A dream and place to put it

Ten years ago Lone Pine School was a decaying building and a pile of weeds. Closed a decade before by the Crook Country School District because of declining enrollment, the two-room schoolhouse – less than 50 years old – sat empty while the few remaining ranch kids living in the valley east of Smith Rock were bussed to Prineville.

This fall a group of educators are taking the building back to its pioneer beginnings, re-opening the school with multi-age elementary classrooms and a learning philosophy more than 100 years old.

“I’ve had my eye on this building for years,” says Jennifer Tracewell, head administrator. When she connected with Danielle Harris and Heather Wiles and heard their dream of opening a school, she told them she knew of the perfect place. All three women have master’s degrees in education and have taught in both public and private schools, as well as homeschooled their own children.

The new incarnation of Lone Pine School is a nonprofit K-8 private school, with “Christ-Centered education in an exploratory environment,” according to the school’s motto. The curriculum is based on the teachings of Charlotte Mason, a 19th century educator who believed in teaching from “living books” written in narrative form by experts, rather than dry textbooks, and short, efficient lessons, among other things.

“Some of the older people who live around here remember the days when the school was just one room and the teacher came in early to start the fire,” said Tracewell. “Hearing them talk about what it was like to be in class with children older and younger than themselves, hearing the teacher work with the kids in front and behind – that’s what we love about the multi-age model, the ability for kids to have so much flexibility in their learning.”
Lone Pine plans to meet Oregon curriculum standards and is pursing accreditation as a private school.

The school has three main teachers and students of all grades will move among them, learning core subjects such as math, reading, history and science. The core school day will be short, only five hours, and capped by a 90-minute elective segment with choices like art, drama, sports, and manual arts. Fridays are all elective, with some of the same subjects as well as topics like French, handcrafts, and music.

This flexible schedule, Tracewell says, will appeal to parents who want the choice to use the core program by itself or with some electives, or homeschoolers who want to take certain classes or electives, or even public school students who want to take advantage of the Friday programs.
Why go to a four-day school week when the larger, better-equipped public school district is catching so much flack for the same choice?

“That choice began very personally; we knew what we wanted for our kids and for us as teachers,” said Harris.

“Plus we both have experience teaching in public schools and have seen the time that is wasted,” added Wiles. “We knew what could be done in a shorter amount of time and then kids could spend more time with their families. And we wanted to open it up to those kids in Redmond (public schools) who were looking for something to do on Fridays that was fun, academic but also reasonable.”

Efficiency of time is the key, said Tracewell. “With smaller class sizes you can be a lot more efficient; you can get a whole lot done. Kids in classes with 30 or more students, they really know how to stand in line well, there’s a lot of waiting.”

The school property is owned by Connie and Chuck Hegele, Lone Pine residents and owners of American Sprinklers and the Lone Pine Clydesdales. The Hegeles were the original buyers of the property from the Crook County School District in the late ‘90s. They renovated the school, which has a kitchen and large gymnasium, and added a large home on the site with the hopes of opening a resident school something like Mt. Bachelor Academy east of Prineville, plans that never came together. More recently the property was on the market for $1.3 million but with the real estate market depressed Tracewell and the other teachers had little problem convincing the Hegeles to take a chance on them and lease the building for a school venture.

According to Tracewell, the school can accommodate 60 students (more if it grows into the adjacent house eventually) and needs slightly more than half that to stay open. Tuition, like the school schedule, is flexible, based on “seat hours” instead of a set fee. A core school-day student only might pay about $225 a month, while a student also taking the extra electives at the end of the day will pay $287 and a Friday’s only elective student will pay $59 a month. The flexible tuition model and calendar – unique among other local private schools – will be one of Lone Pine’s selling points, Tracewell said.

“If we were offered a straight-forward tuition program in this economy we probably couldn’t make it,” she added.

All the teachers are excited about working in multi-age classrooms.
“Grade levels weren’t a part of the education system until the Industrial Revolution,” said Tracewell, and were instituted to be more efficient way to get the maximum number of students through the system. Doing away with the artificial barriers will allow students to progress at their own pace and learn from other students, the teachers said.

Unique from most faith-based schools, Lone Pine will not have classes in theology or religion (excepting some electives) but incorporate faith into existing class topics.

“We just haven’t revised Christianity out of education (as in the public system,) said Harris. “We don’t want to compartmentalize religion in the classroom when we don’t do that in our lives.”

Already the teachers at Lone Pine have been entertaining visitors, including former students and teachers and plain old neighbors from the sparsely populated valley. They want to see what has happened with the building and hear the plans for the future. The Lone Pine staff say they are actively recruiting community members to volunteer or visit the school and to consider it a community resource.

“We’re hoping to bring this valley back together, it’s become pretty fractured,” said Tracewell. “We want to make the school part of the community again.”

For information call 541-548-3505 or log into http://www.lonepineschool.com/.

- story and photo by Leslie Pugmire Hole