Chapter 10: Classrooms, Community, and Change
The evolutionary trajectories of schools in rural Illinois and those of the people and places that they serve intertwine and influence one another. Furthermore, those trajectories manifest and contribute to salient trends in the evolution of rural Illinois. One Crossroads: Change in Rural America host organization produced a substantial companion exhibition examining these interrelationships from its own local vantage point.
Yet another major factor in the social evolution of many rural Illinois communities has been school consolidation, a trend examined in an ambitious Crossroads companion exhibition produced by the Atlanta Museum. Incorporating the findings of extensive archival and oral-history research, “Classrooms & Community” chronicled the incremental merger of rural schools in northeastern Logan County since the 1940s and its multifaceted impact on local social dynamics and community identity. Bill Thomas, a former teacher and school administrator who serves as the treasurer of the Atlanta Public Library District, which encompasses the museum, curated the companion exhibition with substantial input from Museum Director Rachel Neisler, Library Director Catherine Maciariello, and others. The exhibition invited viewers to assess whether its content substantiated its thesis statement: “A school’s location and the size of the geographic area it serves impact the degree to which it contributes to that area’s sense of community.”[1]
In the mid-nineteenth century, five rural school districts were established within Atlanta Township, and eight were founded within the adjacent Eminence Township. Each had a one-room school. The schools were distributed so that no student had to walk more than two miles to attend. In the late 1940s, as part of a statewide school consolidation trend, those thirteen rural districts merged into the Atlanta School District, and the one-room schools closed. From approximately 1948 until 1972, students from throughout the Atlanta and Eminence townships rode buses to school in Atlanta.
In a second phase of consolidation, the Atlanta School District was absorbed into the newly established 377-square-mile Olympia School District in 1972. The exhibition text explained, “The Olympia district stretches from Atlanta in the south to Danvers in the north, and from Waynesville in the east to Hopedale in the west, making it the second largest geographic school district in Illinois. When the Olympia district was established, each of the eight communities comprising it had its own elementary school. The Olympia district now includes three grade-school attendance centers—in Atlanta, Danvers, and Minier—along with Olympia Middle and High schools located outside Stanford.”
“Classrooms & Community” included four main sections, each of which was introduced by one or more framing questions:
“Places in the Heart—Common Places Define Us”
- Do you think the location and size of the rural school dist