take each class. Sharing the cost for these classes made the offerings economically possible and enhanced the educational opportunities for all students.
I believed understanding the district’s history would help me avoid the errors of the past and work with the Board of Education towards the future.
TBC
Did you know that the Cooper Elementary School was, at one time, its own school district ? It agreed to merge with the Plainwell Community Schools only with the assurance that the school would remain open and in Cooper Township.