THE SECRET SCHOOL

A strong-willed young woman pursues her educational dreams in this Andy Hardy–esque tale of a rural school in peril, circa 1925. When Miss Fletcher’s mother’s illness calls her away from her teaching position at a one-room Colorado schoolhouse, the school board president is transparent in his pleasure at the prospect of closing the school. Fourteen-year-old Ida Bidson is not—closing the school will mean missing the exams that would qualify her to go on to high school, effectively dashing her hopes of becoming a teacher. But all is not lost: the students vote to continue secretly, with Ida as their teacher. While the plot is entirely predictable—the mean school board president finds them out and tries to shut the school down, only to be defeated in a climactic public meeting—the characters are well-developed and appealing. Ida is a diminutive spitfire who steers the family’s broken-down car while her little brother crouches on the floor to operate the gas and the clutch; her best friend Tom is a tinkerer whose home printing press saves the day; and even the most obstructive student in school is rendered sympathetically and with depth. Avi (Prairie School, p. 494, etc.) effectively conveys Ida’s difficulty in balancing her new role as teacher within her already busy life as student, family member (and therefore helper on the family’s sheep farm), and friend, and the details of one-room education are genuinely fascinating. This isn’t heavy stuff, but it gives a glimpse into a past where, although the form of education may have been very different from today’s, the problems facing the schools and students will be all too familiar to modern readers. (Fiction. 8-12)