A Portrait of a Collaborative ARSI Team in Knott County, Kentucky

INTRODUCTION: The following report is one of three that depict what ARSI work looked like “on the ground,” that is, in actual small rural school districts scattered across Appalachia. It is a portrait of how the design, values and intent of ARSI played out in practice, in a specific place and time. We at Inverness Research Associates have deliberately used the term portrait as the title of these three individual reports, because they are very much about real people and how in their own hands they brought the ideas and goals of ARSI to the K-12 students in their local regions. To read an overview of the different roles ARSI educators filled and played within the project, please see the report titled “An Overview of ARSI: The Genesis, The Contextual Landscape, and the Model that Evolved.”

Our third portrait gave Inverness Research an excellent opportunity to see the ARSI values and goals put into practice by a collaborative team of four educators working at various levels of the ARSI project. It situates the efforts of these four women within the historical context of earlier, 19th century educational reforms in the county also led by women. We highlight how the current reformers stepped beyond their traditional roles to work both individually and collaboratively to give form and substance to the ARSI program in their region, and how through the process of doing so they each grew personally and professionally.

Jane Campbell, then Knott County´s school district curriculum coordinator, had already begun work in curriculum improvement, networking with ARSI and other programs to bring in professional development for the district´s teachers. Frieda Mullins, a principal at Jones Fork Elementary School was focused on bringing ARSI vision of education improvement and had her school become an ARSI district catalyst school. Evelyn Mayer, then a teacher at Jones Fork Elementary School was invited by her principal Ms. Mullins to become an ARSI Teacher Partner. In this position, Ms. Mayer worked with other teachers to help them begin or improve the teaching of science at the elementary level using inquiry-based pedagogy and curriculum. Brenda Mullins, then a mathematics teacher at Knott County Central High School became a ARSI Teacher Partner, and worked on the process of aligning the curriculum in both math and science across high school grade levels.

A PORTRAIT OF A COLLABORATIVE ARSI TEAM IN KNOTT COUNTY, KENTUCKY

By Elizabeth Horsch

Women, my name is Solomon Everidge. Some call me the granddaddy of Troublesome. Since I was a little shirttail boy, hoeing corn on the hillsides, I have looked up Troublesome and down Troublesome for somebody to come and larn us something…. When I heard the tale of you women, I walked the 22 miles acrost the ridges to search out the truth of it. I am now persuaded you are the ones I have looked for all my lifetime. Come over to Troublesome, women, and do for us what you are doing here.
From “History and Families-Knott County, Kentucky,” published by Turner Publishing Co., 1995, Paducah, KY

Many of the people who live in Knott County today are direct descendants of the early settlers of the region. Looking at a roster of the current population one sees many of the same names that occur in the early county records. Today the people of Knott County share an identity that is grounded in the place they and their ancestors called home. In turn, their sense of place molds their vision and their actions in their personal, professional and civic lives.

Perhaps the public endeavor in which the influence of place is most evident is education. In Knott County education has always been strongly linked with the local geography, history, economics and culture. When the major education reform efforts of the 1990s came to Knott County, they were created and implemented by educators who were themselves products of this isolated region, and therefore the programs they developed were shaped by their sense of place.

In particular, the stories of the women who led this reform—Jane, Frieda, Evelyn, and Brenda—echo the stories of the early pioneer women who first established schools in the region in the early 1900s. The institutions and ways of working which these early educational pioneers created have influenced and are closely interwoven with the lives and careers of the present group of educational leaders.

A brief step back in time to look more closely at the region and how its geography and history have created a unique culture that defines the present, helps us better understand the ARSI leaders and their recent efforts to improve math and science education in Knott County.

The Place

Unlike many other areas of Kentucky, Knott County has no large rivers, and as a result, no broad fertile river valleys. Instead the county is home to steep, timbered slopes of mountains, which abruptly rise on either side of small streams and creeks. The creek beds often comprise the only flat land that exists in the region. Knott County’s rough terrain hinders the building of roads and railroads. As late as the 1930s, there were few gravel roads and the existing dirt roads were impassable in the winter and in the rainy seasons. Even today, winter storms often close mountain roads, forcing schools to close for days at a time.

Not surprisingly farming in Knott County has always been mainly subsistence. Areas which provided sufficient acreage for home building and farming were limited and widely dispersed. The average family farm had only 3-4 acres of flat land, and the hillsides were composed of heavy clay soils that tended to erode if the vegetation was removed. For food families grew small gardens and raised a few livestock. For fuel, they mined the shallow coal seams which striped the nearby mountains. Many built their own furniture, created musical instruments, wove fabric from fiber of the livestock they raised, and used native materials to weave baskets. Each family had to become a self-sustaining unit. Thus the terrain—Knott County’s steep mountains and often impassable “hollers,”—has historically impeded the growth of communities and local economies and contributed to the isolation of the inhabitants.

Today, according to Evelyn Mayer (one of the educational leaders portrayed in this report), “The two growth industries in the county are welfare and schools,” Although coal and timber are the major natural resources in the region, they have not benefited Knott County’s economic growth or stability. The coal reserves are considered significant, but in contrast to neighboring areas where economic development has occurred, less than 7% of the existing reserves have actually been mined because they are difficult to access. In addition, in the early days most of the landowners were persuaded to sell their mineral rights to large coal companies. Currently much of the coal is owned by out of state corporations that pay taxes on only 0.1% of the assessed value of the un-mined coal. The convergence of these geographical, historical and political factors does little to encourage the development of the coal reserves, and consequently, they do not provide much revenue for the local people or the public institutions in the county.

Through the years population growth and prosperity have bypassed Knott County. Today the population of the county is less than 18,000, a gain of only 100 inhabitants each year for the last 100 years. The median income in the county is $20, 373 compared to the average income of $33,600 in the state of Kentucky. Education in particular has been severely impacted by the lack of economic resources in Knott County. Although there have been ongoing educational improvement efforts stretching back almost a century, even now less than a third of the county’s residents hold high school diplomas, and only 5% have a bachelor’s degree. Though historically residents have recognized the need for education, their isolation and their lack of economic opportunity have limited their participation in education’s benefits.

Bringing Education to Knott County: 100 Years Ago

In the early 1900s, the first major educational improvement efforts came to Knott County. During this era, both Hindman Settlement School and Alice Lloyd were founded. These two remarkable and enduring educational institutions have continued to shape and influence education for over one hundred years. Both were envisioned and shepherded by the educated and strong-willed women of the day. And both have played significant roles in the professional lives of the women who have led the more recent educational reform movements in Knott County. We include the following brief description of their history to illuminate the work of the ARSI Teacher Partners who also sought to bring quality education to the county a century later.

The Hindman Settlement School

In the late 1800s, the Progressive Movement was sweeping the industrialized cities of the North. One of the key features of this urban social and political reform movement was the creation of settlement houses and schools to meet the needs of economically deprived families. Settlement facilities, with their focus on the welfare of women and children, offered the privileged and highly educated young females of the day a socially acceptable outlet for their intellectual and physical energies. Because this work was viewed as domestic activity, they could assume roles of leadership in the public arena, historically considered a male domain. And they could do so without alienating a society that was organized around and comfortable with a male-dominated, hierarchical culture.

In the summer of 1900, two intrepid young women, May Stone and Katherine Pettit, pitched their tents on the side of a hill overlooking the small village of Hindman, the county seat of the newly created Knott County. Loaded with books, games, and a small portable organ they preceded to hold “school” for the people of the mountains. The activities of the summer camp were practical in nature—crafts, reading, singing, learning to make biscuits and bread. When the summer ended, the local people implored the two women to remain and establish a permanent industrial school. The pleas resonated with Stone and Pettit, and so, in the words of Stone, “… with little experience and less money, we started a school.”

Adapting the urban settlement school concept to their rural Appalachian setting, they founded the Hindman Settlement School. There they promoted health care, rigorous academics, model agrarian practices and homemaking. To staff the school, Stone prevailed upon former classmates at Wellesley, where she had done graduate work, to come and give a year of their lives to teaching in the school. Many graduates from prestigious eastern women’s colleges worked at the school in the early years, providing a much-needed link to financial support for the school from wealthy Easterners.

A decade later, the school had expanded rapidly and had grown to serve more than 300 students. For many of those children, particularly those who came in from remote outlying areas, the Hindman Settlement School was their only opportunity for education. The school also developed an educational outreach program to train young local women as teachers for the rural schools. Over the next decade, most of the county’s fledgling elementary schools were staffed by teachers trained at the Settlement school. In 1910 the Hindmen Settlement School became the county’s only high school.

As the county grew, the public school system gradually took over the educational programs the Settlement School had provided in its early years. Hindman then shifted its mission and resources to provide supplementary services to the school system and to identify and serve community needs that were not being met by other agencies. It provided summer school and after school tutoring for students who were not performing well in the public school and also developed a full time school for severely learning-disabled children. It began a GED program for high school dropouts and a special literacy program for adults in the county who had never learned to read.

In addition, Hindman began focusing on the preservation of the indigenous culture of Knott County. Many of the early settlers were of Scot-Irish lineage that had fled oppression in their homelands, so that as they settled in the remote “hollers” of the mountains, their ballads, songs and stories reflected the persecution they and their ancestors had experienced. Their music and stories changed little over time because of their isolation. The Settlement School helped the people preserve their indigenous art, music and storytelling. Today it still continues to promote the unique heritage of the area through the Appalachian Family Folk Week, the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, and the Appalachian Visual Arts week. Like the educational leaders who would follow, the Hindman Settlement School responded as the needs of the region changed, “… taking the resources it has and meeting the needs that aren’t being met.”

If you wish to continue reading this report, please download the full report (PDF)

back to top