As small schools across the Northern Plains consolidate, a town
fights to preserve its rural, two-room schoolhouse. By Cindy
Long The spelling and grammar lesson in Steven Podoll’s
classroom is a little like the changing of the guard. “Fifth-
graders, please come up,” Podoll calls. Two students push back
their chairs and rise to meet him at a table in the front of the
room, passing two fourth-graders on their way back to their
seats with their assignment. Half an hour later, two sixth-
graders replace the fifth-graders. Finally, the seventh-grader
is called up. And so it goes for math, science, reading, and the
rest of the subjects the fourth- through eighth-graders in
Podoll’s class study at this two-classroom rural school in
Baldwin, North Dakota. The Baldwin School sits on a small hill
in the center of “town”—just behind the hand-printed “Welcome to
Baldwin” sign and across the railroad tracks from a white
clapboard post office the size of a toolshed. It overlooks the
wide northern plains that roll on for mi