At the end of November 1979 a trustee of the Arbon school district asked the Idaho State Board of Education, meeting in Boise, for an exception. The district had two teaching posts and 20 pupils, and it had hired a man who did not hold a valid certificate. The board let him stay for one year. The Idaho State Journal reported the request on Sunday, December 2, 1979, and it is the fullest of a handful of glimpses the paper gave, over the 1970s, of a very small district trying to stay whole.
Talk of consolidation, 1971
The Arbon district, numbered 383 in Power County, ran the Arbon school, which stands in the Pauline area. In the summer of 1971 its future was being discussed in other people's board rooms. The Journal of August 25 carried a warning that William Thomas, the American Falls superintendent, gave his own board: committees of the Legislature, he said, were pressing hard for a statewide floor of 1,800 students per district. Thomas added that the state's education department already had a map in mind that would one day fold Arbon together with Rockland, American Falls, Aberdeen and a piece of Snake River. The American Falls board decided to talk with Aberdeen about merging on their own terms before the state did it for them.
The same meeting did Arbon a practical favor. Arbon had no way of offering some services on its own, among them assessing and treating children's speech and hearing problems, so the American Falls board agreed to supply them; Arbon would cover the travel mileage and pay any substitute teachers.
On August 30 the paper covered a joint session of the American Falls and Aberdeen trustees, held at Aberdeen, at which Arbon and Rockland were mentioned as possible partners in any combined district. The state's aim, the trustees were told, was about 40 districts in place of the more than 100 Idaho then had. No decision came out of it. A merger was not yet on the table, the paper explained, and the point was simply to think ahead; should one happen, it would probably join only the high schools and leave elementary and junior high pupils in their home towns.
A refusal, November 1971
That fall Arbon needed something from the state. On November 5, 1971, an Associated Press report from the State Board of Education's meeting at Twin Falls said the board had voted 4 to 2 to turn down requests from two districts, Arbon District 383 and a Friends academy at Greenleaf, for emergency teaching certificates sought after the filing deadline. Dr. John Swartley of Boise, who moved the denial, said refusing was the only way the board would find out "if we have any clout." John Peacock of Kellogg voted against. The report did not name the Arbon teachers or say what the district did next.
Permission, 1979
Eight years later the answer was different, and the full account is given below. Steve Lusk, the trustee who made Arbon's case, described a district that could not keep its teachers, with only one of its last four hires still on the job after two years, and said a certificate had been no promise of good work. This time the state board said yes to Arbon, Challis and Bear Lake, though the department's standards commission had said no to all three.
The Journal identified Lusk only as a school trustee. He was probably Stephen T. "Steve" Lusk (1946–2025) of the Lusk family of Pauline and West Fork, who served for nearly 47 years as Arbon's highway foreman, and whose father, David Wayne Lusk, chaired the school board for many years. The article does not say so, but no other Steve Lusk is known in the valley.
Cooperation and acreage, 1980
The next spring the talk turned from merging to sharing. On April 9, 1980, a single line in the paper said the American Falls board had met with trustees from Arbon and Rockland about pooling efforts among the three districts to cut costs. What came of it is not reported.
That June, writing about teachers' contracts, the Journal pointed to Arbon as an example of why the region's districts were so hard to line up side by side. Arbon had only 15 pupils in all, yet its land was worth $130,000 for each one of them; Pocatello's figure was $9,000 a pupil.
What is not known
These reports never name Arbon's other teachers of the 1970s, say whether Lloyd Christensen stayed past his year, or say where the valley's high school students went. Valley families will know much of what the papers left out.
The district survived these years and the next threat as well: in 1982 a tax dispute over a church-owned farm put the school at risk. In 2016 the school had 16 pupils, who saved for a new concrete playground, and in 2018 its notices still went out under the name Arbon Elementary School District #383.
On this site: Schools of Arbon Valley, with a photograph of the Arbon school from about 1980, and the account of Pauline and West Fork.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, December 2, 1979, page B6. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
BOISE — Arbon, Challis and Bear Lake, all small rural districts, had each been refused by the Department of Education's Professional Standards Commission when they sought leave to employ teachers who lacked full credentials. On Friday the State Board of Education gave all three emergency permission anyway.
Speaking for their districts, the three told much the same story of why no qualified applicant had been found: small paychecks, hard and isolated jobs, and too few teachers to go around.
Arbon's case was made by Steve Lusk, one of its trustees. The district had 20 pupils and two teaching jobs, he said, and it could not hold on to the people who filled them; of four hires over two years, only one remained. Women and men alike, he said, tended to find a spouse and go, or as he put it, "they seem to get married and run away." Credentials had not solved the problem either, Lusk said, because several fully certified teachers of recent years had not done the job well.
The teacher in question was Lloyd Christensen of Pocatello. Arbon had put him in charge of two elementary grades that September, although he was 11 credits short of a bachelor's degree, which he was working toward part time at Idaho State University. Lusk said Christensen had once been certified, but that certificate had run out in 1950 and he had not taught in the years since. Lusk also noted that Ruby Christensen, Lloyd's wife, ran an elementary school for the Pocatello district.
Under the board's decision, Christensen could remain in Arbon's classroom for a year.
Challis and Bear Lake left with approvals too. The Challis superintendent told the board his district had offered its special education position to four teachers and been refused by every one. In Bear Lake's case, two teachers were cleared to take on subjects for which they held no certification.
Board member Janet Hay of Nampa followed the three approvals with a pair of motions. One asked the Department of Education to devise a way of reviewing teachers without proper credentials before their cases came before the board, and the other asked it to have emergency requests ready for the board each September.