It was mid-June, just a few days shy of the end of the school year, and the Sagaponack School was bustling with energy and activity.
In one half of the schoolhouse, a couple of boys glued together pieces of wood to make birdhouses while some peers played “coffee shop,” serving their teacher a slice of pretend pie. In the other half of the room, a group of older children took turns answering questions on a whiteboard.
All sorts of learning, all taking place under one roof, in one room where a movable wall is sometimes pulled across the space to separate the kindergarten and first-grade class from the second and third-grade class.
The Sagaponack School ended the 2021-22 school year with an enrollment of 13 children — a number that has now dwindled to just seven for the 2022-23 school year, thanks to the graduation of an unusually large group of third graders plus the lingering effects of Covid-19. In such a small village, enrollment has always come in waves. This is something that Lauren Thayer has seen firsthand in her role not just as Sagaponack School Board president, but also as an alumna herself and a parent of two former Sagg students.
“When I was there growing up, it was probably 12 kids, and even then, there was always one grade with one kid in it,” she recalled. There was only one teacher at the time managing four grades. “It’s not like we had 20 or 30 kids. It goes through the exact same ebb and flow. I think of it as a positive. . . . It’s the chance that parents dream of” for their children, she said.
For the first time since the 2019-20 school year, which was interrupted by the pandemic, Sagaponack School administrators have opened up enrollment to out-of-district families on a tuition-paying basis. Some within the school community acknowledged they were nervous about discussing the drop in enrollment. Would this news have people calling for school consolidation?
“There are just so many people who don’t know about it. A lot of people say, ‘Is that even an operational school?’ “ Ms. Thayer said. “The more Sagaponack can open their doors — let people in and see how high the educational level is there and the uniqueness of the environment — the more families will become interested.”
Besides shifting enrollment, other aspects have remained the same: lessons in penmanship that have gone away in most other local schools; Flag Day visits to a beloved neighbor, Barbara Albright; gym-class field trips to the ice-skating rink, and group bicycle rides to school in the morning. School budget votes are sometimes unanimous in favor of the tiniest spending plan in the region; this year’s budget is $1.87 million. Fred Wilford, who was a member of the board for 36 years, now oversees maintenance at the school.
Jay Finello, the school’s part-time superintendent, who came from larger districts like Huntington, East Islip, and Springs, said being there “gets me back to my beginnings as an elementary teacher.”
“There’s a strong connection between the school and the Sagaponack community,” he said. “It’s very much their school and they are very protective of our school and the kinds of educational opportunities for their children. Parents are active participants. . . . They are supportive and always willing to help. It’s very much a community school.”
In 1919, according to Forbes magazine, there were roughly 190,000 one-room schoolhouses in the U.S., serving rural students mostly in the Midwest. Today, fewer than 400 remain in active use — including Sagaponack — and Forbes opined in 2020 that rather than consider them outdated “relics,” they could actually serve as models for the future of education because of the way teaching is individualized and the role that camaraderie and collaboration play.
“The kind of teaching and learning that takes place in such an environment is much needed in today’s world and a modern-day version of the one-room schoolhouse can serve as a model for the renewal of education,” Brandon Busteed, an education writer, wrote for Forbes that year.
Indeed, the only relic in Sagaponack is the charming, dollhouse-size replica of the Little Red Schoolhouse, complete with the portrait of George Washington that has hung in the classroom for decades. The school was first established in 1712, when Southampton Town was carved into 15 different school districts. The present-day schoolhouse was built in 1885, heated by a coal stove in the center of the room. In 2016-17, the district transitioned from a first-through-fourth-grade structure to a kindergarten-through-third-grade system, mirroring that of its slightly larger neighbor, the Wainscott School.
Out-of-district families interested in sending their children can send an email to the district’s endlessly cheerful clerk, Jeanette Krempler, at [email protected]. Tuition is $9,000 per student.