Northwest Angle one-room schoolhouse to remain open after questions about its future
Apr. 2—ANGLE INLET, Minn. — After concerns about the future of Angle Inlet Elementary School, the last one-room schoolhouse in Minnesota, Warroad Public Schools' Superintendent Shawn Yates said a solution to keep the schoolhouse open has been found.
The school, which is expecting four students next year between kindergarten and sixth grade, will have a new teacher.
"I think we've got a sort of a temporary fix that will become a long-term solution," Yates said.
The teacher lives in the Northwest Angle and has experience at the schoolhouse as a paraprofessional. She will begin working at the school next year with a tier one license given to her by the state, Yates said. Minnesota teachers licenses have four tiers, and she will work her way up those tiers through her time at the school, Yates said.
There will be a public meeting about the school at the Northwest Angle at 6 p.m., April 11. Yates said it's an opportunity for the ISD 690 School Board to visit the facility and discuss its future.
Keeping the school open has been a frequent topic of discussion, he said, and there are still questions about the cost related to its operation, as it only has 10 students who attend. On the other hand, Yates said it's important the facility remains open so the young students don't have to be bussed long distances to larger schools.
A school bus that goes up the Angle every day to collect seventh- through 12th-graders already crosses the Canada-U.S. border eight times a day.
"It's something we have to evaluate every year," he said. "It's quite a distance for those kids to come down and whatnot. It also becomes cost prohibitive if we don't have enough students."
The school operates as traditional one-room schoolhouses do, Yates said, with one teacher giving lessons to students from kindergarten through sixth grade. There are four students enrolled this year. Without the building there, the students would have to travel an hour and a half to the nearest school and the same time back home, Yates said.
"Obviously, we want to be smart with our spending, but we also have to recognize the human element of sending a kindergartener on a one-and-a-half-hour bus ride one way," he said. "That becomes a lot of time for little people to be on a bus. This is the best solution, we believe, for those kids."
