Sagg School

Should You Send Your Kid to a One Room School House?

By Dan Rattiner

In the old days, when Sagaponack and Wainscott were just farmland, the kids in the community were taught in the old one room schoolhouses here. Today, the population mix has grown and changed, with, besides local people, many wealthy former residents of New York City who have apartments there and now own multi-million dollar mansions in the Hamptons which they occupy in the summer and on weekends and still send their kids to private schools in the city.

At the same time, the options for private and public education for children here on the east end have changed quite a bit. In recent years, private schools have flourished in the community, with new ones seemingly springing up all the time. There are now publicly-licensed Charter Schools, which are privately run public schools that educate children with handicaps or disadvantages together with regular students from the area. There are the large regional public schools. The Catholic Schools have consolidated but are still thriving. There are some people who opt for home schooling. And then there are still the little one-room schoolhouses in Sagaponack and Wainscott.

In all this educational turmoil, I went to visit one of these schools last week, out of simple curiosity, in order to see how they were adapting to all the changes. I chose the Sagaponack School. It sits in a prominent position right on Main Street, one of only two public structures on that street. There is the school at the north end of the street, and there is the combination post office and General Store building at the southern end of the street and farther down the cemetery and then the dead end at the beach.

For hundreds of years, these two public buildings, with several private homes separating them, have been what has defined downtown Sagaponack as a place. It would be hard to imagine this village without them.

I have, of course, been in the General Store. But I had never, in all the time that I have lived on the East End, which has exceeded a half a century, been in the Sagaponack Common School. I’d see the kids in the playground outside. I’d see the parents dropping them off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. But I never had been inside. Never had a reason to.

The head teacher of the school, Mrs. Diana McGinniss, met me at the front door and led me in. It was 3:30 on a cold winter’s afternoon. The kids had been picked up. She showed me around.

I mentioned that this is one of the one-room schoolhouses, but everybody calls it a two-room schoolhouse. The original room was built about two hundred years ago. And then a second room was built a hundred years ago. But today, they are fully open to one another and what you get again is a big one-room schoolhouse.

The older space has the desks in it. They are the old fashioned kind with inkwells, and they are lined up in neat little rows facing a teacher’s desk, a pot bellied stove, the flag, and a framed copy of an unfinished portrait of George Washington.

“Congress authorized that these portraits of George Washington be distributed to all the schools in New York State,” Mrs. McGinniss told me. “Our portrait is still prominently hanging. I only know of one other school that has kept theirs up all that time.”

The windows are oversized and beautiful in that old institutional style. The sun streams in. The pot-bellied stove is now just a decoration — the building got central heating eighty years ago. It is toasty warm on this cold day.

The second room, where there are no desks, is an open space that serves as a multi-task work area. Tables can get set out and the kids can have their lunch there. They can play indoor sports there with the tables cleared away — there is a basketball backboard, hoop and net at the far end — and in this room the kids assemble for all sorts of group activities.

As for the school day and the school curriculum, it is a rather amazing mix of the old and the new. Every child is issued a laptop computer on enrollment. Yet the first organized thing that happens when the kids first assemble in the morning every day is the raising of the flag on the pole outside and the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of patriotic songs.

“Before that, however,” Mrs. McGinniss told me, “we have a short period where the kids must organize themselves. They arrive at 8 a.m. The flag goes up at 8:05. The students can do one of four things. They can write their assignments on their assignment pad, correct their work, or they can go off and do their various weekly jobs that they have chosen for the week. In addition to “flag” people who raise, lower and fold the flag properly every school day, we have a mail person who distributes the “mail” (workbooks etc.); a shed person who is in charge of the keys to the shed; the pet person who feeds Fluffy the dwarf hamster; the phone person who is in charge of answering the phone; the line leader who lines people up and leads the Pledge and song; the monitor who distributes paper towels when washing their hands before snack and lunch and organizes the weekly show and tell. These children are ages 6 to 10 years old and they love their responsibilities that help everyone in the school.”

Next, they move onto the more organized part of the day. All academic courses are taught in the morning. Then there is snack and recess. Then more academics are taught until lunch. The social programs, such as P.E, Art, Technology, Science, Spanish, Writing Workshop, and Music are taught in the afternoons.

The teachers teach classes that are divided up by subjects, not by grade levels. It is a tutorial environment. Mrs. McGinniss is the head teacher, but she has two other teachers, both with masters’ degrees, who report to her and teach classes to the students all day. They teach simultaneously every day. Mrs. McGinniss also told me that each teacher has different academic strengths and as a team, they choose the subjects they teach accordingly.

Currently, there are ten students. Therefore, during parent-teacher conferences, parents are given three professional “points of view” regarding their child’s academic, social and emotional progress and maturity. It is one luxury of a well run one-room school’s educational program.

For example she told me, she teaches reading, spelling, language arts, writing workshop for grades one through four, and science for first and second grades. Mrs. Lisa Arrigotti teaches math, social studies and Spanish to all grades and technology and penmanship to first and second grades. Mr. Terry Scammell teaches social studies, math, reading and penmanship to younger students and P.E. to all grades.

The social programs in the afternoon, called that because they involve the whole student body, change depending on the day. Art and Music are taught by visiting teachers. On Monday the kids study technology and music, on Tuesday science and Spanish, Wednesday art, Thursday there is the writing workshop and on Friday Phys Ed, which often involves travel during the nine weeks of cold weather. They travel in the school busses to East Hampton in the wintertime to swim at the YMCA for a three week session, to go bowling at the East Hampton bowl for three weeks, and to use three weeks to go skating at the Buckskill Ice Skating rink. They also play after school sports with the kids from other schools in their age group. These sports include T-Ball, soccer, basketball, roller hockey, wrestling and Tai Kwan Do.

The Sagg kids enter exhibits at the Student Art Show at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton every year. They also participate, by annually writing a literary work, in the Hampton Library’s “Budding Authors” program. This year’s project is to have all Sagg kids writing their own autobiography! Their books are each displayed there for a month.

Every year, the kids also take group trips to the homes of three families in the Sagaponack community. The trips, hosted by the residents of Sagaponack, typically take place on Halloween when the children, in costume, “haunt” Sagaponack, touring the General Store, Post Office and the three residences. In December, one of the student’s parents hosts a holiday luncheon, complete with a special project the children take home. On June 14, which is Flag Day, the students visit a Revolutionary Era house, still in existence, to learn local history during the time when homesick, British soldiers occupied that very home. The children look forward to these special outings every year and are given opportunities to exhibit their manners and knowledge of Sagaponack history. They also are reminded that they represent a community that cherishes them and their school.

“We also take the time to teach manners,” Mrs. McGinniss told me. “We expect our students to make an excellent appearance, be well behaved and polite, especially with elders. We nurture every student’s self-esteem. All of the children play with each other, regardless of age or gender. The older students teach the younger ones, therefore re-teaching themselves materials they have mastered. Older children are natural role models. Teachers, adults and children, are always present.”

In Writing Workshop on Thursdays, the end result for each student is writing and illustrating at least four books a year. These are handwritten books, complete with illustrations, their covers laminated and bound. She showed me rows of shelves with many of these books on them. “During the four years here, each student produces between sixteen and twenty books. We keep them here and then present the books they have written and illustrated to the children at graduation.”

The home phone numbers and email addresses are available to all parents with kids at the school and there is contact 24/7. It doesn’t get more intimate than this.

Does this small intimate system of teaching work?

Every year, the State gathers up the statistics on how all the students in the county do in different language arts and math tests. The Sagaponack School is always at the top. Last year, Sagg kids, as a group, had the second highest average math grades on all of Long Island by any size school. Most kids go on to the middle school and the high school in East Hampton. Sagaponack kids have had a 100% graduation rate from high school forever. And most students, as far back as anybody can remember, have either been honor roll or high honor roll students.

The motto of the Sagg School is “Once a Sagg kid, always a Sagg kid.” And this means that the door is always open for the kids to come back to visit. And many do.

It was 4:30 and the sun was laying low in the sky. It was time to leave. As we went toward the door, Mrs. McGinniss showed me a framed document on the wall.

“This is the list of all the head teachers that have taught at this school going back to 1822. That is as far as anybody can find a record of it. You will note that in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s there are many young women who were the head teacher here who taught for only a year or two. You weren’t allowed to continue to be the head teacher if you got married in those years. That’s why that is.”

Mrs. McGinniss is at the bottom of the list. It says 1999- and the end of the tenure is waiting to be filled in. May it not be for a long, long time.

Up in Springs, where I raised my kids, I remember a school board meeting to consider budgeting more money to build a new wing to handle rising enrollment, when someone got up and said, “The kids can do without this. I pay taxes. I don’t have any kids here. I say no.”

In recent years, in both Wainscott and Sagaponack, where home sites cost in the seven and eight figures and where those who buy them build ten bedroom mansions, there have been attempts, incredibly enough, to shut down the schools for similarly selfish reasons. Last year, the Wainscott School Board entertained such a motion and voted it down. Instead, they voted to expand their little school to accommodate a bigger enrollment.

Last Thursday, a similar suggestion in Sagaponack brought the school district together to meet in the school house to consider such an idea. A capacity crowd voiced their opinions to reject it. It was also noted that closing the school would cause an INCREASE in taxes. And it was agreed that the Sagaponack community identifies with and values its one-room school. Some people in the audience told the Board of Trustees that they had recently moved to Sagaponack to send their young children to the Sagaponack School and to live in a community that valued education and family values.

The future for both schools seems to involve opening the enrollment to allow anybody in the region, paying tuition, to come join with the kids in the district attenting the schools here. They may need a way to have a kindergarten program in both schools, so the kids don’t start in kindergarten somewhere else and then come here for grades one to four. The schools are working on this.

In any case, the programs at Sagaponack — I have not yet visited Wainscott — are unique, special and successful. Any parent with small kids owes it to themselves to consider the twenty-first century version of the one room schoolhouse approach. We are very lucky to have these schools here.