Up the stairs and down the hall of a redbrick school in the small town of Medora, Indiana, teacher Chris Sinnett reads a sonnet by Longfellow.
“. . . So nature deals with us, and takes away / our playthings one by one . . . ”
Sinnett’s students — four in all — sit listening at their desks. Medora Junior-Senior High School, tucked among the hills and hollows of southern Indiana, is one of the smallest in the state, with about a dozen kids per grade.
The teacher finishes the poem and asks his students, who are midway through their senior year, “What is this about?”
“I think it’s about growing older, and changing. We were all kids once,” says Angel Chan-Cux from the front row. On the chalkboard before him is a list of poetry terms: iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme, quatrain, couplet. An assortment of student drawings on a bulletin board includes a pair of skeletons in fancy dress, an angry Batman, a duck wearing a hat.
The teacher nods and urges the kids to think about how the poet draws a comparison between a child going to bed and nature leading us to our final rest. The class falls silent. “It’s about death, how nature takes us to death,” Sinnett suggests. “When people live a long life, we go to it reluctantly, like a little kid goes to bed. We’re reluctant, but at the same time, we need the rest.”
Sinnett teaches Medora’s Advanced Literature class for dual credit, meaning students who pass it can get credit for it at participating colleges and universities. A Notre Dame initiative, the Advanced Placement Teacher Investment Program (AP-TIP), helped establish college-level courses such as this one at Medora last fall and provides teachers with training and support.
In a remote town of 650 people surrounded by miles of farm fields, such classes — and the dedicated teachers who teach them — are opening a door to a world of opportunities. They’re also helping the tiny school and its district survive in a challenging environment for small schools across the state.
On an early November afternoon, the streets of Medora are mostly quiet. A sign on Indiana 235 announces, “Medora: Town of Harmony,” illustrated with musical notes. A man cruises down the main road, Perry Street, on a riding mower, pulling a push mower. A cat crosses Perry behind him. The handful of local businesses includes a cafe, a tavern, a pet “spa,” and a feed mill with a trio of towering grain silos. A mural depicts historic local scenes, such as a cluster of kilns from a former brick plant and a covered bridge built in 1875, which still stands and is believed to be the longest of its kind in America.
John Mellencamp shot his music video for “Hurts So Good” here in 1982, parading through Medora with a pair of women in black bodysuits and fishnet tights. The musician grew up in Seymour, Indiana, about 20 miles down the road.
The school building, which houses the junior and senior high schools and an elementary school, sits near the center of town, with a replica of the covered bridge on one side and a row of maple trees on the other, their red leaves shading a neighborhood food pantry. A sign on the front lawn lists dates for fall events, including school pictures and “Gravy with Grands,” a breakfast for kids and grandparents featuring biscuits and gravy. A few blocks away, a freight train rattles by.
The school is the heart of the town. “It brings life to the community,” parent Tessa Stickney says while watching her son play in a fifth- and sixth-grade basketball game against Lutheran Central. Ada Reynolds, a school board member, is also sitting in the bleachers to support her son, a fourth grader who plays on the fifth-grade team because it was short on players.
Students in Indiana may apply to attend any school in any district. Reynolds and her husband, Medora graduates who run a lumber business, sent two of their kids to a bigger school and two to Medora, where they could benefit from individualized attention. “I felt like the teachers at Medora were really involved with the kids,” she says. “They really cared and wanted to watch out for them.”
Indeed, teachers play an important and deeply personal role in the lives of their students here. In Medora, as in small towns across America, many families struggle to make ends meet. The employment rate is 48 percent, according to the Census Bureau, and 7 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
“My main purpose in getting into teaching was to help in places where I felt like kids were being underserved,” says Sinnett, the literature teacher. “I wanted to do what I could to help in those environments, to bring what I felt was a unique background and unique tools to these situations.”
He recalls his own difficulties growing up in rural eastern Kentucky. “I grew up poor and from a rough household and abuse and things like that — things that typically, because of the impact and the traumas they have on kids, keep them out of the high-ability environments. These are kids I feel like we miss.”
He became a teacher through Teach for America, an organization that works to expand opportunities for kids in vulnerable settings, and spent a couple years teaching in Indianapolis, the state capital, before coming to Medora seven years ago. While attending a 2024 conference, he learned about AP-TIP.
Launched in 2012 with federal funding, the program, which is a nonprofit outreach of Notre Dame’s Institute for Educational Initiatives and its Center for STEM Education, aims to help teachers create challenging learning environments for students. Now funded by the Indiana Department of Education and a private foundation, it trains and supports teachers who offer college-level classes, including dual-credit and advanced-placement, or AP, classes. In the dual-credit program, schools partner with a local college to offer a course. The AP program, administered by the New York-based College Board, offers credit at many colleges to students who achieve above a certain score on a standardized test.
AP-TIP offers guidance for three years, including professional-development events and conferences where teachers can connect and share wisdom. “Everything that our organization does is to the benefit of students, but the teacher is really the primary change-agent in a classroom,” says Stephanie Kucsera, the program’s director of academics. The program currently works with 21 public schools in urban, suburban and rural areas of Indiana.
At the time Sinnett learned of the Notre Dame program, he was teaching a dual-credit English Composition class, the only college-level class at the school. He wanted to offer additional advanced classes; Medora’s principal, Kara Hunt, and the district superintendent, Roger Bane, agreed. But they worried that Medora was too small to be considered.
Certainly not, says Karen Morris, AP-TIP’s director for operations. It’s not about size, she says, but rather about “dedication and earnestness and wanting to do the best for students.” Medora now offers AP classes in math and biology, as well as the dual-credit classes in literature and composition.
Such classes help Medora compete in a fraught environment for small schools in Indiana. The state wants consolidated administration, Bane says. “It gets brought up every legislative session.” He says “consolidation” is code for closing small schools. If only one administrator is tasked with running several schools, the smaller schools inevitably would be shuttered.
But a bigger picture needs to be considered, he says. For starters, he cites the individualized attention kids get from teachers and administrators at a small school like Medora. Bane himself makes a point of getting to know the students and even fills in for the bus drivers as needed. “I feel like the kids need to know me,” he says.
Further, the school offers internships with local businesses such as the feed mill, as well as training for a commercial driver’s license, which can lead to work for businesses like the local farm that’s one of the biggest egg producers in the country.
Sitting at her desk, beneath a poster with a Nelson Mandela quote about the power of education to change the world, Principal Hunt cites additional specialized benefits of small-scale, community-based education, such as a locally funded program that provides a free pair of shoes to kids who need them at the beginning of the school year. The majority do. Another initiative delivers free outfits or coats at Christmastime, she says. People who “really, really care about these kids, in this school, in this community,” she adds, have enabled us “to do the things we’ve done.”
Medora Junior-Senior High School is the community’s largest employer. “If the school would close,” Bane says, “I think this would become just like a ghost town.”
In AP math class, Kade Wright sits beside Angel Chan-Cux, facing a chalkboard covered with equations. Motivational phrases dot the classroom walls — advice about overcoming fear, having a positive attitude. A toy dinosaur head pokes out from a wall near the teacher’s desk, a bead necklace around its neck. The boys are the only two students in the class. They appreciate this, they tell me, because they feel comfortable asking their teacher questions.
“It’s like a conversation, almost like a family,” says Chan-Cux, 17, describing the dynamic. “The teachers here, they really like helping students. They’re always asking, ‘Do you guys understand? If not, we can go over it again.’” He adds that the small classes make the relationships personal: “We’re close to each other. Any problems, like, whether it’s school or just personal problems, we can, you know, reach out and talk a little bit about them.”
Wright, 18, nods and notes that the courses are markedly more challenging.
The boys, who are good friends, speak openly and thoughtfully about their experience at the school. Wright had only vaguely heard of AP classes. Chan-Cux didn’t know what they were. “I was excited to see what it was,” he says, and he was, maybe, “a little nervous.”
Both boys want to go to college and plan to apply for federal student aid, which they learned about through the school; both would be the first college graduates in their immediate families. Wright, who grew up in Medora, is interested in cybersecurity. “It’s really needed because everything is advancing superfast,” he says, “and it makes good money.”
In the longer term, he sees himself living in Seymour, a town of 21,000 people. “I love Medora. I’ve learned how to build relationships here,” he says. “But I would think a bigger place like Seymour is probably more where I want to go, just because it has more diversity, and I would get to meet a lot more people. In Medora, I know everything.”
Chan-Cux moved to Medora with his family from a world away — Los Angeles — when he was in the eighth grade. “We lived in, like, the big old city,” he says with a smile. His father, who works in construction, fell in love with southern Indiana after visiting an uncle. Moving to the rural town was a massive change, and while he misses some things about L.A., he also appreciates country life: His California middle school had more than 500 students in his grade — nearly the population of his adopted hometown.
Chan-Cux wants to study engineering, maybe mechanical, agricultural or environmental. After college, he says, “I’m thinking about maybe going to the big city, living there for a while, and then, you know, coming back to the little town of Medora.”
Kyle Derheimer, the AP math teacher, spent nine years in the United States Navy as a nuclear energy specialist, then a few more years supervising operations for a Duke Energy power plant in the state before transitioning to teaching through a program at Indiana University. “Training and teaching have always been a very big part of my professional career and life; I’ve always enjoyed it,” he explains. He has been teaching at Medora for the past five years, and his wife, Bobbi, whom he met in the Navy, teaches special education at the school.
A native of Bedford, Indiana, just a half-hour west, Derheimer offers his life experience as an example for the students, often describing how he and his wife pursued an education and career.
“I tell them, ‘We didn’t come from money, but we were able to use our brains. We happened to go the Navy route. Go do something; make yourself marketable. It doesn’t have to be college — go get a technical certificate. Pursue something worth pursuing. If you want to come back here, that’s fine, but go get out of here and do something.’ I try to instill as much of that as I possibly can,” he says. “But it is pushing uphill for sure.”
He adds, “I tell people this is like inner-city country, working here. It’s high poverty, a lot of broken homes, a lot of just kids that have gone through a lot of crap.”
Advanced classes help his students gain confidence that they can handle college. “They’re not growing up in a family that’s talking about their own college experiences,” Derheimer says. He learned in his first year of teaching at Medora that when the kids saw that he cared about them, they started to care more about school. “It’s a good feeling, knowing you can make a difference,” he says. “We’re doing the best we can and pouring it into these kids.”
He took students on a field trip to see the power plant he worked at in Edwardsport, about an hour and a half away. “I was shocked by the positive feedback I got from so many of the kids. Because, I mean, it’s not like it was a fun day of goofing off, right? But they had never seen anything like that. Some of them hadn’t even been out of the county for crying out loud. So I try to do stuff like that. When I can, I bring in people that I trust and know to tell their stories, because they’re real.”
Among them: Derheimer’s brother, who told how he racked up a hefty college debt getting an art degree, joined Navy special operations forces to pay it off and later became an entrepreneur and artist in Colorado. “You can find ways to do the stuff that you enjoy doing,” Derheimer says, pointing to one of his brother’s paintings: a boy blowing bubbles filled with galactic images. Also on the wall is a photo of the Blue Angels, the Navy flight-demonstration squadron, which Derheimer asked the pilots to sign for his students.
“After a while, they probably get sick of hearing about Bobbi and me,” he says with a laugh. “I just like to give real-world examples.”
A graduate of Medora’s class of 2017, Dalea Johnson, who teaches AP biology, also uses her experience to inspire. She earned her chemistry degree at IU with the help of the GI Bill after her father, a Navy machinist’s mate, died in a rafting accident. “The kids can see that I . . . got a rather difficult degree,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Guys, I promise, it is possible! You just have to put in the work.’”
Johnson has known some of her students from the time they were grade-schoolers. “I remember when they were little, 10-year-old boys running around my front yard doing crazy stuff,” she says, referring to longtime friends of her brother, who is now a senior at the school. “We have a really good relationship where they can feel like they can talk to me, ask me a question if they’re confused, not feel embarrassed. There’s still a bit of a learning curve where it is college level.”
The students must pass the AP test at the end of her class to qualify for college credit, but whether they pass or not, she sees them benefiting. “They’ve developed reading comprehension; they can look at these big words and be able to break them down. There are so many skills that they’ll use in their everyday lives, even if they don’t go to college. What I’ve been telling them is, ‘At the end of the day, I just want you to do your best. Just learn something new that you wouldn’t have known before.’”
The three students in her class aren’t yet sure about college. “I’m debating on it,” says Ethan Smith, 17, who is also weighing the military and trade school. Waylon Burrell, 16, says he isn’t sure if he prefers to go to college or “straight to the workforce.” Winnie Thompson, 16, is interested in cosmetology. All three say their teacher encourages them to stick with the class. “She pushes us to challenge ourselves,” says Smith. “We need a little challenge.”
After watching a short, animated film about modern cell theory, they are a bit shy about talking with me. I tell them that I went to a tiny elementary school, with about 10 kids per grade, a few miles away in Vallonia. It closed years ago. Smith asks if I liked going to such a small school. I tell him that, as a kid, I didn’t think much about it; I just wished we lived closer to a mall. But now, having lived around the world, I can say that the friends I made in that little school have lasted a lifetime.
“Yeah,” he says. “I get that.”
As the students head to the cafeteria for lunch — chicken nuggets — Johnson tells me the Notre Dame program has been “unbelievably helpful” to her in learning to teach the class. The training began with a weeklong summer institute in Indianapolis, where she, Sinnett and Derheimer met teachers from across the state. “Working with the other teachers, working with this more difficult content, has made me a better teacher in general,” she says.
Sinnett agrees but admits he went into the training with a degree of skepticism. Professional development for teachers can sometimes miss the mark. “So much of it is not relevant to the practice that we’re actually doing, and especially not relevant to the context,” he says. But this training — and the connections he made with other teachers — proved invaluable. Says Derheimer, “That was honestly the best teacher professional development I’ve ever had.”
All three teachers remain in touch with AP-TIP, whose representatives come to observe their classes and offer advice and resources. “They’re trying to figure out how best to help us,” says Sinnett. “They’re not approaching this like a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.”
Nick Medich, the principal of another small school, Argos Junior-Senior High School near South Bend, began working with AP-TIP more than a decade ago and has seen the difference advanced classes can make in students’ lives. “We have a bunch of kids that go to Purdue,” he says, many of whom say they would have been “lost” in college without the AP classes. Argos urges all students to take the classes, regardless of their plans. “We don’t care if you’re going to college, or going into the military, or going to work as a welder,” Medich tells them. “We want you to take on the challenge of the rigor of AP.”
In Medora, the personal attention the teachers give — and the difference they strive to make in students’ lives — is clear.
“Some of the kids still can’t quite grasp what is possible for them,” says Sinnett. “They still struggle to believe, can that really be me? Can I go to college and do whatever I want?” He provides practical encouragement, he says, the kind that tells students “you can do difficult things, impossible things, that life is going to be hard, but you have to push through that.”
Bobby Baughman, 17, wants to go to college to study criminal justice and become a defense attorney. He notes that he knows people who have served time in jail. “I’ve seen people get put away for something that’s not that bad, and I’ve seen people who get out early for something that’s way worse,” he says. Miley Howell, 17, wants to pursue child psychology. “I like helping others,” she says, “but in a different way than doctors and surgeons.”
Medora’s advanced classes aren’t just about college credits, Sinnett says, but about learning how to handle the challenges of adult life — including how to think critically. “We live in an age where we’re inundated with so much information, and so much of it is false. We’re being manipulated. Everything is trying to push you in one direction or another,” he says. “I don’t think kids realize how much they’re being manipulated.” He believes kids in rural areas can be especially vulnerable because “their environment is so small outside of social media.”
“I’m not saying let’s ban it all,” he clarifies. “Let’s figure out how to be thoughtful about using it.”
He’s convinced classes in composition, rhetoric and literature are more important than ever in the digital age. The students describe reading and discussing novels like Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Indiana native Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. They have written poetry, and they tease Baughman for writing a poem inspired by Dr. Seuss. “I guess it wasn’t college-level,” Baughman laughs. When I tell him it’s his artistic license, he says, “I like this lady!”
The classmates say they’re ready but anxious about graduating, and they joke that Sinnett will cry when they leave. He also taught them in junior high.
Their teacher doesn’t deny it. “It will be an emotional breakup,” he admits, cracking a smile. “These kids are part of the inspiration for me, for pushing to have these dual-credit and AP classes. They’re the reason why we have that door now.”
He knows it needs to open wider. “We’re going to need to work harder to get their minds on other things,” such as books in a generation growing up on screens. “The kids don’t read books, but I’m not giving up on it. I’m not sure how to win this war, but I still think it’s worth fighting.”
Abby Pesta is an award-winning journalist and author of The Girls, which Library Journal in 2019 called perhaps ‘the most important sports title of the year,’ and co-author of How Dare the Sun Rise — a ‘gut-wrenching, poetic memoir,’ according to The New York Times. Learn more at AbigailPesta.com.