Jarrett Sweet

Student
Fairfax, Vermont

Jarrett Sweet stood in the lower hallway of the Bellows Free Academy in Vermont and smiled when I asked him where he would like to be to share his story. He looked out the bright windows across snow-covered fields to where a stubble of old plant growth poked up in rows. “This will work,” he indicated, and gestured at the area that becomes a school farm when spring starts poking through the Vermont winter. Jarrett talked about skiing and happy cows and the importance of giving back to the community, and the value of a small rural multiage school where people know each other and help each other out. He loves his family farm and his school and feels his experiences both working on the farm and learning in a small school are both great preparations for the bigger world beyond his hometown. 

The Farm’s Future

If you pull up Fairfax, Vermont on Google Maps you will see little but green fields. Around 4,000 people live in the town’s 40 square miles. The county surrounding has about 50,000 people in 700 square miles. 

It is easy to forget how rural parts of the Northeastern United States can be. But the areas north of Boston, Massachusetts and Albany, New York are their own kind of “flyover country.” Jarrett Sweet is an essential part of that, living with his family on a multi-generational dairy farm outside Fairfax. 

“Do you have kids who are stars in 4H and Future Farmers of America who are really struggling in school?” Ira asks rural school teachers, and their answer is always, “yes.” Our push to make K-12 education completely about 4-year-college readiness has separated schools from their communities, not just in inner cities, but in almost every rural town.

Acceptance and Relevance in a Rural K-12 School

Nothing is more important to small communities than how to sustain a future for the children who grow up in them. In rural areas across America family farms have been plowed under and either resurrected under corporate ownership or sliced into subdivision home plots with monoculture housing that grow like rows of corn across the landscape. Few farm families have been able to hold onto their land or children who are willing to live the life that farm families live. Giving up the family farm can devastate land owners who have passed the heritage of land forward, often across multiple generations. Losing their children to metropolitan areas because all jobs have vanished decimates rural towns, often reducing their towns to little more than a single gas station and convenience store, perhaps with a dollar store and a Ford dealership.

Bellows Free Academy isn’t a typical public school in America. It’s one of a few thousand “combined” public schools meaning it includes more than one level of school. What makes it most different from even other combined schools is that it is a K-12 school with a total enrollment of 800 students. Imagine students staying together from Kindergarten through their senior year. Some would say that’s a terrible model that limits opportunities and options. 

Jarrett Sweet, student, doesn’t see it that way. In fact, he sees attending his small community school as an advantage, a place where every student can engage in both formal and informal learning with opportunities to excel - whether as a leader, in sports (he’s a cross- country skier with hopes of competing at the college level), academically, or in extracurricular activities. The multiage opportunities that connect students at Bellows Free Academy provides teens such as Jarrett the chance to become aspirational peers to younger students. Student after student whom we met there shared that they felt much better prepared for college, work, and adult life as a result of their small school experience. They didn’t see a lack of access to college-level courses as being a critical barrier to getting a good education. They also spoke of benefits to learning in a small community with particular emphasis on  advantages of growing up with friends, family, and educators who stay together. 

“My freshman year I was looking to take more of a lead and more of a lead in my school. I saw this great program building a farm for at school. With my background of being a farmer I thought it would be a good fit so I started to go to their meetings and realized  they were open meetings where anyone could go to club meetings. I joined the club and the seniors were super helpful; they were welcoming with open arms and they were really yes be a part of it.” 

When Jarrett moved into high school in Bellows Free Academy, it was a different kind of “moving up” experience for him because he was already part of the school community and the students in high school were already in his peer community. He also found the Farm to School program underway at the Academy as a perfect fit with his own experiences on his family dairy farm. Welcomed to the group, he became a leader in the program. We met him on a snowy day and even though the school’s farm fields lay dormant under fresh snow, Jarrett chose to stand in the hallway with windows looking upward to the school farm. He sees the school farm as a place to learn life competencies similarly to on his family’s farm. Key to those competencies is coming to understand relationships between humans and the natural world whether it’s beekeeping, growing vegetables, or raising dairy cows. 

“I think on a family farm what you learn is that there's not gonna be somebody who's holding your hand throughout the day so you kind of have to figure out how to do stuff on your own so you kind of get that self-efficiency and you really learn how to problem-solve throughout your day. “ 

The economic changes that have transformed American agriculture can be harsh for families knit close by a life that depends on all working together, sharing both the largess of a bumper crop or livestock year or the losses that come with too much or too little rain on the land. It’s why families such as the Sweets in Fletcher Vermont are unique. Not only have they sustained their six-generation dairy farm operation but their children are finding their way into a future of farming that looks vastly different than the Sweet farms of the past. 

When Jarrett talks about the use of robotics on his family farm and the use of technology in schools, he sees both as offering opportunities that didn’t exist just a decade ago. On his family farm, the robotic milking machines don’t just help his family members to run the farm with greater efficiency, Jarrett also sees the benefits to cows who are monitored more closely to maintain the health and wellness of the herd. On the Sweet farm, Jared says he believes their cows are happier cows because they can choose when they want to be milked and simply walk into the barn based on their time schedule, not that of the Sweets. He also laughs when he says that family members are happier as well because they don’t have to pull the “well before the sun comes up” hours that his grandparents did when they were running the farm. 

Schools can set multiple pathways to learning in motion that reflect a community’s identity and evolving needs. This is especially powerful when children are not artificially separated by age. Jarrett’s active engagement as a “farmer” on his family farm and as leader in the Bellow Free School’s Farm to School project not only reflects that, but opens up careers in agriculture to all the younger children his work touches.