Smallest school going strong

BRUCE BUMSTEAD / BRANDON SUN Enlarge Image

Grads (from left) Chase Howden, Shelley Goforth, principal Denise Benton, Amy Wanner, Alexis Wanner, Paul Vanbeselaere.

WASKADA -- With just three students in Grade 3 and 77 students in the entire K-12 school, you have to think, uh-oh, another school closure.

Waskada School is the smallest public K-12 school in Manitoba, excluding schools on Hutterite colonies. It has just seven teachers this year, and cuts will reduce that number to six in 2010-11. Teachers don't just teach multi-grade classrooms here. They teach triple- and quadruple-grade classrooms.

Yet the school is getting As, not Fs, in the education department. And school closure hasn't been an issue for almost a decade. (There has also been a government moratorium on school closures since 2008.)

"We're hearing our graduates work better individually," principal Denise Benton said. "We're hearing their work ethics are very strong. Professors pass along comments like, 'You must have come from a small school.' " Walk the hallways of Waskada School and you notice something else: no locks on the lockers.

In fact, many locker doors are swung wide open, with their contents exposed in the empty hallway, like some culture where people haven't invented a word for stealing yet.

That's an attribute of a small school. Another is "you don't see divisions between age groups. The older ones help the younger ones, the younger ones don't seem intimidated by the older kids," said Benton.

When Waskada School's high school was threatened with closure a decade ago, the community wouldn't let it go. After all, when a town of 200 people loses its high school component, well, the bell tolls soon enough for the rest of the school. The town is in Manitoba's southwest corner, almost at the junction of the Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota borders.

The community began fundraising. That first year, it raised enough to pay a teacher's assistant salary at the time, about $15,000.

Rule changes don't allow that anymore, so the new strategy is for the community to buy things like smart boards and gym and computer equipment, and let the school pay the teacher's aide's salary. The local Lions Club has put in $7,500 so far this year, Sunrise Credit Union is fundraising, and even Penn West Oil is chipping in.

The school has yet to blank a grade. The lowest number of students in any grade has been three, so far as Benton is aware.

The graduating class two years ago had just three students. The number is up to five this year. It's two boys and three girls. Two of the girls are twins.

Twin sisters Amy and Alexis Wanner are asked about romance in a school so small.

"No, they're like brothers," Alexis says of their two male classmates.

"That would be awkward," Amy adds.

Those type of relationships are left to kids from schools in the nearest towns, Deloraine and Melita.

Things can be very interconnected in a small school, Alexis explained. "Our older sister graduated with (classmate) Paul's older sister, and our oldest sister graduated with (classmate) Chase's older brother, and our dad and Paul's dad work together, and our mom and Paul's mom work together."

Classmates get along well. "You learn to accept people more because you're forced to. You can't just not be around them," said Amy. Grade 11s are paired with Grade 12s most of the time.

Graduation gets interesting. There are a lot of speeches: a grads' speech to the parents, a parents' speech to the grads, a grads' speech to the teachers, a teachers' speech to the grads, a boy grads' speech to the girl grads, a girl grads' speech to the boy grads, a grads' speech to the Grade 11s, a Grade 11s' speech to the grads.

Everyone attends the ceremony. "The whole town of Winnipeg doesn't show up for one class grad, but that's what happens in Waskada," said Amy. The grads have a party after.

They don't have the numbers to form sports teams, so they have form "co-ops" with schools in neighbouring towns to make teams.

Enrolment will likely rise a little in the future. Waskada is in the middle of the biggest oil boom in Manitoba. It's rumoured up to 1,000 new oil wells could be dug this year.

Most of the workers are from elsewhere, but the community expects to get some population growth.

The school building also serves as the public library and community fitness centre to make use of all the space and help pay building costs.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 15, 2010 A6