Top Story

David Scribner

What is the value of a village school?

By David Scribner MONTEREY – This week at the Monterey School, the former Town Hall and police station, up the hill from the library and the General Store, the seven kindergarten students currently enrolled in the village’s educational program were rehearsing their parts in the school play. It is a remarkably comfortable and homey classroom setting, with walls decorated with student art, tables of numbers, posters of the alphabet. There are no rigid rows of desks. It is a rambling set up of tables and chairs, allowing students to find a space of their own. Under the guidance of longtime Monterey teacher Susan Andersen and assistant Belinda Twing, the students are reciting, from memory, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, “The Owl and the Pussycat” by Edward Lear, and “Wynken Blynken & Nod” by Eugene Field. For each poem, they donned costumes, or held illustrations. full story