Every year the School Administrators of Montana accepts nominations from small schools all over the state and chooses just one classroom instructor to award with the annual Rural Teacher of the Year award.
This year’s recipient of that prestigious award is Toni Hatten of the Sunset School in Greenough, a small two-room schoolhouse with an average yearly enrollment of less than ten students.
“It’s more hands-on, more personalized, a more individualized experience, for sure,” Hatten said. “I think that’s why it works.”
Hatten has been teaching at Sunset for the last twelve years, but she never envisioned herself working in such an intimate setting.
“When I first started I only had one student that full year,” Hatten said. “Wow, that was a unique experience. College doesn’t teach you how to teach like that.”
The small rural schoolhouse is a visage of an older America, an often-forgotten style of education which most people won’t ever see, but in Montana’s sparsely populated regions, it’s still a necessity.
“I never dreamed I’d work at a school like this, honestly,” Hatten said. “I thought I’d end up at Seeley Lake Elementary and that’d be the smallest.”
Hatten moved to Seeley Lake in the late-90’s from the much larger city of Lincoln, Neb. She hadn’t ever considered becoming a teacher, let alone an awarding-winning educator..
But while working as a paraeducator at Seeley Lake Elementary she was surprised to find how many of her peers wanted her to become a teacher.
“I was placed in a few classrooms with a couple of teachers there, and they kept saying, you know, ‘you should go back to school’,” Hatten said.
The insistent encouragement of her peers took hold. But while she wasn’t able to completely ignore the idea, she felt that at 40 she was already too old to go back to school. A degree would take at least five more years.
“I turned to a friend of mine when I was contemplating it,” Hatten said. “He said, ‘either, you’re gonna be 45 with a degree or 45 without a degree.’ And I thought, yeah, he’s right.”
Hatten thanked that friend for the final push which got her into college, but she also knew who to blame when things got difficult.
“I was really upset with him when I was in college because it really was hard,” joked Hatten. “It was really hard because I hadn’t, you know, been in school for a very, very long time.”
Despite being such an accomplished educator in Montana, Hatten did not complete high school in Nebraska. As a teen mother with bigger concerns than a daily public school routine, she opted for a GED instead.
Now she spends her days ensuring that children at Sunset get the best education possible and find their own ways to succeed.
“I say, never never give up,” Hatten said. “Always try hard. You can do anything.”
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