In Kings Valley, Oregon, a community-oriented guiding philosophy has propelled Kings Valley Charter School from its original incarnation as an elementary school serving seventeen students to a preschool through eighth grade institution of over 100 that draws students from surrounding communities.

Mark Hazelton, the principal, executive director, and parent of two students at Kings Valley Charter School explains that the school has three things that set it apart. “We believe that people learn best when they are working at the right challenge level and are engaged in work that is personally meaningful, and working with other people; we try to instill an ethic in the students that their work is important and should be well done; and the third piece is that our school is community run.” Decisions about the school are made by a local board consisting of community members, and the school is structured in a way that makes it easy for parents and community members to stay involved.
The Kings Valley community members not only sit on the school board, they are also involved with its daily functions. In 2006 and 2007 the school logged over 4,000 volunteer hours and as of February 2008 they had already logged 3,000 hours—no small feat for a community of just 500 households. Volunteers not only work in a typical capacity on daily operations, they also helped to design and construct the school building. They work with students with disabilities and share their skills and interests with students on Project Day. “A lot of people have a passion for what they do,” says Hazelton, “and they don’t always have a way to share it.” Project Days allow community members to come and teach students about subjects like chess, horse training, and art.

Mark Hazelton believes that exposure to non-academic activities teaches students more about life. Hazelton once took a group of sixth graders to help Betty Malone, a Christmas-tree farmer, plant shrubs and trees for a memorial garden. “Betty Malone is a real farmer,” says Hazelton, “and we’re out digging holes, and we have a sixth grade girl who doesn’t want to have her hands in the dirt, but Betty’s not messing around. This allowed for an interchange where this girl is exposed to this woman who runs a successful farm, and she learns you can touch the dirt, and wash your hands, and you’re done. It’s a life lesson there that’s special, and when you’re out working on projects, talking and digging, that’s special time too. To just talk about what’s going on in their life.” By treating community members as teachers, students in Kings Valley are given more opportunities like this to learn.

In addition to learning through community connections, Kings Valley students have excelled in traditional academics. The communities they draw from offer the same challenges many rural schools face, such as a high number of students on free and reduced lunch, and lack the resources that large school districts may have to serve their students with skills above or below grade level. They combat this by teaching to each individual student’s needs, and they’re showing positive results. About 46 percent of students at Kings Valley Charter School read at one or more grades ahead of their age group. The success of Kings Valley Charter School is an example of what can happen when a community has a vision and a plan, and capitalizes on local assets to help their dreams come to fruition.

From Famine to Feast
Nine years ago Kings Valley received a grant from the forest service to organize and create a community plan. As a result they formed the Kings Valley Area Association. The group worked with a local service provider, Diane Svenson, who had experience in community development in developing countries. At the same time, the original incarnation of Kings Valley School was moving toward closure. Only seventeen kids attended the school, and the Philomath school district lacked the resources to keep it running. The Kings Valley Area Association made the school their top priority and initiated a campaign to keep the doors open.

Mark Hazelton, who’d been working as an engineer, supported the campaign as treasurer of the Kings Valley Area Association. The group had the idea that if they developed a vision for the school, the school district might continue support. They sent out paper surveys, and Svenson led a visioning session to develop a cohesive vision for a “school of excellence” in Kings Valley. “A few things came out of that,” says Hazelton, “one was the school vision, and another was the vision for a place to trade skills and services and do work together, and another was that we all knew each other because in creating a vision for a community we’d been working together.” The school district did not adopt the vision and elected to close the school, but two leaders in the campaign, Betty Malone and Barbra Dowe, were aware of the new charter school law that would potentially provide funds to keep the school running as a charter school. “We had the vision completed,” says Hazelton, “we were able to translate the vision into a grant.” Twenty community members came together to write the grant and Kings Valley Charter School was awarded $350,000 from the state. All of this was achieved by capitalizing on local knowledge and the skills of community members.

Kings Valley had successfully organized to get the money to save their school, and now that the grant had been awarded they took on building and running their new school. This is when Mark Hazelton really got involved. “My background is in creating factories and planning large projects as an engineer. I came in for constructing the work plan.” It was a complex plan with seven or eight committees. “When the project got complex, I was one of the only ones who could understand the plan,” says Hazelton. “I had younger kids, and I didn’t think it was my time to become involved with school.” There was a one-year opening on the board and Hazelton and another community member flipped for it. “It wasn’t in my plan to be involved with the school,” Mark explains, “but by the time it was time to renew the position it was clear that the work wasn’t done.”

Capitalizing on community assets like Mark Hazelton’s project management experience was an important part of getting and keeping the school running. The school reopened in September 2001 with thirty-eight students. “We carried on and it was basically amateurs running the school,” said Hazelton. “We’re just farmers and engineers and loggers.” Not having professionals involved didn’t keep the school from growing. The community held on to their vision of a school of excellence that people would come to from other communities. As Hazelton notes, “the board was pretty thoughtful about making decisions, and things happened slowly. Three or four years in we decided we wanted something bigger. We grew by leaps and bounds.” Now there are over 100 students in preschool through eighth grade at Kings Valley Charter School and students do come from the surrounding area. About one third of the students are still from Kings Valley and others come from seven different school districts, including Independence, Philomath, Dallas, Albany, and as far away as Corvallis.

It’s unusual for a rural school to have the reputation to draw from such a large area outside their community. Hazelton attributes much of the success to the community aspect of the school. He says the small size of the rural community has contributed to the school’s success. “The smallness of the community means you can’t fail the kid,” says Hazelton. “If you know people well, and you don’t do a good job for their kids, there’s something personal there. The kids are going to inherit the land. They are going to live next to you. If you don’t do a good job, they’re with you forever.” While Kings Valley Charter School now serves students outside of Kings Valley, this attitude has persisted. “Now if you come to the school, you’re part of the community,” continues Hazelton. “If you were to export this model, you would have to define community. The community size has to be such that the interested parties can all put their input in.”

It may seem odd that Mark Hazelton went from such a small role with the Kings Valley Area Association and flipping for a one-year commitment to the school to becoming the impassioned executive director and school principal he is today, but his involvement with the school project shifted his perspective. “How I think about life has really changed, in terms of what I should be doing,” he says. “I could have stayed working as an engineer making money for myself and other people, here I don’t make much money, but the impact on these lives is much greater; there’s more pressure but the outcomes are much more special as well.” The school project has brought out this community-oriented side in many people in Kings Valley. Not only does the school stay running with a constant stream of volunteers, so do the local farmer’s market, the fire department, and the Kings Valley Cemetery group.

The Kings Valley community tapped into their local assets to create their dream school. They relied on local service providers to come up with a vision and a plan. Dedicated community volunteers committed their time and professional skills to identify and capitalize on a funding opportunity; they used local volunteers to build the school. It is, in the end, the community that makes Kings Valley Charter School the unique and successful school it is today.