Tracey Decker’s baby has not been born, but the Pierpont resident already knows she wants her child to attend Pierpont Elementary.

Decker, president of the school’s Parent Teacher Organization, has two stepchildren in the school and a 4-year-old who’ll be heading to kindergarten in two years. Although Decker didn’t go to Pierpont Elementary, her husband did, and since coming to the community four years ago, Decker has become passionate about his elementary alma mater.

“When I first moved into the community, everyone was so welcoming and friendly at the school,” she says. “The school is the

heart of the community.”

That heart, a far-flung organ of the Buckeye Local School District, is in danger of losing its beat. The board of education, facing declining enrollment and projected deficits, is weighing the option of closing either North Kingsville or Pierpont elementary schools at the end of the school year. Pierpont is the logical financial choice of the two: Its small enrollment would make it easier for the district to absorb the 120 students who go there while realizing the greatest savings on operational and teaching staff. Closing Pierpont also would retain some extra classroom space for open-enrollment students, a source of income for the struggling district.

These decisions are never purely financial, however, and board members in open session have acknowledged the community impact of closing a school and their reluctance disrupt families and youngsters.

Board President Norah Anderson says the board has consistently been considerate of the building’s role in the community and kept it open despite its inefficiency.

“Otherwise, Pierpont would have been closed a long time ago,” she says.

“I would like to keep Pierpont open if there is any way to do that,” she adds. “We will continue to struggle with that.”

The building’s original section dates back to 1938, but it houses a 21st-century educational program administered with an old-fashioned attitude of caring. In October 2008, the school was named a state School of Promise, one of only 146 such schools in the state.

Janet Woodard is teaching her 35th class of first-graders at Pierpont. Three years ago, the school was on state academic watch, but teachers pulled together and brought the building up to School of Promise status.

“We work as a team,” she says. “We get together and work on different things. There is a consistency of how we teach kindergarten through third grade.”

She says it’s more than concern about academics that makes the school work, however.

“We’re kind of like a family,” she says. “If I see where a sixth-grader is having a problem, I can be there for him. We’re there to help if there’s a problem and celebrate when they succeed.”

Woodard says teachers haven’t allowed the possibility of closing to threaten the educational program. She, like many of the other Pierpont residents who showed up for the board’s community meeting Jan. 21, worries about what will happen to their town if the school closes.

“You take the neighborhood school out of the town, and it’s like you are taking the heart of the community out,” she says.



Memories of 1961

Drive through Pierpont on a snowy afternoon in January, and it’s obvious that there are far more heartbeats in the aged school building than in any other structure in town. Pierpont’s only restaurant, Rogene’s, is closed for the winter. Across the street, Dan Swift’s Jamboree Foods store fills food orders for both “English” and Amish residents of the township. South of Jamboree are the Pierpont Presbyterian Church and Barbie’s Beauty Shop.

Bob Richcreek’s Shell station is just south of Rogene’s, and while there may be a couple of Pierpont High School alumni chewing the fat inside, most of the motorists who buy gas this time of year prefer to stay in their warm vehicles and let Bob pump their fuel.

Like many other gray-haired Pierpont residents, Richcreek completed all 12 grades in the one-story building up the road. His wife, Darla (Brown), who graduated in 1960, was a member of the next-to-last high school class from Pierpont.

The town didn’t die overnight when Pierpont’s upper-level students headed north to Kingsville, but it lost a quality of life that wasn’t replaced by becoming part of something larger than a rural crossroads.

Darla Richcreek says the high school even had a basketball team that went all the way to state.

“Everybody went to the events at the school, even if they didn’t have students there,” she says. “They had athletic games; they had plays. I feel we’ll really lose a lot if we lose our elementary school. I hate to think what it will mean to the community.”

Kay Cork, class of 1961, says a small school actually provided students with more opportunities.

“Every person had a part, and it seemed like there were more things going on in the community,” Cork says.

Ruth Hoover completed all 12 grades at the school, had five children go to elementary school there and has a grandchild enrolled.

“I think it would be a great loss to our community, but I realize the enrollment is down,” says Hoover, a Pierpont resident. “I realize other communities also have their neighborhood schools.”

Staying in touch

For Hoover and other grandparents in the district, their contact with the school is only three or four times a year. There’s the annual grandparents breakfast in May, a PTO-sponsored event that’s so popular it spans two days. Music programs a couple of times a year, open houses and perhaps a volunteering opportunity draw the community to the school at other times.

“The school is definitely a gathering place for the community,” says Bob Richcreek. “I think it would be bad to get rid of it, but I’m not the one who will make that decision.”

Richcreek sells the occasional tank of gas to a teacher, support staff worker or parent taking a child to school. He also sells a little diesel for district buses and, in the summer, gasoline for the power equipment that keeps the building’s grounds neat. Individually, they aren’t big sales.

“But with the way the economy is, anything negative is going to be bad,” Richcreek says.

Across the street, Dan Swift sells deli foods, snacks and other grocery items to teachers and support staff. He says that part of his business will disappear if the school closes. More important, the traffic flow generated by the building drawing parents and staff to its parking lot 180 days a year will evaporate, as well.

“People who drive (their students ) to Kingsville will stop there rather than drive here,” he says. “That will definitely play an impact on the community and businesses in it.”

Swift is a Scout leader for Boy Scout Troop 140, which meets at the fire department but recruits youngsters through the school. Swift says if the building closes, it will become very difficult to select and recruit Pierpont males out of the homogenized Kingsville Elementary student population. Glen Holden, whose wife is a teacher at the Pierpont school, says it will impair other community organizations’ ability to recruit for and communicate their missions to Pierpont’s younger generation.

“That’s the source of communication throughout the township,” says Holden. “If there’s a Little League sign-up, it’s dispersed through the school. If there’s a 4-H group meeting, it’s dispersed at the school.”

Future citizens

Even the local church finds its future in the school. Since 1952, Pierpont Presbyterian Church has run the Jesus Educates the Students (JETS) program for Pierpont Elementary fourth, fifth and sixth-graders. About three dozen youngsters gather on Thursday afternoons at the church for the hour-long activity. Parents, who sign permission slips for the youngsters to attend JETS, pick up the students at the church.

JETS teaches youngsters basic Bible skills, training they would otherwise not get in school or, in many cases, at home.

“They learn John 3:16 and a few books of the Bible,” says Milan Hoover, who has volunteered with JETS for the past decade.

Robin Walker, who works at the school as a lunch monitor and an early-intervention worker, directs the program. She says the dozen or so residents who voluteer with JETS are concerned that their 57-year-old program will fold if the school closes.

“Just the fact that the kids are (at the school) makes the program available,” says the Rev. Ed Diehl, pastor of the church. “If the kids were not there, the program would not be available.”

“All of us feel it will tear the heart out of the community if our school leaves,” Walker says.

JETS students do more than learn, sing, pray and snack. At Christmas, they adopt another student and fill Operation Christmas Child boxes.

The school also helps feed the community’s hungry residents by collecting food for the pantry housed at the church.

“The school takes up a collection for the food bank,” Diehl says. “They collect … close to 1,000 cans of food for the pantry.”

If the school were to close, Diehl says his parishioners would have to increase donations to the bank, which helps, on average, 10 families a month.

Those numbers sound small to people who live in cities, but life is lived on a smaller scale in Pierpont, and little things have big impact, for both good and bad. Walker, during the devotional period of the JETS program Thursday, seemed to speak as a prophet when she read from the “Our Daily Bread” booklet: “Your little place is not a steppingstone to greatness; it is greatness.”

Drawing cards

Diehl, who has lived and served in the community nine years, says the school is one of the reasons people build new homes in Pierpont Township or look for existing property on its back roads. The school is small, accessible, friendly and nearby. If a child gets ill, the parent has to drive only a mile or two to attend to the need.

“The kids are close to home, and that’s one of the reasons people live here,” he says.

“I think it is going to be a big loss,” says Kay Cork. “Why would anybody want to move out here if they had a 5 or 6-year-old who is going to have to ride a bus for a couple hours every day?”

Woodard points out that many people who live in Kingsville or Ashtabula Township consider Pierpont a long drive. If that’s the case, they ought to consider how much longer that ride would seem to a kindergarten student who will spend more than an hour on a bus each way.

Darla Richcreek says their son, now in his 30s, was legally blind and had to ride the bus to a special school in Ashtabula. She’s concerned his unique experience of a long bus ride and several transfers would become commonplace for the displaced Pierpont youngsters.

“He was worn out when he got home from school,” she says. “That’s a long ways for the little ones to go.”

Woodard points out that the school has 10 open-enrollment students, about 10 percent of its population. She says these are parents who have identified benefits inherent to the community school, who make the sacrifices required to enroll their children in that building.

“Parents choose our school because of it smallness, our uniqueness,” she says.

There are perks to being a part of this school, as well.

Every two years, the PTO sponsors a field trip for its fifth and sixth-graders, says Decker. The last trip was to Pittsburgh. Students toured the Science Center, went to a Pirates game and had dinner at a Golden Corral restaurant. They traveled on a tour bus, and the entire bill, about $3,000 for the 30 to 40 students, was picked up by the PTO.

“The kids loved it,” Decker said.

Later this month, all kindergarten through fourth-grade students will head to Edgewood for a theatrical performance. The trip is sponsored by the PTO.

Woodard says it’s not just for the good times that this school comes together with the community’s other two institutions — the church and fire department — to help. When a 4-year-old girl in the community became ill with cancer last year, the school and fire department took the lead in raising $5,000 for the family. When a family’s home burned over Christmas, the three institutions came together to assist.

The school endows every student with an intangible benefit for life: that sense of belonging to a community of scholars going back more than 100 years. Every June, members of the Pierpont Alumni Association return to their hometown to reminisce and share a meal at the fire hall. The old class photos that hang in the halls of the school are moved to the fire hall, friendships are renewed and that sense of community rekindled, even as the community slips a little further into the engulfing shadows of “progress.”

“There’s a sense of community there because they were all there together,” observes Glen Holden. “If the school is not there, that sense of community is greatly jeopardized.”