Each child gets private music lessons. And the teacher has her hands full. Double O, named for the nearby Double O Ranch, has been there in one form or another since the 1890s. Seven in one county Of the 21 small districts that survived the move, seven are in Harney County, an expanse of sagebrush, rimrock, desert and isolated ranches the size of New Jersey, Rhode Island and Delaware combined. These schools are not rural, they're remote.
People feel if they lose their school, they lose their sense of community.
And I guess that kind of thinking is not necessarily a bad thing. The Double O teacher, Sharon Buermann, had nearly two decades of teaching in larger schools. She took the Double O job earlier this year when she and her husband bought a hay ranch nearby. It is not like other schools. When something needs fixing, a School Board member comes by and fixes it.