Editor’s note: Wetzel was a writer and died in 2018 at the age of 102. Her husband was Winston Wetzel, the superintendent of the Missoula County High School system who accompanied the development and realization of the Seeley-Swan High School. This tale is printed with permission from her daughter Gretchen von Rittberg.
How would you feel if your children had to ride a bus for five hours a day to attend high school? Shooked? How would you feel if your neighbors’ kids rode a bus for five hours a day? Indifferent? In Montana a community that cares about its neighbors’ kids has just built a new high school on the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
Perhaps, if they had waited, funds would have been forthcoming under the poverty program, for in the Seeley-Swan Lake areas of western Montana, as in Appalachia, the kids are where the money isn’t. But in Montana they do it differently. The people of Missoula County, most of whom live in the county seat of Missoula, voted to build a high school in Seeley Lake, 60 miles away.
The completion of the school, on land that had to be logged before work could begin, brought to an end what was claimed to be the longest school bus run in the United States. Whether or not it was the longest, its hazards distinguished it – five months of snow and ice; floods, ice jams and road break-up in the spring; falling rock, logging trucks, steep grades, curves and white-tailed deer year ‘round. By the time the six students who boarded the bus at 6 o’clock in the morning got to Missoula County High School they had ridden for almost two and a half hours.
During the eight years the bus ran, the road to Seeley Lake was paved with school dropouts, as poor grades, disinterest and exhaustion took their toll. In the spring of 1960, not one of 11 potential seniors from the eighth grade graduating classes of the area was still riding the bus. Some had been sent to other schools and some families had moved away to be near a high school. The rest had quit.
Across the United States the first week of June will be the occasion for thousands of high school graduation ceremonies. None will match the fervor of the ritual at Seeley-Swan High School. Eighteen charter graduates will collect diplomas, if all make it, and a crowd is expected for the ceremony. For here, where children have struggled for an education and parents have fought for it, there is the refreshing notion that education is truly a privilege!
What makes a good school? Some people say, “Mark Hopkins on the end of a log.” When the school became a certainty, Winston Wetzel, superintendent of the Missoula County High School system, began the search for a staff of Mark Hopkinses for the logging community. It was a formidable job.
What would you look for in a principal of a school where drop-outs were the norm? The principal, Roy Scott, was himself a high school dropout.
A heavy equipment operator with membership in the Teamsters’ Union he is a veteran of the Merchant Marine and the Army, serving in World War II and Korea until machine gun bullets shattered a leg and put him in the hospital for two years. It was not all time lost, however, because he met his wife, a Montana girl who was a physiotherapist, there.
He is tattooed on both forearms and is probably the toughest man in the valley.
His other qualifications? B.A. and M.A. from Arizona State—and he did pass a G.E.D. test in lieu of a high school diploma – and nine years of teaching and school administration, two of them in brand new schools, one for a dam in Arizona and one in central India. Most important, Scott teaches the most vital subject offered to Seeley-Swan boys shop and he teaches it well.
As for the rest of the faculty, their average age is 26. They are young, attractive, qualified, experienced and dedicated! Their enthusiasm is contagious and their only anxiety seems to be that they “aren’t doing a good enough job.”
More than 40 girls are members of Miss Shirley Bandy’s Future Homemakers’ of America. Their first activity was a cake sale and dance, which netted $85.00 for the treasury. One cake sold for $20.00! Miss Bandy, one of three business-home ec teachers in Montana, is a native of the Swan Valley and returned because she was homesick for the mountains.
Resourcefulness is the key trait of Kim Haines, coach and science and math teacher. When biology specimens failed to arrive, he sent out the word and was rewarded with a trapper’s day’s catch of four muskrats.
Between classes, the specimens were kept in the home ec refrigerator. Fortunately the girls were then involved in clothing projects.
A National Science Foundation fellow from the State College of Iowa where he earned an M.S., he is a journeyman carpenter, part owner of a dude ranch near Glacier National Park and an army veteran.
Patrick K. Dolan came to Seeley-Swan from three years of teaching in the cattle and wheat ranching community of Jordan in eastern Montana. He finds loggers’ children easier to manage and more eager to learn than ranchers children. His teaching assignments include social studies, general science and health and physical education.
The whole faculty is working to remove the ubiquitous “I done” and “we was” from the students’ vocabularies, according to Marvin Anderson, the English teacher. He doubts if they will be completely successful.
The library is Mr. Anderson’s particular pride, with its 1,317 well-selected titles. The only library in the area, the books are circulating rapidly and members of the school administration are asking no questions as to how many non-students are reading them. Three sets of encyclopedias, three daily newspapers, and 33 periodicals have done as much as anything to bring the outside world into Seeley Lake.
Wrestling is offered to the boys by Carl Meachum, elementary school principal, who volunteers for the job an hour a day. Physical fitness is not much of a problem in this rugged country and the boys seem to have an aptitude for the sport. They have already beaten a much larger school.
The quality and pace of village life has already been transformed by the alchemy of a high school. Movies are held once a week. School dances, basketball games and wrestling matches have broken the monotony of the long winter and six independent basketball teams are in action. The focus of life has moved from Ozzie’s Bar to the school.
Mrs. George Eldrige, a prime mover of the school, says, “We never had anything to go to before. Now I’m worn out from all these activities.”
Principal Scott says, “We could get out a crowd for a tiddley-winks match.”
So school keeps at Seeley-Swan and everybody is happy. In a few years they may have forgotten the struggle it took to get the handsome building, which may well be the only high school in America which has a fishing stream on its grounds. Here’s how it happened.
In 1960 when Seeley Lake failed to produce a single graduate, some parents had a meeting. The bus route was a failure. Children were farmed out in neighboring towns. Families were unhappy both with the separation from their children and the strain of the bus ride.
Mrs. Grace Siniff, a graduate student at Montana State University in Missoula, undertook a sociological study of the 12 families of the bus students. She found that “only two families seemed to be indifferent to the education of their children.” Considering that this was a sixth of the families involved, however, this was a high percentage and indicated substantial indifference to education among this group, although Mrs. Siniff found the rest of the families very interested and determined to improve the situation.
Although the parents were not unaware of the many educational advantages their children had in a large, comprehensive high school, they felt they were denied “social” advantages because of their inability to attend after-school functions. With no time for outside help from teachers and no access to reference materials at home, their rate of failure, was excessive.
The long ride, lack of exercise and the anxiety about the road and weather were also cited as disadvantages. One mother said, “You could see the weariness building up. My girl had to get up at five in the morning and she never got to bed before eleven. She had such a cross disposition it made everybody in the family miserable.”
Why did they stay? “This is a good place to live. Sure, the snow gets high as the fence in the winter, but the summers make up for that. My girl likes horses. My husband likes to fish and pan for gold. We know where our children go and who they are with. And we know everyone here. There’s lots for boys to find to do – fish and hunt in the summer and on weekends. I can’t think of one disadvantage!”
What they needed was their own high school. The problem was that they were part of the county high school district and that although they could “secede” from it, “there wasn’t enough taxable valuation to finance a popcorn wagon.” So one of the parents claimed.
While the area was studded with such jewels as Placid and Crystal Lakes, the Clearwater River and the Mission Mountains, much of the land was in the national forest and brought in no taxes. Private owners held some forested land, but valuation was low. This is no rural area. Hay is the only crop which is grown and even kitchen gardens are unsuccessful because of the short growing season. Ranching is limited by lack of open grazing areas and long winters.
The area is heavily wooded and it is estimated that about forty million feet can be cut annually on a sustained yield basis. Logging could be doubled if the demand justified it. Logs at present go to four sawmills in the area, as well as to Bonner and Missoula. Sawmill jobs are relatively permanent while logging jobs tend to be temporary.
The townsite of Seeley Lake is on the shore of the lake of the same name, one of a series of lakes on the Clearwater River. The village consists of a post office, drug store, two general stores, two filling stations, two bars with cafes, a garage, barber shop Laundromat, two churches and an elementary school. The remains of a stage coach station remind the visitor that the black-top road is only nine years old.
Outdoor recreation seems to hold the future for the Seeley-Swan area and there are as many seasonal homes build on the lake shores as year-around homes. Last year, according to records of the U.S. Forest Service, there were 63,000 man days spent on the Seeley Lake public campgrounds alone. In the Seeley Lake area of the Lolo National Forest, 303,220 man days were spent in recreational activities, which comes close to doubling the 1960 use of 156,947 man days.
The Forest Service is at a loss to explain the phenomenal rise in recreational use of this area, as it is far in excess of other similar areas. Factors influencing it are the exceptional appeal of Seeley Lake for water-oriented families, the improvement of campgrounds, the desirability and safety of the beach for small children and the heavy flow of visitors through western Montana during the Seattle World’s Fair. This, of course, is in addition to the facts of life of a growing population and shrinking wilderness.
The economy of the area was a real factor in the question of whether the children went to the school or the school came to the children, like the legend of the mountain and Mohamet. The effectiveness of a well-organized community to move mountains was soon demonstrated as the parents’ committee of Seeley Lake stormed the Missoula County High School board, the Montana Legislative Assembly and the Missoula county voters in turn.
In a study of the predicament of the Seeley Lake bus children, Mrs. Audra Browman of the school board asked, “How do you choose between more children having more years of poorer schooling and fewer children having fewer years of better schooling? How much obligation
Do the rest of the people in the county have to make it easier for these children to continue an extra year or two in high school? How much right have we to demand that children pay such a high price to obtain an education … Also we would have to answer those who said that it was not their fault if people chose to take jobs so far away from a high school. This will require much emphasis on the American belief that all children have equal rights to an education.”
The board voted to establish a branch high school at Seeley Lake to be financed by a $274,000 special levy, but first the state law had to be changed to allow construction of a “satellite” high school. The Seeley Lake people applied pressure to the 1963 legislature and the change was legal. There was hope to get the school operating in the fall of 1964.
While the curriculum and building plans were being formulated in the superintendent’s office in Missoula, the Seeley Lakers launched an all-out campaign to convince the county of their responsibility for “all the children.” On the eve of the special levy election, July 20, they delivered a four-page flyer throughout the county. It carried the headline, “Why not a high school at Seeley Lake?” and the plea, “Please vote Yes!” Next day the levy carried!
A month’s wrangle enlivened the summer over where to locate the building. Seeley Lake businessmen wanted it next to the elementary school and offered to pay for the site. The school board in Missoula was adamant because it was too close to the bars and the highway. A compromise was reached on a site about a mile from the town.
Oddly enough, with “water, water everywhere,” the biggest problem as the building progressed was finding water. With Seeley Lake a mile away and a mountain stream on the grounds, it was necessary to drill 650 feet before striking a barely adequate flow. Creek water could not be used because state law outlaws “unprotected sources.”
Late in October of 1964, classes started in the new Seeley-Swan High School after two months of split sessions at the elementary school. The student body, which was supposed to number about 80, according to school census figures and enrollment projections, numbered an even 100 instead. The administration is still trying to figure out where those additional 20 kids came from. Only three have dropped out this year.
The student body adopted the name “Blackhawks” for their athletic teams and the colors black and gold for their school and were in business as another typical American high school except for the fact that it was a new experience for these children to find that they liked school. For the first time it was fun. They referred not to “the school” but to “our school.”
“School spirit” seems to pale a term for the aura that surrounds every class and activity. It is a reverence, almost a religion with the students.
Jim Howard, president of the student body, and Jeanne Shockley, vice president and cheer leader, who, predictably, wears Jim’s ring on a chain round her neck, point out that there have been no broken windows, lipstick marks in the rest rooms or carving on the desks. If there are, they will be handled by the students themselves.
The people of the county have been invited to visit their investment in their neighbors’ children at dedication ceremonies March 6 or any time when they’re in the area. It’s still too early to say for sure, but it seems likely that they have invested wisely.
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