Battle Rock: The Struggle Over a One-Room School in America's Vanishing West - Hardcover

Celis, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891620665 ISBN 13: 9781891620669

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2002

Synopsis

A colorful look at rural America's rebound--and at the tensions created when urban expatriates meet old-time country values--centered on a Colorado community and its one-room school house.

In the 1990s, rural America increased in population three times faster than it did in the 1980s, as people left cities searching for a slower pace, new opportunities, and better schools. Battle Rock is the examination of one such rural community tucked into McElmo Canyon in the remote southwest corner of Colorado. From 1999-2000, Bill Celis lived in the community and attended Battle Rock school, which sits in the middle of the canyon, providing both a real and figurative divider between the longtime farmers and ranchers from the newer urban expatriates. As Celis warmly describes the daily lives of the canyon residents, the children, and their teacher, he carefully paints the portrait of a community under pressure resulting from conflicting viewpoints, goals and values. Along the way, he encounters bull snakes and loaded revolvers, Anasazi ruins and majestic vistas, poverty, stubbornness, ghosts, a cattle drive, and the daily struggles on the playground and in school board meetings. In Battle Rock, Celis puts to rest the common misperception that smaller communities offer simpler lives.

About this title

About the Author

William Celis is an assistant professor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication. He was a national education correspondent for The New York Times and a reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews

Celis, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California, took a leave in 1999 to move to Cortez, a small town in rural Colorado, to write about its "one-room" schoolhouse, Battle Rock. With 26 students in grades K through 6, Battle Rock had one teacher/principal, Paul Hanson; one part-time assistant; and a few visiting teachers. Celis got to know Hanson, a few of the students and their families, and the town's Assembly of God minister in the year he stayed. Locals were routinely hostile to outsiders, and Celis found most Cortezians to be backbiting gossips, so he had to give up on a number of potential sources for his story of the "struggle" over this school. The problem is, there's hardly any battle at Battle Rock. For all the ominous foreshadowing, the big "struggle" is really quite small: a parent thinks Hanson could be doing a better job, Hanson offers to resign, the other parents urge him not to, so he stays for another year. Even without a battle, the story of this one-teacher school might have been stimulating had Celis examined how attention-deficit students are handled, why this public school is still staging Christmas pageants and whether the local Native American children attend the school. Unfortunately, Celis is fascinated with the more routine aspects of school life, e.g., two girls excluding a third, and the disciplining of a child who doesn't finish his work. This earnest book suffers from a lack of sharp writing and deep thinking.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1891620665
• ISBN 13: 9781891620669
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256