Welcome to Macina Island Moments, hosted by lifelong islander Jason saint One. Through
conversations and interviews with fellow island locals and residents, Jason will bring you the
real stories and characters that to find life on the island. Whether you're a
seasoned visitor, new to Macna Island, or even an island or yourself,
you'll be sure to learn firsthand about the island with Jason on Macin Island Moments.
And welcome once again to another episode of the mac and Island Moments podcast.
I'm Jason saint One coming to you from Macin Island, the only podcast
to my knowledge that's by a Macin Island resident, year round resident on Mcan
Island. Today's episode we're gonna call it School Days. We're gonna talk about
the Macin Island Public School and we actually have a teacher here joining us later
on in the discussion. I want to thank our sponsors, Macina Island Tourism
Bureau. Your trip begins at Macan Island dot org. Talking about the school,
I said in the previous podcasts we'd get into the school and more year
round life. I attended Maclan Public School K through twelve, and after college
I coached for a year and then in two thousand I was elected to the
Board of Education. So basically, of the fifty years on this earth,
I've been associated with that school one way or another for thirty eight of them,
and I'm proud of that. I'm a proud alum, and I cherish
and speak fondly of my time there. Public education has a long history on
the island, with Thomas Ferry starting the mission way back in the early eighteen
hundreds and kind of continuing up through the fort The current school, which opened
in nineteen sixty. The current school building, which opened around nineteen sixty and
had a major expansion in nineteen eighty nine and in two thousand, it houses
roughly seventy kids pre school through twelve. Previous to that, the kids attended
the Thomas W. Ferry School, which was in Marquette Park. The building
is still there. It's commonly called the Indian Dormitory, but it's now known
as the Richard and Jamie new Guinum of Art. The Island school up until
nineteen seventy only went to tenth grade, and then you'd either commute to the
mainland or go live with the relative to finish and that ended, like I
said, nineteen seventy and we've been having a graduation every May since. A
little known facts well to the school. We have an athletic department. We
compete in girls and boys basketball, girls volleyball, soccer, golf, and
track, and we even have e sports. I've always kidded that McK island
belongs to the largest smallest conference athletic conference in Michigan. It's large, and
that geographically our conference is huge, but it's made up of the smallest schools
in Michigan. And they include Paradise, Michigan, which is Whitefish Township,
Grand Ray, Michigan, which is Burt Township, which is way up by
the beginning of pictured rocks, Hannahville School which is out by Escanaba Munising Baptists,
which of course is in Munistering. Maplewood Baptists is just north of here.
And of course our late Michigan foes on Beaver Island. The Beaver Island
Islanders are in our conference. So geographically i'd say tremendously large, student body
wise, it's tremendously small. We fly to our away games in the winter.
Imagine that being in high school of basketball and flying for an away game,
it always sounds fun to say we're flying for a game. They don't
do that till college, of course, anywhere else. Another interesting facet is
we generally play an overnight series. And what I mean is, because of
the costs and the unpredictable weather, we usually have a home game on Friday
night, and the visiting team spends the night in our gymnasium, and then
they get up in the morning. They play against Saturday morning, so they
handle two games sort of over the course of just two days, one Friday
night and one Saturday morning. The Friday night games are usually the big happening
in town. You go down to the gymnasium and there's a concession stand,
hot pizza, and I would say the better part of the whole town shows
up to not just for the sport, but for the social aspect of it,
certainly, and it's a lot of fun, you know. Oftentimes friendships
are forged between these schools because they get so close from spending so much time
with each other. And to this day, I'm still friends with some of
the kids they played against in high school high school basketball. The school is
well funded. Proposal A wasn't great to every district Michigan, but Proposal A
worked out well for us. Twenty years ago. I would say, our
kids don't want for much in regards to what money can buy. While I've
always prided myself as a fiscal conservative, and if you don't believe me,
ask my kids, the one place I don't hold back is the school.
Now, what I'm going to say next is probably going to anger some of
our tax payers, but my position is resolute. And that one day I
was at a board meeting and we were kind of working over pennies and dimes
and I glanced out the window we meet in the library of the school,
and you can see the Grand Hotel, And at that moment, my philosophy
changed. These kids, our kids are going to Scho School literally in the
shadow of a hotel up there that's charging three thousand dollars a night for a
suite and sells bottles of wine for nine hundred dollars. There's no way that
our kids should glance at that opulence all around them and then say, but
hey, here at the school, we don't have money for this. And
it really kind of changed my thinking and going forward from that moment. If
it's any issue that can help our kids in one iota, then if the
money's there, I say, spend it and let's do it. So now
to that end, I won't say we're a spendthrift. And the board does
manage its finances quite well, but when it comes to our student's advantage,
I pull no punches. So okay, enough pontificating. I graduated with two
other kids. Most classes are between four and ten students. I had a
really small class. Of course, we just had three. We've never had
a class reunion, as I have them all the time by happenstance walking to
the Mustang. There's my classmates. You can get a fine education at the
school. The one on one attention is on paralleled. And our guest is
going to talk about that shortly. I'm sure. In fact, I remember
going to teachers' houses after school for help on homework, and I presume that
stuff still kind of goes on, and Liz is nodding yes, and I
remember Ms Voiko, excuse me, miss Bennett, she's married now meeting meeting
with the kids on Sundays at the school to help them, and mister Daren
of course, always took any and all requests to help the students and kind
of really set the bar for commitment from the staff. One of my favorite
stats, one of my favorite statistics about our education is one year we had
seven seniors and four of them were accepted at the University of Michigan. I'm
not sure there's even an elite prep school in Michigan that can boast a fifty
seven percent U of M acceptance rate in one year. That was pretty amazing,
and of course, you know, I really like that. So anyway,
as I said, this podcast will tell more and more into growing up
here and going to school here, and we'll start more at that aspect.
Now with our next guests, we have macnown Public School teacher Liz Burt.
Liz is the senior teacher at the school. She's been on staff for thirty
years. And oddly enough, Liz and I go way back, and I
have probably known Liz longer than anybody on mcin Island, as when I was
a little guy about eleven years old playing drums and Fort mcannon, Liz was
with the girl Scout troop that would come in and stay for a week and
raise the flags and kind of help maintain the park. And oddly enough,
I've known Liz all these years and she ended up getting married and moving to
the island and taking a job teaching. Funny thing for those in education or
on school boards. Liz is on the negotiation the union negotiations team for the
island, and I'm on the board of Ed's negotiation team. Now one would
think we can't even be in the same room without giving each other the stink
guy or jeering at each other, but it's not like that on mcanaland we
all have a couple of responsibilities. We all have multiple jobs we take on
to get it done. So it's just something we handle and it's not a
big deal. So, without further ado, I'm going to introduce Liz and
she's going to talk a little bit about how her career came to mc and
Island. Liz, thanks for being here. You are very welcome. It's
wonderful. So my classroom is the most amazing classroom in Michigan. So my
room, you know, of the four walls, two of them are all
windows, one of which is a bay window. It's like they pay me
to work in this room. And I can see the straits of mackinaw.
I can see the bridge. So every morning in my room, I see
the sunrise. It's amazing. You can see the sun set if I'm there
working late. And it is like when we get new principles and they talk
about moving staff around, it's like, I'll teach whatever you want me to
teach, just you can't take me out of that room. I've been in
that room. Literally, this is year thirty one, and I can't imagine
being anywhere else. So, like, you know, you're thirty one,
it's getting close to retirement. People start asking me now on the street,
oh, why are you going to retire? And I just that room in
that school is so much of who I am that I can't even think about
it. Plus there's this little third grader that regularly asks me, you're not
going to retire yet, missus burt right, so got to stay till she's
in seventh grade. Well that'd be nice. So, if I'm hearing this
correctly, a teacher, salary negotiations should be easy. As long as we
let you stay in that room, you'll vote for no rais exactly okay,
perfect, off the record. Off the record, of course, are there
ever times when you're envious of mainland teachers, and based on your experiences,
are other times when mainland teachers are envious of you? Or is it more
curiosity? So absolutely I'm envious of mainland teachers. In November, when I'm
riding my bike to school, it's thirty four degrees and I'm going through horizontal
rain that is not pleasant, but it's worth it, you know, when
you get to school. Probably the only other time I'm envious of mainland teachers
is when every school district within fifty miles US has a snow day and we're
in school. Because so in thirty one years, I sat down and figured
it out, we've had about ten Yeah, you know, a couple days
when the boiler was on the fritz. There was a day when the custodian
couldn't like she couldn't shovel out the snow drifts before the kids got to school.
There was one day years ago we had power outage, and other than
that, you know, a couple days for cold tempts. But in thirty
years it's been less than ten days. So I'm jealous on those days,
but other than that, not really. You know, we have challenges.
There are things about teaching on mac and Island that absolutely are more challenging than
teaching on the mainland. So you know, most mainland teachers would have one
grade level, they'd teach sixth grade, they'd teach fourth grade. All of
our elementary classrooms are splits, so you know, it's first grade and second
grader, it's third grade and fourth grade. This year, I have fifth
grade and sixth grade and fourth grade, so I only have nine students,
but I have three grade levels. So you know, there are days when
I'm the thought of only having to prep one math lesson would be nice,
because you know, I'm doing three math lessons every day and three reading lessons
every day, and three levels of spelling and three levels of reading. So
in teacher speak, that's a prep. So I have more preps than a
mainland teacher would. But you know it's worth it because I really get to
know my students. I can build relationships with them that mainland teachers just when
you only have a kid for a year, you don't you don't get to
know them nearly as well as human beings. You don't get to see them.
You know, I get them for three years and then even when they're
out of my room and they're up on the high school end. I usually
can't keep track of what grade they're in anymore. It's like are you a
junior? Are you a senior? But I get to see them graduate and
I get to see them go off. You know, there are kids who
I had as students who I still see every day in town and they're like,
Hi, missus Burt, how are you. You know, most teachers
the kids out of their room and they don't they don't know what happens to
them, so that that's amazing. Probably one of the harder things, though,
would be having your own kids in your classroom. That was definitely challenging.
And if I was on the mainland, that probably wouldn't have happened.
You know, they would have arranged it. So I got asked, when
you had your own kids did they did? They say Mom? Or they
say missus Burt. You know, we talked about it, kind of had
a family meeting, like what did they want to do? And they thought
calling me missus Burt was a pretty stupid idea, so they called me mom.
It was we had to make arrangements at home. So like I had
my kids for four years at that point. I was teaching fourth, fifth,
sixth, and seventh grade, so I had four or five for half
the day and six seven for half the day, but just math and science.
So we kind of worked it out as a family where all right,
Dad, he was in charge of homework. He was in charge of signing
permission slips, because you know, as a kid, you have a rough
day at school, you come home, you want to cry with mom,
and it's like, ooh, Mom's the reason I had a bad day.
So having him sort of take over that that aspect of things made it easier
for those four years. Well it's like good cop, bad cop situation going
on, but I would argue it was another just wonderful, unique experience that
you get living on Mcin Island that you might not get somewhere else. Very
true. My next question was to talk about challenges, but you kind of
handled that. I have a question for you and and feel free to be
as honest as you would like. You kind of touched that on the sideways
rain in November, and I've mentioned that actually in the previous podcast, everyone
talks about the sideways November rain. In your thirty plus years you've been here,
have you ever thought of moving on or have you always felt like your
move to Maccana was your last move. So I would definitely say that Macinaw's
my forever home. That you know, I started coming here at fourteen with
the Scouts, and then I I didn't want to not be on Macinaw anymore,
so I got a summer job here in college. I worked at the
Fort and at Dowd's all the summers that I was in school. And a
lot of people who come to Macina Island regularly get it that there is something
about Macina Island that just for some people, it is this magical place and
it gets into your blood. And you know, I would go away to
Michigan State, Sorry, and I would be at school, and you know,
coming back to the island in June that was coming home, going back
to school, going back to my parents' house, that it didn't feel like
home anymore. Mackinaw was where I needed to be, and it was just,
you know, it was like the universe wanted me to be here because
the year I graduated from college, there was a teacher who you know retired
or left and you know, it just was was meant to be. And
funny how that works out. Have you ever said, jeez, had that
not happened, I think I'd be working where I would never even enter your
mind because it never had to. Well, thank goodness, it never had
to. I had interviewed with Detroit public schools. I had interviewed with some
districts in Texas because at that point in nineteen ninety three when I got my
job, there were not a lot of teaching jobs in Michigan. You know.
It was where there were, you know, you might get several hundred
applications for one job. So those were my just in case. So I
would not have ended up in Texas. When I interviewed it was one hundred
and one on May thirty first, And having grown up my whole life in
Michigan, I knew I cannot do that, So probably would have ended up
at least for a couple of years in Metro Detroit until I could have have
moved somewhere else. Sure, so obviously it's a small town, speaking of
the year round pop. That is how different for you was it to be
a teacher in such a small district Having grown up in Metro Detroit. I
mean here you run into students and teachers daily. You go to the post
office, there's one of your teachers, or for you, there's one of
your kids. You go to the store, there they are, you're on
the ferry. Was that weird at first? Or did not? Phasia?
It's wonderful, you know. So when I was I did my student teaching
and lansing, and I remember being out at Meyer one night and one of
my students saw me at Meyer and he was appalled, like, what are
you doing here? You shop at Meyer? You know, he honestly thought
teachers eight in the school at cafeteria and there must have been some secret room
that we all slept in, and here the kids know that. You know,
teachers aren't this mysterious group of people. They're fire just like firefighters or
police officers or the mayor. You know, they're just normal people with jobs
who go home to their families. It's very true. What do you think
are the pros of attending Macna in public school? And what are the cons
or the downside of going to school on mac And Island? And I'll have
a follow up for you, but go ahead with that one. So I
think the pros of our school absolutely a million times over outweigh the cons,
like, there absolutely are some cons, and I think I want to start
with the cons first, just because you know, I want to end on
the positive note. Sure so, so, not only am I a teacher
at the school, but I do have my own children have gone through the
school. So my son graduated last year, class of four, my daughter
graduates this year class of eleven. Big class, big class. And so
certainly compared to my own high school experience or the high school experience of my
nephews, you know, they have fewer class choices. You know, there
aren't every language you can imagine and every art class that you can imagine.
Now, since we've gotten Michigan Virtual High School, which if you're not familiar
with that, that is an online platform where like we don't have a Spanish
teacher and language is a graduation requirement, so kids can take a language over
Michigan Virtual High School. It's like an online class. So they have fewer
classes that they can take in person. They don't, like you mentioned with
sports. You know, if you don't like basketball or volleyball, or soccer
or track golf, you know, there's not a whole lot you want to
play football, you want to play some other rugby. You're not going to
be able to do that. My kids complain about social opportunities. You know,
when I was in high school there every month there was a dance,
or you and your friends could go to the movies or do things like that,
and so kids don't have the same social opportunities here. Both of my
kids would complain about dating that. You know, even the kids my kids
aren't related to anybody, unlike many kids in the high school who it's like
cousin cousin, cousin cousin. My kids would argue even the kids they're not
related to, they feel like their cousins because they've grown up together, like
they've been together since preschool. So dating, I think was hard. Everybody
knows everything about everybody else. You sneeze and people six doors down are you
feeling okay? So that lack of privacy sometimes I think can be hard.
But at the same time, the pros are amazing. So growing up here
today is like it was in the seventies, but with bikeomets, you know,
like you think about the seventies where we it was go outside and play,
come come home when the light the street lights go on and kids here
do that. They're out in the woods catching snakes, they're building forts,
they're you know, outside with a gaggle of neighborhood kids, and a lot
of my friends in the cities their kids. You let your kids play outside,
yeah, all the time. Don't go with them, No where are
they going to go? You know they're going to be fine. The kids
get a driver's license for snowmobile at twelve, you know, twelve years old.
They have a sense of independence on top of the independence that they already
have. And then when you think about the school, they're in very very
small class sizes. So my class of fourth grade, fifth grade, and
sixth grade is nine kids. So even though I'm trying to teach different math
lessons, because there's only nine of them, I know, all right,
this one is struggling with this. I need to find time to help them
with this. This one needs help with that. Whereas if you had thirty
I don't think as a teacher I would be able to be as in tune
with those things. Our special ed department is amazing. So like all of
our kids who are involved in special education are in mainstream, you know,
they might go see the special education teacher for an hour, but nobody is
segregated off by themselves. And because of that, the kids all grow up
knowing that everybody has different abilities. And I personally have never experienced one of
our kids with maybe some special needs being bullied. It might happen a little
bit, but I don't think it happens like maybe in some of those bigger
districts where those kids are not. I mean, these kids are on the
varsity basketball team. Everybody is on the varsity basketball team. Doesn't matter how
wonderful of a player you are. Everybody wont one team, and that really
fosters that sense of togetherness. You know, they're really because we are so
small. There aren't like we talk about kids falling through the cracks. We
don't have cracks, or if we have cracks, they're so small. You
know. I remember years ago, mister Yerman. You remember, mister Yerman,
we had a student who was in danger of not graduating, and that
student ate lunch in mister Yeerman's office every day so that mister Yerman could make
sure, Okay, you're getting this done. You're getting this done. You
know, if you don't graduate from our school, it's because you are kicking
and screaming as they were trying to drag you, because there's just this huge,
like you were talking about, Missus Bennett, the staff investment in the
kids. And then you know, even though they don't necessarily have all of
the class choices, there are a lot of things that our kids can do.
They can go to the mainland and do you know CTE welding classes,
things like that. Our DPW has just started this youth apprenticeship program where the
kids are going to the water plant to learn the chemistry and all of that.
At the water plant. There's just all they can do. The dual
enrollment program. You know, you think, oh, they're on mac and
Island, how are they going to do that? Well, they go up
to Lake State and so a lot of those things that you'd think our kids
couldn't do they can. We still have a senior trip. How many schools
still take kids on a senior trip? You know, I know to a
lot of the kids, that's a really big deal that that's a special thing
that they still get to do. And then another really neat things that our
kids get is they get for the kids that attend our school, there are
like limits for how many years you have to attend. Our community supports our
kids with huge scholarships, tremendous, you know, the community Foundation, the
Poulti Foundation really support the kids so that if they want to go to trade
school, if they want to go to college, finances aren't as much of
an issue as maybe they could be. Yeah, that's definitely changed over the
last thirty years. Yeah, it's huge for sure. So Liz, I
know this is kind of a this subject being taught at school has kind of
left the school districts and they're doing a different setup. But I get a
lot of folks asking me how we do it on the island, and I,
you know, I can't really answer how it's done nowadays. But my
day when it was time for Driver's Ed, I have a ton of people
ask me how did you do drivers ad on macin Island. So mister Weillnet's
and mister Duncan would come over from Cedarville. They were the Driver's Ed teachers
and they would they do the classroom session on a Saturday. It'd be a
couple of saturdays. You'd spend six or seven hours down at the school and
then you had to get your hours in and since it wasn't a one hour
class. We'd go over on a Saturday or Sunday and go get in the
little Ford Escort with the yellow triangle on top that says student driver, and
we'd get our hours in. So to maximize our time, we would we'd
drive all day. And in fact, I remember driving a Cadillac and back
and the Escanaba and back, and I mean these are you know, it's
two hundred miles each way or one hundred and fifty miles each way, and
we'd get all of our hours in in a matter of a day or two.
Take your examine. You're all set. You're the mother of teenagers.
Now, how are the kids doing? Drivers? Sad now? So it's
done now through a private company that you have to pay. They're the one
that we used was based in Sheboygan, and they we would get all the
island kids together and they would send the person to the island or to the
mainland. The kids would all come over on the boat and then they'd go
off driving. You know, it usually was three or four of them that
would go. They'd have a couple cars, so they might go for two
or three hours at a time, depending there were a couple times where it
was just my two kids in the car, so they'd go for you know,
a couple hours. The hard thing now is in Michigan where they have
these three tiered driver's licenses, right, so they don't have learners permits anymore.
It's a level one and to move from a level one to a level
two you have to log fifty hours of driving, ten of which are at
night. Holy So with the boat schedule the way it is, you know,
in the summertime, even it's late, it's light out so late,
we can't do night time driving in the winter time, you know, the
last boat over to the island's four can't can't do night time driving. So
you know, at Christmas time when we were at Grandma's, it was like,
oh, we're going to Walmart, you need to drive. We're driving
ten hours to Indie. You need to drive. That's funny, there you
go, Folks didn't I didn't know how it was. I guess I'll be
dealing with that in about eight years. So I don't mean to ambush you
with this question. And I don't want this to be like a Hallmark commercial
or Lifetime television for women. Movie of the Week, but so every teacher
talks about that moment where they say to themselves, this is exactly why I
became a teacher. Do you have that moment or is it moments? Or
does it happen weekly or is it that monthly or oh, I would say
it happens weekly. You know, there are moments when a kid just looks
at you and they've just had an epiphany, and you're like, that's why
I'm here. But there are definitely a few moments that that stick out in
my mind, and one of itch would be years ago, probably. So
I started in ninety three, so this might be ninety five. You know,
ninety six. I was just married to my husband, got married in
November of ninety six. So, and I had this one particular student who
was really challenging. I know, he's Jason sitting here trying to figure out
who I'm talking. I graduated ninety two. It's not me, And you
know, this student really struggled. And you know, my job as a
teacher sometimes is to push you into doing hard things and to show you that
you are capable when you think you're not capable. So sometimes it seems like
a teacher doesn't like you or they're they're trying to make you do things that
you don't want to do. And I was convinced that this kid just hated
me. This kid just, oh, can't stand And I got married in
November, and we didn't take a honeymoon then, but you know, I
took a long weekend because we were getting married that weekend. And I came
back on Monday and this sixth grade boy had embroidered on a piece of fabric
Congratulations missus bird. And it must have taken this kid hours to do this,
and you know, it was the quality you would expect of a sixth
grade boy. But it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Still
have it, I still do. That's that's wonderful. It's a great story.
So also in addition to teaching, I understand you're a blogger. Yeah,
do you have been blogging since two thousand and eight, So you're blogging
before blogging was cool long time. It's like, oh, I'm old enough
to say that. Yeah. My blog's name is The Quilted Turtle because that's
one of the things I do for fun. I like to sew. So
Quilted Turtle dot blogspot dot com. If you just google the quilted turtle.
It'll come up wonderful. Let me ask you this last question. There's a
lot to learn still about going to school and living here year around on the
island. Do you think you'll come back and chat with us again anytime?
That'd be great, you know, Liz, I did want to mention a
special treat our students get that. It's not only unique, but it kind
of exemplifies the partnerships we have with our surrounding business community and our other nonprofits.
Each and every enrolled student of Maclaaland Public School gets a pool pass to
Grand Hotel, a season pass. The first week of January, each student
is name is forwarded to Grand Hotel and they issued a pool pass for the
upcoming season. It's another perk and a unique situation and we love it,
folks. Once again, I'm Jason Saint and coming to you from Mcina Island.
You can always reach out to us at macamoments at gmail dot com all
lower case. You can reach out to us on Facebook and give us suggestions,
tell us what we're doing wrong. Missus Burt, thanks for joining us,
and we want to thank our sponsor, the Macleland Toursenbrero. Your trip
begins at Macina Island dot org. Everybody, thank you and good day.