Orchard Prairie seeks bond to replace 1970s-era building while maintaining oldest school in use in Washington

They do things a little differently on the prairie.

Up a winding gravel road flanked by small farms and sweeping grassland, there exists the tiny school district of Orchard Prairie on a secluded hilltop north of Millwood, boasting the oldest operating schoolhouse in the state.

The two-school district with the prairie dog mascot spans less than 6 square miles and serves 78 kids in kindergarten through seventh grade. Older pupils learn in a building from the 1970s that shares the grassy campus with the district’s original school house built in 1894 still occupied by younger students.

Orchard Prairie’s size allows the schools to function differently than others with more students: grade levels sharing classes, teachers personalizing grading standards based on kids’ abilities, a full-school recess that lends itself to plenty of intermingling of ages.

“We’re just unique,” said school board member Naomi Lathrum. “We have small class sizes. We have a real family feel here; everybody knows everybody. The bigger school districts have really great programs and curriculum, but you also have thousands of students and you kind of get lost in that a little bit and cliques form. Here, you don’t have that.”

Grinning portraits of each pupil are stapled to the walls, and kids form close relationships with the dozen staff who run the two schools. Turkeys wander the gravel parking lot where students remind visitors to watch for their droppings.

It’s all happening in a building that, though laden with small school charm, Lathrum worries isn’t up to par with state standards on school facilities.

“We are held to certain standards to provide facilities that are up to a certain code,” Lathrum said. “If we aren’t doing that, then the state could come and say, ‘You’re no longer fit to house students here.’ At that point, we would probably be absorbed by some surrounding district, and then we would lose control as this community.”

Though there’s no imminent threat of closure or consolidation into a larger district, the construction of a new up-to-code school would provide more space and ease anxiety surrounding their future. The new building would replace the structure from the 1970s; the historic schoolhouse would remain in operation.

To fund this construction, the district is seeking approval on a $6.2 million bond from 60% of the some 500 voters who live there.

If passed, the bond would tax property owners at an estimated rate of $2.21 per thousand of assessed property value, adding on to a levy rate that collects at a rate between 91 cents and $1.22 per thousand, fluctuating based on home values. The bond would be paid off over 30 years.

District staff’s dream school would be built behind the centennial-plus schoolhouse. It would be big enough for all classes and a nurse’s office, front office, a single entrance for safety, a multipurpose room, an interventionist room all absent from the existing facility.

“It’s just enough to house our essential needs, so our classroom space, cafeteria and administrative space,” said school board Chair Katelyn Schuler, who also works as a counselor in the schools. “It’s kind of your bare bones, nothing fancy or flashy. It’s just exactly what we need and nothing beyond that.”

They would demolish the out-of-date school from the ’70s, but they wouldn’t dare think of touching the antique icon from 1894.

“It’s kind of a beacon, an icon of the community that holds a special place in a lot of people’s hearts so we’re doing what we can to preserve that,” Lathrum said, fondly recalling playing at the school’s playground in summers while visiting her grandparents in the house she now owns with her husband.

The district is in the process of getting the original school on the historic registry in Spokane County after they make several repairs and cosmetic enhancements to return it to its turn-of-the-century glory.

It used to be a one-room schoolhouse in the truest sense of the word, though at one point the district built a wall that now divides the kindergarten classroom and one shared by first- and second-graders.

From the vertical windows to the gable roof crowned with a small bell tower, the old schoolhouse is a true time capsule from just after Washington’s statehood in 1889 and Spokane’s incorporation in 1881.

The 130-year-old bell still tolls twice yearly, its clang audible across the prairie. It’s a tradition for each kindergartner to ring in their educational career on their first day and again ring it on their last day of seventh grade.

“It was really loud. My mom and my dad heard it, and my nana and papa heard it, too,” said kindergartner Blondelle Frank, a third-generation prairie dog who lives on the prairie with her family.

The close quarters make for a familylike school, but they’re short on space. Every corner in the old schoolhouse is used: each surface in classrooms covered in books and toys, crates of school supplies line the hallway, occupied also by paint pots and a model skeleton. Kindergarten teacher Kirsten Schierman built a cabinet in the old school’s bathroom in which she stores extra supplies and mementos from the school’s past.

She scours estate sales for historic artifacts from life on the prairie: classic children’s books and class photos from the 1960s. A teacher there for 27 years, her most prized souvenirs predate her time at the school by decades. While renovating parts of the old school, she found construction paper art and writing samples from its former pupils, one cursive practice sheet timestamped April 24, 1922. A memento from a questionable, though common, practice in the olden days, she still has the school’s original paddle used to punish disobedient students. One of the prairie farmers made it, drilling holes in the wood so it would whistle while in use.

The historic nature of her classroom isn’t lost on Schierman.

“It’s such an honor,” she said, describing a mix of obligation, inspiration and veneration of the history that seeps from her classroom walls.

“I do feel the presence of learning in here,” Schierman said. “You can’t be in an 1800s building without knowing this whole time it’s been for children’s learning.”

Ironically, it’s the newer building built 1972 that has “come to the end of its lifetime,” said Joseph Beckford, superintendent and principal at the school.

The two-story flat roof building is as cramped as its sibling next door. Upon entry, visitors are met with a “front office,” a desk in the hallway outside the two classrooms.

Students always pack their lunches, the small kitchenette in the basement cafeteria can’t accommodate school hot lunch.

“We need a bigger cafeteria because it gets really loud, really quick,” seventh-grader Rilyn Six said, describing having to yell over the full-school clamor with her best friend Maddy Weeks, both prairie dogs since kindergarten.

Rather than a nurse’s office, kids seek treatment in the corner of the intervention room behind a partition, next to two small rooms used for Beckford’s office and Schuler’s private counseling room.

“I think often people are surprised by just the lack of space,” Schuler said. “When we have substitutes come and they come here for the first time, we kind of show them around; they’re caught off guard.”

A new school would give students and staff room to stretch their legs and make it compliant with modern standards like the Americans with Disabilities Act seismic codes. It would be cheaper to build a new school than update the current building, the school board members said.

A new school would also address the school board’s concern that Orchard Prairie could be absorbed by a neighboring district if facilities aren’t up to state standards. While it’s not an impending threat, Lathrum has concerns.

“I think if we don’t make improvements to the school facilities, if we don’t come together as a community and commit to investing in making improvements that are needed here, that we are going to lose what we have,” Lathrum said. “We are going to lose our control of our community. We’re going to lose control of the education of our children here, and I don’t want that.”

The state has consolidated one school district in the last 40 years. The once Vader School District in Lewis County that served around 50 pupils closed in 2007 due to financial issues. Voters in their district repeatedly voted down levies and, as the final nail in the coffin, didn’t pass a bond to address a soon-to-be condemned school. The students there were absorbed into the neighboring Castle Rock School District.

District staff are hopeful their tight-knit prairie community will muster the lofty 60% support needed to pass the bond and build their new school, though they acknowledge the acreage owned by farmers in their district can create a high tax burden on property owners.

“It’s not about the building; that’s not why people come to school here. That’s not why these parents have invested time and energy to drive their kids to and from school every day. It’s not because of our amazing library that we don’t have. It’s not because of this lovely carpet or the fluorescent lights,” Lathrom said. “It’s because of the people who work here and the community that sends their kids to school here. That’s why they come and they deserve a good school.”