Moline documentarians on one-room schoolhouses1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe minute her husband Kelly hit the “record” button on their video equipment to shoot a documentary about one-room schoolhouses, Tammy Rundle said she was worried.
“When we started out on the project, I thought, “˜I don’t know about this stuff.’ I didn’t know if it would be interesting or what,” she recalled, thinking back to the first day of shooting in June 2009 in Spragueville, Iowa, a small Jackson County town outside Maquoketa.
But the Moline-based filmmakers say they learned as much about the subject as students learned in the classrooms once they had completed “Country School: One Room – One Nation.” The documentary, which debuted during November in Des Moines, will have its Quad-City premiere next month.
“The one-room schools didn’t just serve an educational function, they were literally the center of the (rural) community, the farms around that school,” Kelly said. “Those folks may not have attended the same church, but they sure all did have kids in that school.”
