Is your public school too large and distant (both physically and socially) for you and your children, too impersonal (take a number, please), and too bureaucratic (with layers and layers of officials)?

Though one-room and small schools are sometimes seen through rose-colored glasses, they made parents and students feel more welcomed, more interactive, more intimate with each other and the school's programs, and-even today where they still exist in the United States (the mid- and far-West)-more academically superior.

Today, with electronic advancements available-computers, videos, distance libraries and learning for research-there is no reason to crowd students like a herd of cattle into schools and classrooms. Research has proven that a smaller economy of scale is not more expensive. Some have recently started talking about scaling down the size of schools (not those, of course, with a vested interest in the large school "plant"), but it has been mostly talk. When will the real community school return?

This volume has three focuses: 1) The nostalgic remembrances of an early Maryland one-room school by those who attended and taught there (with interesting data and old-timey pictures), 2) a brief, succinct, and eye-opening history of small schools in America, and 3) easy-to-read research briefs that support returning to smaller, local-community schools today.