Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy Read Free Page B

church district and ties them closely to their neighbors. Amish people do hire English “taxi drivers” who use their own vehicles to transport their Amish patrons for business, special events, and long-distance travel. Moreover, some Amish business owners have English employees who provide a truck or car for daily business-related travel. On the day of the shooting, parents of the injured children rode to hospitals in police cruisers and the vehicles of non-Amish drivers. Because flying is off-limits, they declined offers to go by helicopter to the hospitals, although many of the injured were transported that way.
     
    As the sun erased the overnight darkness, the school came into clearer focus. It was a typical one-room Amish school sporting a cast-iron bell in a small cupola on the roof. Built in 1976, the yellow stucco building sat in a former pasture about fifty yards from White Oak Road and about a quarter mile from the nearest Amish homes. There are more than fourteen hundred similar Amish-operated schools across the country. Most, but not all, Amish youth in North America attend private Amish schools like this one. After completing eighth grade, the “scholars,” as the Amish call their pupils, begin vocational apprenticeships at their homes, farms, or home-based shops, or with a nearby neighbor or relative.
     
    The West Nickel Mines School is one of thirty Amish schools within a four-mile radius of Georgetown. These one-room schools, like the Amish church districts they serve, are named for nearby towns and locally known sites—Cedar Hill, Wolf Rock, Georgetown, Valley Road, Bartville, Mt. Pleasant View, Peach Lane, Green Tree, and so on. More than 190 Amish schools are sprinkled across the Lancaster County Amish settlement, which spills eastward into Chester County. A school board composed of three to five men supervises one or two schools—hiring the teachers, caring for maintenance, and managing the finances.
     
    Private Amish schools like this one in Nickel Mines are relatively new. In fact, Amish children attended rural public schools until the advent of large, consolidated schools in the mid-twentieth century. Consolidation meant that Amish pupils could no longer walk to school; it also meant that their parents had less control over the schools their children attended. Increasingly the teachers in the big schools came from faraway places and had little knowledge of Amish life. To their dismay, Amish parents found their high-school-age children exposed to topics and classes they disapproved of, such as evolution and physical education.
     
    The Amish objected to this revolutionary change in public schools. In their view, a good eighth-grade education in the basics of reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic was all that was needed for success in Amish life. In fact, in Lancaster County dozens of Amish parents were jailed in the early 1950s because they refused to send their children to consolidated schools beyond the eighth grade. Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1972 case known as Wisconsin v. Yoder, allowed Amish children to end their formal education when they turned fourteen. Both the threat of consolidated schools and the court decision spurred the growth of Amish private schools.
     
    Compared to homes, barns, and shops, schools contain the least amount of technology in Amish society. Typically this technology includes only a battery-run wall clock, a propane gas light, and a kerosene, coal, or wood stove. There are no calculators, microscopes, computers, electrical outlets, security cameras, or televisions. One Amish teacher, often with the help of an aide, teaches all eight grades in the same classroom. The curriculum, taught in English, focuses on the basics: spelling, reading, penmanship, grammar, arithmetic, and some geography. A quiet but orderly hum hovers over the room as children whisper and help one another while the teacher works with one or two grades at a time. A student’s