Schools still play key role in communities
By Ellen Crawford
The Forum

North Dakota can thank a horde of grasshoppers for its first school. Like many of the region's earliest schools, this one had a religious background. Two Catholic missionaries, Fathers Joseph Provencher and Joseph Dumoulin, traveled to the Manitoba settlement of St. Boniface in 1818, intending to open a school.

But shortly after they arrived grasshoppers destroyed the crops the community depended on for food and everyone fled south to Pembina. The two missionaries went with them and started a mission school, where they taught about 60 students. Most were Metis, a mixed-race people of American Indian and French descent.

The school was short-lived. At the time, Pembina was part of Canada. But in 1823 the border between the United States and Canada moved northward and Pembina became the first permanent white settlement in what would become North Dakota.

When its residents discovered they weren't under French rule any longer, they closed the school. It didn't re-open until 1848. The people who settled this region continued to struggle for the next several decades to provide an education for their children.

Schools often were little more than shacks with dirt floors, benches for seats and boxes for desks. Some settlers partitioned off a portion of their homes for a school. But people persevered, and schools eventually became the center of focus in many communities and gave them a sense of identity.

Today education is big business. School districts and colleges are among many cities' largest employers and a substantial chunk of local and state tax dollars support education.

Other education firsts

Minnesota's first public school opened in St. Paul in 1847. A group of families banded together and hired 30-year-old Harriet Bishop of Vermont as the teacher. Conditions at the school were far from glamorous. It was a mud-plastered log shack that once was a blacksmith shop. Bishop had to drive out rats and snakes that occasionally sought shelter there.

Moorhead's first school was a subscription school that opened in the summer of 1872 in the Presbyterian chapel. It lasted two months. Another school opened in the chapel that fall and stayed open for five months.

The following spring Moorhead residents formed a school district, issued $5,000 in bonds and approved a 8-mill tax levy to building the city's first school. Teen-ager Mercy Nelson conducted one of Fargo's earliest schools, also a subscription school, in the early 1870s in a log cabin in the vicinity of what's now Island Park.

Students began attending classes in the city's first public school the winter of 1873-74 and later in 1874 Fargo organized as the state's first school district.

Slow to advance

One-room schoolhouses sprang up all over the region in the latter half of the 1800s, but the quality of education varied from school to school, and since many settlers were immigrants, the students couldn't speak English.

Many students dropped out after learning the basics because their families needed them on the farm. Well-educated instructors were rare, and most teachers didn't stay in the profession more than two years.

Perhaps it was the pay - generally under $30 a month, which was even less than a domestic servant's salary. Or maybe it was the restrictive rules that teachers, most of whom were women, were forced to follow.

In 1915, for example, North Dakota banned female teachers from marrying, keeping company with men, loitering downtown in the ice cream stores, traveling beyond city limits without permission from the school board chairman, riding in a carriage or automobile with a man other than their father or brother, smoking, dressing in bright colors and dying their hair.

Female teachers also were required to wear at least two petticoats and be home between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless attending a school function. Legislators and other state officials, teacher associations and parent-teacher organizations worked hard during the next several years to consolidate schools, require teachers to be certified and upgrade teachers' pay and working conditions.

However, the situation remained dismal, and the Korean War helped point out just how bad it was, according to Curt Eriksmoen, social studies coordinator for the state Department of Public Instruction and the author of a history of North Dakota's elementary and secondary education. Thirteen percent of North Dakota's draftees failed the armed forces' qualification tests. That was one of the highest failure rates in the nation, Eriksmoen says.

In comparison, Minnesota's failure rate was 2.2 percent. The state Legislature passed two bills during the 1950s that helped combat this problem. One provided a countywide tax to support high schools. The other included a funding formula that took into account the differences in school districts' demographics, educational needs and ability to generate tax dollars.

Subsequent legislation dealt with teacher qualifications and training. Although conditions have improved considerably in the last century, the state still grapples with issues such as teacher shortages, school consolidation and funding.

Colleges sink roots

This area's higher education system also dates back more than 100 years. Moorhead State University came first, in 1888, followed by North Dakota State University in 1890, and Concordia College the following year.

Moorhead State started as a normal school, a place for training public school teachers. It became a state teachers college in 1921, when it was authorized to grant a bachelor's degree. The institution changed its name to Moorhead State College in 1957 and shifted its emphasis to sending liberal arts graduates as well as teachers into the working world.

In 1976 it became Moorhead State University to better reflect its mission as a liberal arts school, and on July 1, 2000, it will become Minnesota State University Moorhead. NDSU can trace its roots to the Morrill Act, which Congress passed in 1862, giving each state a land grant of 30,000 acres for each U.S. senator and representative. This meant that when North Dakota became a state in 1889, it received an allotment of 90,000 acres.

The Morrill Act specified that states couldn't sell the land for less than $10 an acre, and the money had to be used for at least one college where the main function was teaching agriculture and mechanical arts. Thus, when NDSU opened, it was known as the North Dakota Agricultural College, which spawned one of its better-known nicknames, "Cow College."

In 1916 it split into three basic divisions - on-campus education, research and extension - when administrators realized that the college has a responsibility to help farmers with their problems as well as teach their children.

It became a university in 1960 and today is well-known as a state research facility. Concordia, a private, Lutheran liberal arts college, started as little more than a high school or academy for young immigrants and the children of local farmers.

The immigrants wanted to learn how to live in their new home, and the Norwegian settlers in the area wanted their children to go to school where teachers spoke their native language and taught traditional values.

A controversy developed in the early 1900s over the school's future. Some faculty wanted it to be a business school and others thought it should be a liberal arts college. The liberal arts college proponents prevailed. Concordia developed a complete college program in 1913 and issued its first baccalaureate degrees four years later.