About 12 miles north of Pipestone, just across the Lincoln County line, is the Heartland Colony of Hutterites.
The colony consists largely of field land and agricultural buildings like grain elevators and livestock barns. The living quarters for the 13 families that call the colony home sit back behind the agri-business structures like a small village.
Their homes are modern in design, and the streets of their tiny settlement are mostly gravel. The modest bonnets and long skirts of the women and the simple slacks and suspenders of the men present unique contrasts to the shiny new pickups in many of the yards.
In the middle of the living area sits the Pipestone Area School District’s smallest school building with only two classrooms and 23 students.
The relationship between the school district and the colony began about 12 years ago, only nine years after the very beginnings of the colony itself.
Jerry Wipf, minister/president of the Heartland Colony, said a group of Hutterites from a colony near Aberdeen purchased the plot of land in southern Lincoln County in 1989. They started building on the site in 1991 and by 1995, 90 people had settled there. Today there are a total of 75 people living at the colony.
Life at the Heartland Colony is largely agricultural. They raise hogs, cattle, turkeys and chickens, and grow wheat, beans, corn and alfalfa on 3,500 acres. The men work the fields and in the barns and do most of their own carpentry and mechanical work, and make their own livestock feed. The women take care of the families and work a large community garden.
The colony is self-sufficient, but Wipf said they could not get by without selling their goods to the outside world. While interaction with the outside world is necessary, the Hutterites prefer to live a life separated from the perceived ills of society at large.
“We try to lead a life that’s Christian-like and we try to stay isolated from the world,” Wipf said. “We feel we need to keep our kids safe from a lot of things that are happening in the big cities and the towns.”
That’s why they prefer to teach their children at the colony rather than send them to the public schools.
It was around 1996, Wipf said, when colony representatives first asked the Pipestone school district to provide a teacher at the colony. Prior to that, they didn’t have enough students to make it feasible for the district to send teachers out, so they hired their own teachers. But, Wipf said, that proved to be unsatisfactory.
Laurie Westerbur, who taught at the colony from 2000 to 2009, said part of the problem when the colony hired their own teachers was the lack of consistency. Teachers came and went, and they were often inexperienced, which made it difficult for the students to learn and caused them to fall behind their grade levels.
Jim Lentz became PAS superintendent years after the district established the colony school, but he said the school most likely provided a financial benefit to the district when there was only one teacher onsite due to the amount of state funding received per student. The addition of another teacher and a paraprofessional, however, has since reduced the economic benefit to the school, which is now minimal if it exists at all.
Westerbur said the district first sent teachers out to the colony in 1998. Then she arrived in 2000 to teach a class of 21 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
“That’s quite a bit for work for one teacher,” she said.
“She was being weighed down way too much,” Wipf agreed. “So we went back to the school and asked for another teacher.”
The next year, the district added a paraprofessional to help. Then in 2007 they added another teacher, Kris Reinhard, to teach the younger grades.
Teaching at the colony is very different than teaching in a typical public school, Westerbur said. Some of the differences are positive and others make teaching much more difficult.
One of the first things she noticed early on was the isolation from the outside world. On Sept. 11, 2001, for example, she had been working at the colony all day and went to a meeting at the school in the afternoon. Everyone seemed so somber and she had no idea why until after the meeting when she went home and turned on the news.
“I was probably the only person in the country that didn’t hear what happened until 5:30 in the afternoon,” Westerbur said.
One of the biggest challenges teaching at the colony is the language barrier. Wipf said children learn only German until the age of five. According to www.hutterites.org, Hutterites use a German dialect used in 16th century Austria, where the religion originated after the reformation
Another challenge she found was that common examples that teachers use in a typical classroom to help students understand concepts have no meaning to the Hutterite students. For example, she couldn’t ask the students, If each team gets three outs in each of the nine innings of a baseball game, how many outs do they get during the entire game?’ For a child with no exposure to baseball, such an example only causes more confusion.
On the other hand, she said, all the students come from stable, two-parent homes and they’re all financially secure and come to school well fed and ready to learn, which is not the case for every student in a typical public school.
Craig Boeddeker, who teaches fourth through eighth grade at the colony, and Reinhard, who teaches kindergarten through third grade, said another challenge is teaching multiple grades in the same classroom. They either have to teach to a small group of students in one grade while monitoring the entire classroom or find a lesson that meets the needs of all the students in each of the grades.
While the colony is protective of their children and places much stricter limits on Internet access, the teachers use the same curriculum as the other PAS schools, with the students subjected to the same tests and assessments that apply to all Minnesota students.
Boeddeker said the facility is somewhat limited in terms of physical education opportunities, but the students still participate in phys-ed twice a week. Last year, Boeddeker brought students to Pipestone every other week to go to the library and the Ewert Recreation Center something he hopes the school will allow him to do again this year.
Other teachers also visit the colony once a week to teach music and computer classes.
Minnesota law requires students to receive educational instruction up to age 16, but the PAS District provides teachers for the colony only up to eighth grade typically age 14. After that, students have the option to attend the public school, receive home schooling, or take online courses.
Boeddeker said nearly all the students take online courses through the Minnesota Virtual Academy offered through the Houston Public Schools in Houston, Minn. to finish their education. There are 10 students enrolled in the online courses at this time.
Lentz said PAS is now offering online courses and he hopes the colony students will stay with the district after eighth grade in the future.
Wipf said most Hutterite colonies started offering an online option for students to earn a high school diploma or Graduation Equivalency Degree (GED) about 10 years ago. Before that, most colonies only offered the state minimum education, which is eighth grade in some states. These days, Wipf said, nearly everyone at the Heartland Colony earns a high school diploma or GED.
Overall, Reinhard said, the students at the colony have the same needs as any other students and they come from very supportive families.
“The Hutterite people are great to work with,” she said. “They are always willing to lend a hand.”
Who are the Hutterites? Source: www.hutterites.org
Hutterites are a communal people who live in colonies throughout North American.
There are about 45,000 Hutterites living in the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia in Canada, and North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Washington and Montana in the United States.
The Hutterites share common ancestry with the Mennonites and the Amish, but differ in that they share all their possessions. Their communal lifestyle is based in Biblical teachings of Christ and the Apostles.
The group emerged as a distinct culture and religious group in the early 1500s as a branch of the Anabaptists, which were part of the reformation churches. The term Anabaptists means rebaptized and was applied to the church because their members were rebaptized as adults.
In the early 1530s, Jakob Hutter became the chief pastor of the Anabaptists. Then in 1535, King Ferdinand of Moravia, the modern day Czech Republic, ordered the Anabaptists removed from the land. On Nov. 29, 1535, the authorities captured Hutter and, after torturing him for months, burned him at the stake in Innsbruck.
Hutter left a lasting legacy on the Anabaptists, which had fragmented into at least a dozen groups, by forging working communal groups. As a result Hutter became the namesake of the Hutterites.
In 1622 the Cardinal expelled the Hutterites from Moravia and many of them fled to Slovakia. Then in 1771 the group migrated to Russia, where they were allowed to live safely on land owned by Count Rumiantsev.
In the 1870s the Hutterites immigrated to North America after Russia implemented a new law requiring all citizens to join the military. Many of them settled in the United States until World War I when they moved to Canada to avoid participating in that war. Many have since moved back to the U.S.