Less than five years ago, Dayton Elementary was down to a grand total of seven students in its kindergarten through sixth-grade classes.
The handwriting was on the blackboard: The oldest continually operating rural school in the state of Montana was on its deathbed.
Saved it? That hardly does justice to the turnaround Nicole Fant has engineered at 98-year-old Dayton Elementary. Enrollment is up more than 500 percent in four years. There are five teachers on staff now, not just one.
And instead of boarding up the front doors of Dayton Elementary, they cut a hole in the back of the two-classroom building and are "adding on" a 4,500-square-foot addition. Essentially, it's a new school that keeps the historic old one intact as well.
Next month, Dayton's 45 students will move into modern, spacious new digs just a short walk from the west shore of Flathead Lake.
In the meantime, things are a bit hectic in the construction zone. The kindergarten class is being conducted in a hallway in the old school, right outside the door to Carmen Lane's fifth- and sixth-grade classroom.
Jamie Bartel, who teaches first and second grade, and Raina Yarbrough, who teaches third and fourth, are running their classrooms a few miles up the road in the old Proctor School, which closed its doors to students back in 1976.
They're all operating, temporarily, without things most schools take for granted.
The Internet? There isn't even a telephone at the Proctor School.
"But we've got a bathroom," Bartel says with a smile. Back in Dayton, they're without indoor plumbing during this stage of construction. The kids use a portable outdoor toilet, wash off outside with a garden hose, and go through a lot of sanitary wipes.
The payoff for these momentary sacrifices looms large: a brand new school for the upper west shore.
But how did an old school on its last legs come to be a brand new one with such a bright future?
It started back in 1999, when Nicole Fant applied for a job as clerk of the school district.
They turned her down.
"They'd already filled the position," says Fant, who grew up in Texas and Arizona and moved to the small town of Kila outside Kalispell with her family when she was 15. "But they needed a teacher's aide, so I took that."And she loved it - enough so that she decided to pursue a degree in elementary education.
Taking night classes offered by the University of Great Falls through Flathead Valley Community College, Fant registered for a minimum of 20 credit hours per semester and earned her degree in just three years.
The whole time, she also worked three jobs. An aide at Dayton Elementary during the day, Fant cleaned homes and was a waitress at Dayton's one-and-only night spot, the Idle Spur, as well.
Hired as Dayton's supervising teacher - a title that essentially means she also handles the duties a principal normally would - Fant quickly went to work resurrecting the dying school.
"The real story is Nicole," says school board member Carey Cooley. "She's basically the one who got the school back on its feet, just because of how hard a worker she is. She's our kindergarten teacher, principal, school secretary, nurse, janitor, counselor - everything."
"Mrs. Fant is the Dayton School," agrees contractor Cameron Gillette, who's around the school every day as project manager on the new building. "I don't know what they pay her, but it's not enough. She does everything around here."
Including saving the place.
It wasn't that there weren't children in School District 33. It's just that most of them went to school elsewhere, mostly in Polson, where many of their parents worked and where that district offers an after-school program.
"I think a lot of people would have liked for their children to go here," Fant says, "but if we let out at 3:20 and their parents don't get off work until 5 o'clock or later and still have to drive home, that's a problem."
Especially in a small community like Dayton, where the district can't afford to operate a bus system.
Fant applied for a grant and created Dayton's first after-school program. Enrollment shot up 250 percent in the first year alone, but she says it wasn't easy.
"We had to go fight for them," Fants says. "I think some people didn't even know the Dayton School was still open."
Fant advertised their kindergarten roundup. Invited reporters from local weeklies to school events, such as field trips - Dayton Elementary loves its many and varied field trips - to get the school's name out in the public eye. She made her case - even today, the teacher-to-student ratio at Dayton is a fraction of what you find in larger districts - to parents in the area who home-schooled their children.
"That was a big year for us," Cooley says. "We went from seven to 27, but schools are run based on last year's numbers. We were supposed to run a school for 27 students based on a budget for seven, and we had to ask for emergency funding from the state."
The enrollment has steadily increased since it more than tripled in that first year and eventually outgrew the old building. District 33 - which serves the areas surrounding Dayton, Rollins, Proctor and Lake Mary Ronan - went to the voters in the spring of 2007 to ask for $675,000 to construct the new building.
The bond issue passed.
But not enough people voted to make the election valid.
There are three big events in Dayton, where the population stood at 95 as of the 2000 Census.In the summer, several hundred people visit for Dayton Daze, a day of sailboat rides, wine tasting, a bazaar, parade, pig roast and outdoor (weather permitting) dance.
The other two events are school-related. In the winter, it's the school Christmas pageant, a tradition that dates back more than 40 years. In the spring, it's sixth-grade graduation.
The Christmas pageant "is insane," says para-educator Susan Hartman, who sews the costumes each year after a new theme is chosen. For last year's pageant, Hartman was bundling up dozens of students in dinosaur outfits for "A Prehistoric Christmas."
"We have to do two performances now, it's so jammed, and we still can't fit everyone in," Hartman says.
"People have to park a mile away," Cooley adds.
The sixth-grade graduation in the spring might normally draw just a handful of family members, but Cooley says they turn it into a barbecue for the community, the entire student body and their families. When last year's graduating class of two got their diplomas, there were 150 people on hand.
So the little school does play a big part in the fabric of Dayton, which is one reason when enough people didn't come to the polls for the bond election, school board members Cooley, Jim Ferguson and Linda Moore decided to run the election again - and this time, to take it to the voters.
Ballots asking for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on funding the new building were mailed out to all eligible voters in the district, and there's little question left on how important the Dayton School is to the upper west shore.
By 295-48, the new building was approved.
When's the last time you heard of a school bond issue
in Montana passing with
86 percent of the vote?
Fant may have been instrumental in turning enrollment figures around, but she says the other teachers and aides are the ones who have gone above and beyond to make things work during this disrupted school year.
"It's an amazing staff," Fant says (it also includes special education teacher Jan Toth and para-educator Lisa Fant, her husband's aunt). "They worked all summer long, unpaid, to make this happen, and they've moved the entire school three times."
MacKinly Corrigan is up to her elbows in shaving cream.Fant, who teaches kindergarten, has sprayed Barbasol shaving cream on a table in the hallway of the old school and has the youngsters spreading it around, then practicing drawing shapes and letters in the white stuff.
"This is funner that I thought it would be," Corrigan announces.
"It smells like Dad in here," decides her classmate, Jeremy Fant, the young cousin of Nicole's husband James, a fence contractor.
With just four kindergartners, the teacher is able to give each of her charges plenty of attention. When, on the fifth day of the new school year, she asks them to draw a square in the shaving cream and most respond with a rectangle, she can see what each has done and quickly point out the differences between the two.
"We had one of our teachers go to Kalispell after three years here," Fant says, "and now she teaches 120 students a day. She told me, 'I've lost all the connections to my students I had in Dayton.' "
And there are lots of connections in a small school. Yarbrough, the third- and fourth-grade teacher, continues a long family tradition of teaching at Dayton Elementary. Her grandmother taught here during World War II, and her great-grandmother taught here prior to that.
Lane, the fifth- and sixth-grade teacher, came to Dayton this year from a school in the Kalispell area precisely to teach in a smaller classroom.
"I really like the togetherness of smaller classes," says Lane, who had also previously spent 13 years teaching in a small elementary school in Dixon. "You really get to know your students."
"Larger districts have more services than we can offer," Cooley says. "They have guidance counselors, psychologists, speech therapists, bus systems, sports programs."
But at Dayton, the average class size is 12, and that seems to make up for a lot. Dayton students annually glide through their standardized testing, and the school easily exceeds its Annual Yearly Progress numbers as required by the No Child Left Behind Act.
And they do it without sacrificing fun. Dayton Elementary is a school where, with the proper permission slips and a hot day late in the school year, the entire staff and student body will take a break and go swimming in nearby Flathead Lake.
They go ice fishing every winter, too, taking part in the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks' Hooked on Fishing program.
There are field trips to ski, to bowl, to the Whitefish Wave and Sweet Pickin's Pumpkin Patch in Kalispell.
"We used to go over to Wild Horse Island and do things like count the wildflowers, too," says Cooley, whose mother Linda Gore taught at Dayton for a dozen years and who attended the school herself as a child. "But now that we've got so many students, there isn't a boat big enough to take everyone."
But by next month, there will be a building big enough to hold them all. Dying it was, but Dayton Elementary has done more than survive.
It has been born again.
Reach reporter Vince Devlin at 1-800-366-7186 or by e-mail at vdevlin@missoulian.com. Reach photographer Kurt Wilson at (406) 523-5244 or by e-mail at kwilson@missoulian.com.
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