Teacher turmoil
Teachers wrestle with whether to stay or move on
Story by Daniel Testa
Photos by Brian McDermott

            The Teacherage sits at the end of a short, muddy road with no name in Frazer, Montana.
            Comprising six narrow townhouses, it provides faculty housing for Frazer’s only school. This town of about 450 on the western edge of the Fort Peck Reservation provides few housing options. The nearest towns are Nashua, 17 miles west, and Wolf Point 19 miles east. There is little in between besides sagegrass and railroad tracks, the blank expanse of the eastern Montana sky and U.S. 2 extending out to meet it.
            Rent is $175 dollars a month. The front porches afford a view across the street of the Frazer School’s north side.
            Of the six staff members living in the Teacherage for this school year, five won’t return in the fall.
            At the end of the row, Don Giesler, the high school English teacher in his first year, slides his key into the lock on the door of No. 6 and wonders who his neighbors will be five months from now.
            Finding and retaining motivated, qualified educators has always been difficult for rural schools in Montana. But the difficulty is amplified in this isolated Assiniboine community, which has 104 students, kindergarten through 12th grade.
            Because the school is so small, seven teachers of core subjects teach grades 7 through 12. Music, art, physical education, and Native Language teachers teach all grades.
            At Frazer the turnover problem is concentrated in the high school grades, with a nearly full turnover rate year-to-year, according to Mandy Smoker Broaddus, a former Frazer administrator now working at the state Office of Public Instruction. Neither tribal officials nor OPI keeps statistics on teacher retention, but all agree it is a problem, particularly on reservations.
            The turnover has a predictably negative effect on students. Their feelings range from annoyance at reading the same book in English each year with each new teacher, to an unwillingness to respect or bond with a new teacher unlikely to return next fall.
            “My favorite teachers left when I was in junior high,” says senior Fawn Beston. “You respect teachers when you know them better.”
            After pausing for a moment, she adds, “They know you’re not horrible, like they think we are.”
            For a tiny school, Frazer has a reputation as a hard place to teach. Principal and Superintendent Richard Whitesell will tell you he spends the majority of his time handling discipline problems. The reason, he says, is that a community educates its children, not just the school. But in Frazer they don’t have that.
            In his first year as superintendent, Whitesell had to fill seven teaching jobs as late as July.

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View the Fort Peck Slideshow