Relay: Always Learning

I visited the Wainscott School last Monday, and just like its 19 students do there every day, I learned something new.

The concept of a modern one or two-room schoolhouse was completely foreign to me. To be frank, I simply didn’t know they existed on Long Island anymore, let alone in two neighboring communities on the South Fork. But now I am aware, and as I stood in Wainscott’s tightly arranged, cheerfully decorated classroom, I watched as the teachers, Kelleann Yusko and Dorry Silvey, handled two blended grades each: kindergarten and first grade in Ms. Yusko’s half of the room, and second and third grades in Ms. Silvey’s half.

Because I am so new to this particular community — I’ve been a Wainscott resident all of three weeks so far — the school’s superintendent, Stuart Rachlin, graciously invited me for a tour and one-on-one conversation about the unique character and challenges of the school district.

“I think that because New York State law allows towns to provide for their own education, as opposed to having regional or county schools as occurs elsewhere, those schools have become a focal point and a source of pride for the community,” Mr. Rachlin said a few days after my visit. Wainscott “absolutely is a treasure,” he said. “For all of the years that Wainscott has been in existence, the school has been a constant.”

I’d never seen anything like it, and I’ve been to a lot of public schools.

I’ll look back on my first visit to Wainscott School as a pivotal moment in my own education about the diverse climate of education on Long Island. My first learning experience along these lines came during my senior year at Island Trees High School in the fall of 1998.

I’d signed up for a class in public policy, and our teacher had planned an exchange program of sorts. About four years prior to New York State’s takeover of the then-troubled Roosevelt School District in 2002, my classmates and I headed to Roosevelt High School to shadow students in a similar class there. Those students also visited our school, where the extreme differences — the textbooks and computers, the physical facilities, even the students’ and teachers’ attitudes — were so disparate they brought tears to some students’ eyes. I’ll never forget it.

Some years later, I got a job as a reporter covering high school sports for a New York City daily newspaper. Sports programs ranged from ragged to robust — kids with uniforms that were faded and outdated played against kids with much cooler ones, with equipment that varied along those same lines, in gymnasiums that reflected the same divide. All funded with public dollars.

Working for Three Village Patch a few years ago, I got to cover a system considered one of the Island’s best for regularly producing Intel Science Competition semifinalists as well as regionally or nationally ranked athletic teams. Working for Hauppauge Patch, I attended a school board meeting during which exasperated school officials tried for four hours to ease parents’ concerns about the placement of children from a new homeless shelter into classrooms already considered overcrowded.

Wainscott itself may very well be on the verge of its own metamorphosis, as an affordable rental housing project is currently being explored in the community.

My visit to Wainscott School, and my subsequent recollections of experiences in school districts across the region, led me to the conclusion that every school system here has its own challenges. But in my opinion, whether children are learning in a single classroom, an enormous school, or even in a home school setting, districts have one mission in common: to prepare their children for success in life.

Christine Sampson, who is covering education for The Star, is a Long Island native who was most recently living and reporting in Virginia.