Walking around Paoli Public Schools in south-central Oklahoma, one is greeted by the sounds of students running on the playground and the smell of fresh-cut grass. Grass mowed by Paoli Superintendent and principal David Morris.
“I came into work this morning, first thing I did was get on the mower and start mowing before the kids got here,” Morris said. “And then I came in, and I’m working on finances. And as soon as you leave, I’m going back out, getting on a weed eater or, you know, fix a toilet. But, in the small schools … It takes everybody.”
Morris does what he can to keep the small school afloat.
Paoli has around 180 students in pre-k through 12th grade. He said in a town with an aging population and no new development, the school has struggled to keep its numbers. Paoli’s third through sixth-grade classes are in the single digits.
In search of a solution, Morris reached out to the local pre-k through eighth-grade school district, Whitebead, to request a voluntary annexation.
“I see what’s coming. I can see it down the road,” Morris said. “And you know, if it doesn’t go through, we can hang in here, and we can be like a lot of other schools that have slowly dwindled. And we can hang on. But we’re going to start losing programs.”
Without enough kids, Morris said the district will start losing extracurriculars and won’t be able to fill up sports teams. And that means parents could pull their children from the school in favor of other schools with those resources.
“You have to have kids to have funding to add those programs,” Morris said. “... So, I don’t know what more we can do with what we have to make this work.”
Since the Oklahoma State Department of Education began keeping records of school annexations in 1976, more than 100 schools in Oklahoma have been absorbed by other districts.
For an annexation to happen, both communities must vote affirmatively. Without a voluntary annexation, districts like Paoli stare down the possibility of a dying school, which means the state could intercede and may divide its students between neighboring districts.
If the annexation were to happen, Whitebead, which has an enrollment of more than 300 students, would gain a high school and use of Paoli’s facilities. But Whitebead superintendent and principal, Jason Midkiff, said merging the schools together would come with challenges.
“Paoli has a really rich and strong heritage and tradition that they have, as does Whitebead,” Midkiff said. “What does it look like when you come together? How do you make that work?”
Further complicating a potential annexation is an OSDE rule that applies to Paoli and Whitebead’s specific situation.
If an independent district, like Paoli, annexes to an elementary district without a high school, like Whitebead, the rule requires both school boards to be abolished. The governor would then appoint three members of the newly formed district to a new board of education, and those members would appoint the remaining two members.
Midkiff said his community members have voiced hesitations about the possibility of the current school board being “upended.”
“In the last couple of years, they voted all those people on [the school board], and for a reason,” Midkiff said. “They felt like they were the best fit to oversee this school district. And to think that that could change, and them not have a say in that, obviously, is a concern of, well, who would it be?”
Midkiff said the new board would be making consequential decisions for the district, from which facilities to use, how transportation across sites would work and grade break ups between sites, to things like school colors, a district name and a mascot.
The Whitebead community, Midkiff said, has not made its desire for a high school known to him. He said in some ways, operating a pre-k through eighth grade school has been beneficial, allowing staff to focus on foundational skills of education and not have to worry about things like career tracks and AP classes.
“There’s always people that love their experience at a school, at a [pre-kindergarten through eighth grade school], and they’d love for it to continue,” Midkiff said.
‘If the school goes, it’s a problem.’
Jeff Schmidt is an associate professor of marketing and supply chain at the University of Oklahoma and author of Here Today: Oklahoma’s Ghost Towns, Vanishing Towns and Towns Persisting Against the Odds. He said when schools go, the towns are in trouble.
“Then the kids have to be bused 10, 15, 20, 30 miles, 40 miles each way, and they’re on the bus for an hour each way,” Schmidt said. “No one’s going to move there in that case, right? I mean, even for a free house — if I can afford it, I’m not moving there.”
Whitebead is about eight miles from Paoli Public Schools, but Midkiff said extra transportation time would still be a consideration if the annexation were to happen.
Schmidt said if schools decline, they could struggle with academics. Currently, the Oklahoma School Report Card rates the district as a “C” school, though it has higher-than-average marks for high school graduation and assessment performance.
“How could [a declining school] have a great report card if you only have five people per class, and the same teacher was teaching three, four, five, six different subjects? They can’t be as good at it,” Schmidt said. “They can’t recruit people from other places. A lot of the teachers have been there forever, or they’re from they’re originally, right? So no one wants to move there. So if the school goes, it’s a problem.”
Keeping alive the legacy
Small schools across Oklahoma have long faced the looming possibility of annexations. One Ada resident, Kevin Flowers, lived that reality — from both sides.
At his dining room table in his historical home, Flowers arranges memorabilia from McLish Public Schools, where he and his family attended. He’s got yearbooks, sports ribbons and jackets.
He points out a picture of his mother winning the “Dairy Princess” pageant. Another of his uncle, a basketball coach, who’s now in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. And a volume of preserved school newspaper clippings from 1960 to 1980, meticulously kept together by his mother. All of the pieces make up the unforgotten history of his alma mater.
But about 20 years ago, McLish’s enrollment dropped so far that it couldn’t survive. The school, which had been built by a nearby oil field in Fittstown, had been sliding for decades since its enrollment peak in the 1930s and 40s.
“It was a gut punch. Oh, my god, my school’s closing,” Flowers said. “That was really hard.”
It was annexed to neighboring Stonewall Public Schools. But as a McLish alum and, at the time, Stonewall’s superintendent, Flowers was put in a unique position to shepherd the transition.
Stonewall fixed up McLish’s facilities, and it’s now used as a middle school — with the name, McLish Middle School. He kept up McLish’s memory through a memorabilia cabinet at Stonewall, and he said some students still wear McLish colors.
Flowers said it was important that Stonewall honor McLish’s legacy.
“Everything that we had promised that we would do, we did,” Flowers said. “You make a community that lost their school happy — when we did our bond issues, one bond issue was 100% yes. Zero no’s. Because we were doing what we told them we would do.”
While the area around McLish never bounced back to its peak, he said by combining resources and bonding capacities, McLish and Stonewall both ended up reaping the benefits.
“Everyone wants their school to survive,” Flowers said. “Every McLish person will tell you, ‘Well, we would’ve loved for it to stay.’ But it’s worked for us.”
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