Trego's Mountain Ear

I won’t be serving another term on Trego’s school board.  I’ve gone past 75, and the body just doesn’t have what it takes – the simplest way to describe it is that I can’t handle the heartburn anymore.

I see that, at the federal level, there’s a lot of commentary about waste in education – that the education complex hasn’t increased the number of teachers per student, but that we (the taxpayers) are paying a lot more for ‘overhead.’  The complaints have validity – and as I step from the board into another form of retirement, I’d like to describe what I see.

A hundred years have passed since my mother did her last year at Trego Elementary – she left at 11, and my grandparents moved to Mica, Washington in a covered wagon.  The great depression arrived early in the Tobacco Valley – and few places still belong to the same families that were here a century ago.  My grandfather did a heck of a job holding things together through the nation’s worst economic times – but the story is Trego School.  If we think back a century, it was a one-room log school house.  Since getting through the eighth grade was the expectation at the time, a one room school, a teacher with a normal school education (one year past high school) and a local school board and a county superintendent was all that was needed.  Electricity would be another 20 years in coming – and, while flushing toilets would accompany that construction, the outhouses would still be on the school grounds into the mid-sixties.

I came into Trego school as a sixth grader in 1960.  Three classrooms, three teachers, two apartments in the teacherage, Lil Shay was the school cook, Mrs. Ritter as school clerk, and Wilda B. Totten was the county superintendent.  In my second year of high school, I learned that Trego’s school clerk, Mrs. Ritter, couldn’t type. It wasn’t a problem – Dad was on the school board, I was taking typing class in high school, and I was detailed to do all the board’s typing as they worked to get a new school built before the population impact that came into the community to build the tunnel and replace the railroad that was due to be flooded.

I was here when the first phones came into Trego – hell, I was here when the nearest phone was Osler Brothers Mill on Mud Creek.  We had electricity but no telephone service at Trego School when I started – the phones came in about the time I completed the eighth grade.  Our library was a monthly visit from Mrs. Herrig and the bookmobile (her father was our first forest ranger at Ant Flat – connecting with the ‘birth’ of Trego in 1903, with the construction of the Dam on Fortine Creek, and later the Great Northern Railroad.

Sixty years later, there are a lot more demands on the school board and the school staff.  The bookmobile is long gone – but Trego’s board is looking at changing one of the classrooms into a school/community library.  (The county’s present library funding really does provide less for the rural schools and communities than was available in 1960.

The school – built in 1965 – was wired for one office phone and intercoms to the classrooms.  It was modern and up-to-date at the time, but in 1965, no one anticipated that Trego Elementary would be counting its computers by the dozen, and DARPA had not even begun to publish studies on the research program that would become the internet.

We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the regulations for special education over these past sixty years – though I haven’t seen a corresponding increase in the education our special ed students receive and demonstrate.  We have many more regulations for the school cook in 2025 – but I think the meals Lil Shay served were every bit as good.

In 2025, we have more support staff – but we need those folks because the demands of technology – and the demands of increased county, state and federal bureaucrats have increased tremendously.