Congratulations to CGB High School

I'm pleased, and have no hand in-- from either end, the kudos given to our school district in this recent U of M study ranking it among the top 10%. Guess we just lucked out moving here.

Actually, the 2007 Small Town Symposium at UM Morris was on schools and community revitalization. So in terms of resettlement, it looks like we have a firm foundation. So here is an advertisement on this blog to Resettle Big Stone County. We have good schools-- move here, move back here, stay here. I'm looking for an artisan cheesemaker in the community. Got milk? Got school age kids?

This quote from rural SW MInnesota author Paul Gruchow seems apropos
"Among the science courses I took two full years of biology, but I never learned that the beautiful meadow at the bottom of my family's pasture was a remnant virgin prairie. We did not spend, so far as I can remember, a single hour on prairies-- the landscape in which we were immersed.

I took history courses for years, but I never learned that one of the founders of my town and for decades the leading banker... was also the author of the first comprehensive treatise on Minnesota's prairie botany. I can only imagine now what it might have meant to me- a studious boy with a love of nature- to know what a great scholar of natural history had made a full and satisfying life in my town. I did not know until long after I left the place that it afforded me the possibilities of an intellectual life.

Nothing in my education prepared me to believe, or encouraged me to expect, that there was any reason to be interested in my own place. If I hoped to amount to anything, I understood, I had better take the first road east of town as fast as I could. And, like so many of my classmates, I did."