Bruce Matson helps fourth-grader Devin Bramble, 9, with a question during class at Elm River Township School on Tuesday, May 7, 2019. Matson is the school's administrator, bus driver and only full-time teacher.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
ELM RIVER TOWNSHIP – The lunch lady knew what the kids were willing to eat that day because she was related to every single student in the school. All six of them.
“I just base it off of what they like at home,” said 38-year-old Raquel Bramble, mother of three of the students, aunt to the three others. She wore a long apron and stood in the basement kitchen at Elm River Township School, where she was preparing a lunch of panko chicken, dressing, and mashed potatoes and gravy, all made from fresh ingredients. “I know what they like and what they don’t.”
Elm River Township contains 100 square miles and 170 people and one elementary school educating a handful of kids. Here, there’s a single teacher; who’s also the administrator; oh, and he’s the bus driver, too. There's also a business manager who handles the accounting, but she also teaches part-time. And when the lunch lady isn’t cooking homestyle meals, she’s in charge of recess, leading the kids to outdoor adventures beyond the playground. On this day, they’d be hiking to the woods to visit the beavers in the nearby pond.
This unique school has survived for 113 years, largely thanks to the Schools of Choice program, because, despite all the changes to the world around it, some people in this very rural part of the western Upper Peninsula still prefer to send their kids to an old-fashioned little schoolhouse, far from the influences and pressures of the big city and its large schools.
“There are some parents who homeschool because they don’t want the big public school,” said Bruce Matson, the school’s 55-year-old administrator and sole full-time teacher. “Well, we’re as great a compromise as you could possibly have. They like the size, there are fewer problems here because you don’t have the social competition here or the social problems and the things that can lead to teasing and bullying and things like that.”
In some parts of rural Michigan, life keeps getting harder
For years, people have been leaving small towns and moving to big cities, and the places they leave behind are getting older, smaller and poorer every year.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
But like other small schools in sparsely populated parts of the state, staying open year-to-year is a challenge. Rural Michigan has lost population for decades as young people move away seeking work, leaving an aging population behind, with fewer people staying and starting families. In Michigan, three out of every four residents now live in urban areas, on only 3,623 square miles or 6.4% of the state’s land. The rest are thinly spread across the state's remaining 52,916 square miles of small towns and countryside, like this remote northern part of the state, where there are fewer young people every year thanks to migration and a falling birth rate, which in 2018 fell to its lowest level since the 1940s.
In Michigan, the average age is above 50 in 21 counties — over 25% of the state’s total — more than any other state, according to Census data. And all of them are in rural areas.
In Ontonagon County, a short drive west of the school, the average age is 58.6. Michigan’s school-age population, which fell 17% since 2000 to its lowest level in half a century, is projected to fall another 7% by 2025.
And that’s how you end up with a rural school that has only six kids spread throughout nine grades.
It was early May. Summer was near, which brought uncertainty about the next school year, as it always does. There was no telling how many students, if any, would be back in September. A year before, they had 11 students. In the 2018-19 school year, it was down to six kids — two third-graders, a fourth-grader, a seventh-grader and two eighth-graders. And the two in eighth grade were graduating and leaving for high school elsewhere next year.
“Is that a concern? Maybe, but it seems like kids always come from somewhere,” Matson said. “But we are actively looking to promote the school, ‘cause there are a lot of people … even people in the community, that aren’t even knowledgeable that our school is still open.”
* * *
It was 9 in the morning, and class was in session. Matson stood at the board, writing out complex math equations for the eighth-graders — Kendra King, 14, and Danny Bramble, 15 — two of the lunch lady’s kids, who stood next to him, wearing the pained, sleepy expressions of teenagers forced to contemplate geometry this early in the morning.
The kids in the other grades sat at their desks, working quietly in their books, each tailored for their respective grade levels. All of the students here are taught in one room. During the day, each gets their turn at one-on-one instruction from the teacher.
There was no escape, no way to blend mercifully into the background and no back of the class to bury their heads.
“You can’t hide here,” Matson said. “To me, as an educator, I’ve been in bigger districts, I know one thing that’s very special here is because we’re small, we truly build relationships. In a bigger school, you can’t do that, no matter how outgoing and friendly you are in talking to the kids. When there’s so many kids you can only get to a certain level or depth with that relationship. Where here, it truly becomes a family.”
Elm River Township School business manager Krissy Plutchak (right) talks with students before they head back to class after returning from an excursion through the woods in Michigan's Upper Peninsula on Tuesday, May 7, 2019.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Elm River Township School was built in 1906 to educate the children of local copper miners flocking to the region. By the 1950s, with the population falling and most of the mines long closed, the high school grade levels were eliminated, while the elementary enrollment gradually shrank over the years. The school had as many as 20 students at one time in recent memory. But more often than not, all the kids can be counted on both hands.
The school is its own district. It gets no money from the state, and instead relies on property tax revenue from the township.
Bruce Matson, Elm River Township School’s administrator
We just have flexibility that others don’t. We literally look at the weather forecast and say, ‘Let’s go to a waterfall.’ Who else can do that?
It’s a rare survivor from the era of the one-room schoolhouse, where a whole town’s children could fit in a single classroom. A century ago, there were more than 200,000 one-room schoolhouses in America. But as the country transitioned from rural and agricultural to mostly urban and industrial, the rural countryside slowly emptied out. Now, nearly 80% of Americans live in an urban area, and the number of one-room schoolhouses in rural places numbers only a few hundred.
Elm River Township School is luxurious by one-room schoolhouse standards. It’s housed in a two-story, century-old, white-sided building that still has its old slate chalkboards, its vintage wood wainscoting, its creaky wood floors, its long past staring down from class photos taken during the Great Depression. The school is modern enough to have the latest computers, new books and a standard curriculum, but it’s still isolated enough to chart its own course within its remote surroundings.
“We can do things that other schools can’t,” said Krissy Plutchak, the school’s 45-year-old business manager. They once took the kids golfing at a nearby tourist resort for their field trip. Sometimes they’ll hop on the bus and head to Michigan Tech 30 miles north to run around their track or play racquetball in their facilities. The next day, they’d be going to a swimming pool at a nearby tourist resort.
“We put the kids first, we get to know them, we base stuff off their personalities, off their likings, take them places that they enjoy, that they might not get to see with their families,” Plutchak said.
“We just have flexibility that others don’t,” Matson added. “We literally look at the weather forecast and say, ‘Let’s go to a waterfall.’ Who else can do that?”
* * *
In the Upper Peninsula, the population of the largest cities has held relatively steady for decades, but the rural areas are slowly emptying out. Since 2010, 14 of the U.P.’s 15 counties lost population. In Houghton County, where Elm River Township School is located, the population went from a peak of roughly 88,000 in 1910, to 47,600 in 1940, to 36,300 today, a figure largely maintained by residents of Houghton and Hancock, where about 12,000 of the county’s population lives — 7,200 of whom are students at Michigan Technological University. The rest of the county’s residents are scattered throughout 1,500 square miles of small villages and towns.
Donken is one of them. It’s an old lumber town a few miles north of the school, which grew around the Case Lumber Mill a hundred years or so ago. The town was named by the mill owner using a combination of his son’s names — Donald and Kenneth. On one side of the highway are a handful of decaying wood buildings, and on the other side is a wide dirt road with the town’s few houses down the way.
One of those houses belongs to the lunch lady.
“My kids are the only ones in Donken,” she said. “There’s other families, but they’re all older. Their kids are all grown and gone.”
Elm River Township School lunch lady Raquel Bramble (center) stands by as students finish eating their lunches at the school in Michigan's Upper Peninsula on Tuesday, May 7, 2019. "The kids seem to be leaving more than they did when we were young," Bramble said. "You know, they don't stick around anymore as much as we did. And eventually they'll probably end up back here, just like we all do, but I think it's going to make things really difficult for the people that do stay here with all the younger generation taking off, because the help isn't going to be there anymore, and the community support isn't going to be there anymore."
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
For the kids in the region, life had always been a simple world of woods and water and makeshift outdoor fun.
“I’ve never been in the big city. I’ve been in the country all my life,” said eighth-grader Danny Bramble. “I get to do what I want. Out in the woods, I don’t have to worry about complaints. I can go on my snowmobile and be as loud as I want, I can take a truck out in the field and go tear up my field without getting yelled at or any complaints, and just have a lot of fun.”
Here, there’s no mall in which to wander. No nearby downtown where they can hang around. Then, as now, a lot of young people in rural towns say they look forward to the day when they can move someplace else.
“The kids seem to be leaving more than they did when we were young,” Bramble said. “You know, they don’t stick around anymore as much as we did. And, eventually, they’ll probably end up back here, just like we all do. But I think it’s going to make things really difficult for the people that do stay here with all the younger generation taking off, because the help isn’t going to be there anymore, and the community support isn’t going to be there anymore. I mean, I could be wrong, things could change by then, but you just don’t see the level of help that these kids coming up could give. They just don’t do it anymore. So they’re just out of here and it’s going to make it hard for people that stay.”
Bramble’s daughter, Kendra, didn’t know what she’d do after graduating, but whatever it was, she knew it wouldn’t be here. “I’ll probably just leave,” Kendra said.
Bramble’s son, Danny, said he’d leave too, the way his family had gotten out for years. “I’m going to join the Marines,” he said. “It’s in my mom’s side of the family that we’ve been doing it for many years. Like my uncle’s a Marine, my other uncle’s a Marine, my grandpa was, so I figured I would be, too. It just goes down the line.” After he gets out, he said he wants to move to Wyoming.
Not all the kids leave, though. Some grow attached to country life. And some who leave regret it and wind up returning years later. That split was embodied in the business manager’s family.
“I have an 18-year-old daughter who is graduating, and she can’t wait to leave. She wants to see more than just the U.P.,” Plutchak said. “And a 23-year-old son who absolutely loves it here and does not want to leave. So I guess it’s all their personal choice, what they want out of life. Do they want to travel and see the world? Which, yeah, they should. Hopefully they come back, ‘cause it’s a beautiful place.”
* * *
But for now, they were still country kids.
It was now late morning, time for recess, so the students put on their thick boots and winter jackets to face the still-cold spring air, and they headed outside with the lunch lady toward the trail that leads into the woods.
Elm River Township School eighth-grader Kendra King, 14, jumps over a puddle on the way back to class from recess on Wednesday, May 8, 2019 in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
“I like to get them out a little bit, even if it’s for 15 minutes of walking,” Bramble said. Sometimes, they’ll hike along a trail in the woods through Winona, the ghost town that surrounds the school. It once had two bustling copper mines and close to a thousand people. Now it’s down to a dozen residents.
Today though, they were walking to the nearby pond. Beavers had built a dam there, the kids noted with excitement. Sometimes, in the spring, there are turtles and fish to see.
“It’s awesome, it’s fun,” said seventh-grader Alex Chobanian, 13. “We go for walks, like, to random places. Two years ago, we went to a place that was full of sand, and we just rolled around in it because what else are you supposed to do with sand except for, like, collect it and stuff? And then there’s that pond that is also really cool. One day we were walking over there — there’s a trail over there — and we saw two animals fighting. It was really cool. Two porcupines, don’t know why.”
It was a gray day. Dried leaves from last year’s fall crunched under their feet. They came to a muddy clearing where a still pond reflected the sky, the surrounding pines and their own faces like a mirror. Next to the water there was a tall pile of plain rocks left behind years ago from copper mining. It gave the boys a place to climb and stand high and skip rocks across the water, and look around, and talk to each other.
Nearby, on a smaller rock pile, the lunch lady and her daughter Kendra stood huddling in their winter coats just above the water, bathed in pine-scented air, watching the boys play, and talking to each other. There were no traffic noises, no cellphones, no city sounds, no buildings.
Elm River Township School student Daniel Bramble, 15, looks over a pond during recess on Wednesday, May 8, 2019 in Elm River Township in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
The students scoured the ground for sparkling minerals scattered in the sea of plain gray rocks. There’s quartz in here, the kids said — rough, beautiful crystals lying just underfoot. And copper too, streaked within some of the gray rocks. Every time they found something worthwhile, they’d announce it to their friends, who’d all come over to take a look. There are many gems out here, they noted. You only have to look to find them. Same goes for life in the country.
“I wanted to get out of here as quick as I could because it seems like there’s nothing here, but if you know what to do and where to go, there’s lots to do here,” said the lunch lady.
They started the long hike back to class, one of the last of these walks for the two kids who’d soon be leaving the school, and after that perhaps the region. This country life might seem boring, and some were counting the days until they could move away. But like others before them, they’d probably look back at all this fondly, and one day they just might return.
“I think a lot of kids think life’s better elsewhere and they want to leave, and they can’t wait to get out there,” Matson said. “But from what I’ve seen, ‘cause I’ve been at this for 28 years, in time a lot of those kids then realize how good they have it in the U.P., and how good a life we have in these small rural communities, and how much closer the people are. I’ve seen a lot of kids want to come back and have the simpler life.”
(Left to right) The entire student body at Elm River Township School poses for a photo outside of their school on Wednesday, May 8, 2019. From left: Alex Chobanian, Kendra King, Devin Bramble, Alfred Trainer, Jacob Chobanian and Daniel Bramble.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Rural Michigan is ailing. For years, people have been leaving small towns and moving to urban areas, seeking opportunity in cities with more people, more jobs, more excitement. And the places they leave behind get smaller every year. Some rural areas are still lucky enough to have an industry that provides local jobs — logging, mining, a factory or two. But many don’t, and residents often have to rely on low-wage jobs at fast-food restaurants or chain superstores, which are blamed for driving small local stores out of business, furthering the despair. As small towns shrink, loneliness, isolation and poverty grow. It means an aging population, a lack of jobs, a shortage of doctors and fewer educational opportunities, all of which have led to higher rates of depression, addiction, homelessness and suicide than in urban areas. Yet for many people, rural life still embodies their dream of a welcoming place where life is slower, friendlier, more old-fashioned; where everybody knows their neighbors and where doors can still be left unlocked at night. A place to which they can always return. Last year, a Gallup poll found that while 80% of Americans now live in urban areas, only 12% of them said they want to live in a big city. Two-thirds said they’d prefer to live in a small town or rural area. But few actually move back there. And for those who never left, life is getting harder. This is the third story in a five-part series about life in rural northern Michigan.
