Little Red Schoolhouse featured on Public TV

Karen Daniel (SU Archivist)



Shippensburg University’s Little Red Schoolhouse will be featured on television. The Pennsylvania Humanities Council (PHC) produces Humanities on the Road, a television series that airs on the Pennsylvania Cable Network (PCN).

The purpose of the series is to provide public access to the talent from the PHC’s Commonwealth Speaker’s Bureau and to showcase non-profit organizations that host the tapings of the programs. In this case, viewers from all over Pennsylvania will learn about our Little Red Schoolhouse and SU’s dedication to education.

This is happening because in July, 2006, I received an email from Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of Education and History at New York University. He was writing a book about the history and legacy of the one-room schoolhouse and was interested in the history of the schoolhouse on our campus. He had read an article in a 1974 Phi Delta Kappan that described the Potato Point School, which was moved from its original site and reconstructed here in the early 1970s.

According to the article, both President Gilmore Seavers and his predecessor, Ralph Heiges, worked hard to raise money for the project. Alumni contributed substantial donations of funds and equipment for the restored schoolhouse. Dr. Zimmerman wanted to know if the SU Archives had any files on the project, especially what it meant to those who contributed to it. I sent him scans of correspondence, memos, records of donations, brochures, news releases, news clippings, and photos. His research resulted in a book, Small Wonder : the Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory, published by Yale University Press.

One example of how the author used archival material is a reference to a letter from Howard Etter, the last teacher in our schoolhouse, to Al Mason, our Alumni Director in 1973.

In November, 2009, a representative of the PHC invited me to apply to be the site for Jonathan Zimmerman’s program on one-room schoolhouses. The application was successful, and Shippensburg University was selected from more than 75 organizations. The episode was taped before a live audience at 11 a.m., Saturday, April 30. Dr. Zimmerman’s spoke about why and how the little red schoolhouse became an American icon.  PCN-TV will broadcast the episode to 3.3 million households next fall.

For more information contact Karen Daniel at KADANI at ship.edu.