About 20 miles east of Bridgewater in the small New Brunswick town of Knowlesville, a community of modern settlers are pairing new and old ideas in their quest to live happily and educate their children.
“We’re inviting people to the rural area to take part in the land trust initiative and to consider this home,” said Tegan Wong-Daugherty, a teacher and director at the Knowlesville Art and Nature School, a charter elementary school with 20 students. “We really felt that we needed a school as the heart of the community.”
The school is a throwback to the old rural schoolhouse, and it also is a new gathering place for Knowlesville, a town of fewer than 1,000 residents where a group of families in 2010 started a 130-acre neighborhood land trust, offering 2.5-acre plots for other people and families who wanted to be part of a sustainable, small rural community.
“A lot of the older people from previous generations say once you remove the schools from the communities, you really take the heart out of rural communities,” said Wong-Daugherty, as the school was holding its annual country fair fundraiser. “We tried to bring one back. It seemed like a pipe dream.”
The school reflects the values and lifestyle of the startup community. The multi-age classes spend a lot of time learning outside, studying the forest or working on projects, and in art, music and writing — inspired by the Waldorf and Montessori school systems.
Last spring, the students used their math skills to design and build a longhouse gazebo with former church pews as benches. They often make their own meals — also applying math — with vegetables they grow and cook sourdough bread in an outdoor clay oven they helped built. The renovated school building is powered by solar panels, heated with wood, draws on a large a community garden for meals, and is connected to homes and roads through wooded trails.
“Right now they’re just finishing a creative writing block where they’re spending every morning writing outside,” said Wong-Daugherty. “We start our days outside, we end our days outside. We have extended recess and lunchtime. Even in winter, everyday we’re outside. There’s a lot of art, activities, writing and music, all integrated with the academics.”
The students “have a main lesson in the morning, when everyone is sort of more academically awake, and that can go on for a month. The idea is that you can sink really deeply into a subject and learn it in full,” she said.
“It’s really given an alternative for some students that were struggling in the public school system and needed something different that met them where they were at,” she said.
Throughout the year, the school has 20 students from the 10 families who’ve settled on the land trust plots, and from the area around Knowlesville, located 10 miles east of Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick’s “French Fry Capital of the World.”
Much like northern Maine, western New Brunswick’s communities are aging and declining in population, with potatoes and lumber as two of the major industries. Leaders in the South Knowlesville Land Trust and school community say they have the opportunity to stem the rural brain drain by creating a neighborhood with the best of rural and urban — walkability, shared spaces, peace and quiet, and ample land for food.
Wong-Daugherty is originally from Ottawa, and moved to Knowlesville in 1988 to work in forest conservation. She later met her husband, Leland, a Louisiana-native who came to Bridgewater, Maine, as an organic farming apprentice at Wood Prairie Farm.
They settled in Knowlesville, where they bought 130 acres, and in 2008, when their oldest child Michael was 4, they helped start a preschool based out of the Women’s Institute in Knowlesville, with Tegan as the head teacher.
In 2010, they started the land trust to bring in other families at the same time they were starting the school. The land trust requires people and families who are seriously interested in taking the free 2.5-acre plots to spend a year living in the community to make sure it’s what they want to do. After that, they can have a plot for free and receive help building a small off-grid home.
When they wanted to open the elementary school, the Wong-Daugherty’s and others in the community found the nearby Baptist church, which had been vandalized. The building was moved, put back together and renovated, with a straw-bale insulation addition to form a kitchen.
The Knowlesville community has drawn a diversity of newcomers from Canada and elsewhere, including a family originally from Israel who lives in Woodstock and sends their children to the Art and Nature School. Tuition this year is $3,600 (about $2,700 in U.S. dollars) which is on par with private schools such as Cornerstone Christian Academy and also comes with options for parents with limited income.
Kia Bartock, a land trust settler and mother of a son in the school, came to Knowlesville from Ottawa in 2014, drawn by a diverse rural community that focuses on children and self-sufficiency.
“I love how progressive it is in a rural setting,” Bartock said. “The kids have their hands in the dirt from seed to harvest, and they see the whole cycle. I love that they’re always moving and outdoors before they start their day. They need to move.”
Like some American parents and teachers, Bartock said she was troubled by the rise of standardized curriculum and testing, and how the wide availability of junk food and lack of activity during the school day can lead to student behavior problems and disengagement.
She argues that many youngsters with apparent learning problems, especially those given pharmaceutical stimulants for attention-deficit disorder, really just need more exercise — an idea supported by research. One recent study, in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, found that a 12-week program of exercise before school was associated with improved math and reading test scores in all children, especially in those with attention disorders.
Bartock and others say bringing the classroom outdoors lets students learn arts, math, science and social studies in practical and fun activities that work their brains and their energy — much like a rural life built around farming.
This style of rural schooling “definitely has its challenges,” Bartock said, “because it’s a small group, and you’ve got all different ages and stages.
“Working through those issues is good for the kids,” she said. “It gets them working on their social skills, empathy and compassion to learn conflict resolution. Nothing gets swept under the rug. It’s not just, ‘Go the office, and you’ve got detention.’”
After more than two years in Knowlesville, Bartock said she is happy to have made the change, an investment in living a good natural life herself and in her son’s future.
“In this day and age, with this generation being the next to pick up the slack, I think what we’re doing here is key. It’s essential in the big picture.”