Strang, Fillmore County's last Class I school, 'going quietly'

Already, as the minds of two eighth-graders, one third-grader, one first-grader and one kindergartner eagerly embrace visions of summer, memories of the students who have gone before them ooze out of these corners as irrepressibly as chalk dust out of a blackboard eraser.

Shouts and laughter from the monkey bars. The smell of a grilled cheese sandwich warming on a radiator. Students striding toward the Strang Tavern after school with a dollar tucked in a jeans pocket.

More personal memories, too.

Wayne Matejka practicing outdoors with the basketball team in 20- and 30-degree temperatures in the 1940s because Strang had no gym.

Julie Dunker playing Mrs. Santa Claus, long after the high school closed in 1951, in the annual elementary Christmas program.

Teacher Deb Rohr staring wide-eyed at the garden snake that wriggled out from under the school’s basement door.

Now, on May 11, 2006, the bell rings for the last time.

“I’ll be sad Thursday night because it’s the end of an era,” Rohr said as she looked back on 18 years of teaching in this building and ahead to the next night’s final school program.

“There are a lot of good memories here,” said a woman who also got her elementary education in this two-story, red-brick relic from the 1930s. “I put in a lot of work, and I think I helped a lot of people.”

Now, time and a legislative mandate crafted 70 miles away in Lincoln as LB126 have caught up with Fillmore County’s last Class I school.

Strang is one of dozens of elementary-only schools in the state that can’t meet the new criteria for staying open.

“We’re not going willingly,” said Bruce Soukup, president of the three-member school board, “but we are going quietly.”

Across the state, about 200 Class Is are being dividing into those that will be fully attached to a larger school and stay open and those that won’t. Numbers of students and distance from the closest learning centers are among the deciding factors.

In Saunders County, for example, two country schools near Wahoo, Standard and South Center have closed. Counterparts in the tiny towns of Ithaca and Malmo will move beyond budget affiliation to merged status by a June 15 deadline.

The dozen or so students at Clear Creek, a century old and a classic example of a rural, white schoolhouse, will be attached to Ashland, three miles away.

Ashland-Greenwood Superintendent Craig Pease expects families with ties to Class I schools to adjust fairly quickly.

“Although it’s always a little bit sad for people who have had a school district standing for 100 years, once the school is closed, the kids come to town — they really don’t have any desire to return to that.”

As his counterpart Ed Rastovski sees it from a Wahoo vantage point, where there are proven schools, “there is little need for Class I schools to be two, three and five miles away from us.”

The Class I change affects about 8,300 of the state’s 284,000 students in public schools. But Russ Inbody, approaching his 30th year at the Nebraska Department of Education, sees these as watershed events, even if voters repeal LB126 in November.

“You’re seeing the emotions that this school reorganization brings out in people,” Inbody said. “And it’s a tough issue, no matter which side you’re on.”

In Strang, where the population has dwindled to about 30 and the number of students who live within district boundaries has sunk below five, the likeliest relocation points are Fillmore Central seven miles to the north at Geneva, Shickley and Bruning-Davenport.

At least in addressing out-of-towners, some of the community’s long-term residents present an accepting attitude.

That includes farmer Scott Houck, leaving morning coffee at Bubba’s Anytime restaurant, the most recent community gathering spot.

Houck began school in Strang in 1965, graduated as the only eighth-grader in his class, moved on to high school in Bruning and eventually followed his father and grandfather onto the school board.

So how tough is Strang’s loss to take?

“Sometimes we’ve got to make some hard decisions like this,” he said before returning to his spring-planting chores, “and close some schools and keep our property taxes in check.”

Houck is quick to turn the conversation toward taxes and a recent Nebraska Farm Bureau study that showed that all of the top 10 counties in total property tax burden for agricultural land, among 534 counties surveyed in seven states, were in this state.

As of 2002, Fillmore County was No. 4.

“Our property taxes are terrible,” he said.

That pushes his descriptions of public education in Strang into the past tense.

“It’s been a good school,” he said, “but there are a lot of other good schools, too.”

Yet he’s quick to acknowledge that this might not be a popular point of view in more rural parts of the state.

How different is it, after all, from the message Tom Osborne tried to deliver on his way to defeat in the Republican primary?

“That hurt Osborne,” Houck said.

Others headed in and out of Bubba’s offer the same point of view about Osborne, whose picture hangs in at least two places at the school, although they’re careful to keep their own voting choices to themselves.

“You remember what people say,” Dunker said.

In such a close-knit and closely related community, there’s every chance she already has analyzed Osborne’s undoing a dozen times in family gatherings.

Wayne Matejka, after all, is Deb Rohr and Julie Dunker’s father. Bruce Soukup married another of the Matejka girls.

One of the school’s two graduating eighth-graders is Rohr’s son Dustin. The other is Soukup’s son Ashton. Four of the five students are Wayne Matejka’s grandchildren.

Over all the additions to the family tree, Wayne Matejka also has served on the school board.

He and the rest of the board will step down after paying their final bills, in his 50th year as a member.

When Matejka was a Strang student, he estimated there were as many as 65 in grades kindergarten through eight. The descent into single digits was gradual.

“I think one thing is there’s no industry around to bring people, and farms have gotten bigger. There’s just not the people in the community, and it keeps getting worse and worse.”

Recognizing the inevitable, the school board has decided to transfer ownership of the school to a community-improvement group. Using at least part of it as a museum is one possibility.

His daughter, Julie, and his grandson, Ashton, voice their regrets.

“You can’t beat the education from small schools,” Julie said.

“The teacher helps you out more,” Ashton said. “You get to a bigger class, you just get kind of shoved to the back.”

Deb Rohr sees one of the pluses of what’s ahead for her students, including son Dustin, as more social interaction. “They need more kids their age.”

Even in the face of so much population adversity, School Board President Soukup is not willing to concede the need for outsiders to step in and decide the fate of local schools. Soon enough, he said, local people would have acted on their own.

“We just don’t like being told we have to close. And that’s what they did to us.”

Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.