WVPE 88.1 Elkhart/South Bend | By Sid Shroyer
PublishedJune 20, 2024 at 3:56 PM EDT
My friends in the New Carlisle and Rolling Prairie areas are quietly kvelling this week after the New Prairie High School baseball team last Friday became the second-ever team state champion, after softball took state a year ago.
Honest and proud, but modest. That’s how I remember New Prairie from my teaching days. I loved the students and my colleagues and even some of the administrators. Coaches coached. Teachers taught. It reminded me a lot of where I grew up, so I knew how to act, for the most part, in a place that felt like home. During a year of some uncertainty about the changes that progress brings, I’m sure the signs of success in a community where the school means so much are heartening. There are many more signs we don’t hear about.
Situated between South Bend and LaPorte, but a suburb of neither, the New Prairie community maintains a small-town, rural identity that in the 27 years I was there rarely attracted attention beyond its own borders. “That’s how we like it.”
There is always some concern about the patronizing stereotyping that exists for people in rural communities. Either, they say, we are ignored, or people think they know better than we do how we ought to behave. The best boss I ever had tangled with state regulators at odds with his old school experience and wisdom. For Chuck Stephens the kids came first; the department of education checklist boxes came last.
At New Prairie, I had the freedom to teach in the manner I chose the only Indiana semester-long classes on the literature of the Holocaust and the literature of the Vietnam War. It was the essence of teaching. My students wanted to know about the things I wanted to share. I could not have been more fortunate. With support from the New Prairie community, my colleagues and I made it a practice to encourage questioning and critical thinking. We talked.
When a nationwide challenge to library books found New Prairie a year ago, I knew the school board would respond as appropriately as it did, without regard to people who pontificate from both sides of the political spectrum that they know best how the New Prairie United School Corporation ought to act. School board candidates don’t run as ideological members of a political party. They run as members of the community. Imagine that.
I grew up in a rural, small-town community and I spent the best part of my professional life serving a rural small-town community and so while I’ve chosen to live my life in cities, I’m sensitive to the labelling of rural Americans as rubes who live where they live only because they aren’t smart enough to get out. My sister stayed “home.” I know better.
One political party ignores rural communities altogether while the other political party patronizes a perception of “shared values” while serving the interests that have been decimating rural communities since at least the 1940s.
“Wait a minute,” my New Prairie friend says, “Your party patronizes a perception of urban ‘shared values’ while serving the interests that have been decimating those communities since at least the 1940s.”
City and small-town people have a lot in common. At least, we’re talking. It’s too bad that someone tells us not to trust each other.
To me, the ongoing decline in rural population is the story of commerce promoting policies that force migration to urban areas. Both parties at every level of government support the idea, with a consensus that people are better off because of it. That’s what I learned growing up. “Brain drain.” Smart kids leave.
By virtue of being in the right place at the right time, though, New Carlisle could be bucking the trend. A confluence of roads, internet cable, land, and water makes the area attractive to innovative companies, and that’s leading to it being a new center for technological progress. The area has something to offer. New Carlisle appears to be in good shape for the economy of the future.
It’s a local story that’s full of irony, with a specific concern that a battery factory intended to preserve the environment by reducing the need for fossil fuel could damage the environment by depleting or damaging the water supply. I worry, also, about the development’s impact on a community that lives happily within the context of a way of life that runs counter to the forces that favor the rich at the expense of everybody else. Princeton University professor of social sciences Robert Wuthnow notes in his book The Left Behind that, “Small town ways of life are disappearing.”
That bothers me. By choice, those small-town rural Americans often subject to the ridicule of so-called sophistication are the very people living the lives we idealize as being more attuned to what really matters.
The real stories in life are never simple with easy explanations. I love New Prairie. I’m glad they are state champs. I hope the area prospers.
Music: "The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)" by Timbuk 3
