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COOPER LANDING -- There's no such thing as a normal day at Cooper Landing School.

With one teacher and a half-dozen students at the K-8 school, that might go without saying. But life in the one-room schoolhouse could be headed for a change.

The state requires that a school have at least 10 pupils for a building to receive funding. Cooper Landing School falls four shy. Kenai Peninsula Borough School District officials have estimated the funding shortfall will cost the district between $250,000 and $260,000. But they don't plan to close the building this year. For now, administrators are saying they'll tap into the district's fund balance to make up the difference.

On Monday, staff from the central office are holding a community meeting in Cooper Landing to discuss the school's future.

Tommy Gossard, the teacher there, isn't sure how many how many people are going to attend, but he said he won't be surprised if a sizable chunk of the town shows up.

"It's the talk of the town," he said.

The little unripe banana-green building nestled up against the steep flanks of Juneau Mountain off Bean Creek Road is far more than just a school to Cooper Landing.

"It's the hub of the community," Gossard said.

In the building's gym on Wednesday the school's three older boys threw a football back and forth during the morning break not far from a piano with a decorated Christmas tree set up alongside it. The gym serves as the focal point not just for school events like the piano recital held a week prior, or the upcoming play, but also for a number of local functions. A community potluck is on the calendar this month, and local groups take advantage of the space for workouts or gatherings. On the weekends quilters meet there for a retreat.

The building isn't exactly a stereotypical one-room schoolhouse either. At the entrance, school secretary Barbara Atkinson or a parent volunteer greets visitors in the school's modern office. A short hallway leads to a spacious hexagon shaped main classroom, capped by a towering, pyramid-style roof.

Against the walls are shelves piled with the materials needed to teach nine different grade levels.

While the school's windows offer views similar to those that backcountry travelers enjoy from cabins on any of the many nearby hiking trails, the school is hooked up with enough computers to have every student surfing the Internet at the same time.

On Wednesday morning, Gossard worked on a vocabulary worksheet with his two fifth-graders, Jimmy Milne and Phillip Rhodes, using a SMART Board. Nearby, eighth-grader Kyle Milne, the school's oldest student, studied for an upcoming exam for the ninth-grade-level history course he takes online.

In the back of the room a set of wood burners gave the room a rustic scent as they heated up. The students were using them to make holiday gifts. A few weeks ago Gossard had a local expert on wood burning visit the school.

Gossard relies heavily on support from the local community to help teach about things like fishing, sewing, juggling, cooking and building survival kits, among others.

"The students deal with me every day," Gossard said. "It behooves me to bring in someone else who's a resident expert, and then they have the kids' attention."

Since Cooper Landing students don't get a new teacher as they move up through the ranks, Gossard said he works hard to keep things creative. Part of this is bringing in guests. Another tactic: he never teaches the same lesson plan twice.

This year for example, he did a space unit where he had the students build model rockets. The first-graders built snap-and-glue versions while the older students' kits were more complex.

"You have to keep it fresh," he said.

Combining lessons is fairly common as well. A Wednesday afternoon art project making snowflake decorations quickly evolved into a science lesson on snow, then a history lesson on their study, followed by a vocabulary review of geometric terminology.

After that it was back to art.

That freedom is a significant part of what defines life at the school, Gossard said. There are no bells to mark the change of class periods, nor even a hard set schedule through the day. What happens between 9 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. is just as easily influenced by the weather outside as anything else.

"There's been times it'd snow in the morning, then it clears," Gossard said. "I'll say, 'Let's go ski, we don't have to wait for P.E. at three o'clock.' You just take advantage of each day."

Since there's only one of him, Gossard makes continual laps between the two-part classroom, answering questions and keeping the students moving on various projects.

"Usually I do a lot of walking," he said, laughing.

One of the first skills Gossard worked on with his two former kindergartners, now first-graders, Linnaea Gossard and Elly Baur, is working independently. The pupils quickly assume the role of instructor too.

"Once you teach it, then you've mastered it," Gossard said.

When his students switch roles and work with their peers it also helps to boost their confidence and self-esteem. At the same time, working in unison with older students motivates the younger students to excel beyond their grade level.

"We meet the district needs for what they're supposed to, but anything else that somebody older is doing, they pick up on it and they say they want to do it too," Gossard said.

He also gets a good deal of help from parents.

"The community is here for the school," he said.

On Wednesday two volunteers visited the school to help out with lessons.

Despite their rural location, the students still get a chance to travel outside the shadow of their mountain home. Earlier this year they participated in a program at the Challenger Learning Center in Kenai, saw "The Lion King" in Anchorage and have all learned to ski on the slopes of Aleyeska Resort. These trips are typically paid for through fundraising efforts by the parents and community, Gossard said.

To add exposure, he collaborates on a frequent basis with the schools in Moose Pass and Hope. Just this week students from Hope came to Cooper Landing to dissect salmon and rainbow trout.

Collaborating with the other schools is made easy, Gossard said, as they share the same principal, Jim Dawson.

Gossard said he's also relied on his small school colleagues for help and advice,

The veteran teacher who taught at both Redoubt and Tustumena elementary schools had no idea what he was getting himself into when he started four years ago.

"You sit there and interview and think, 'Oh yeah, I can do this,'" he said. "Then all of a sudden you step in here and you're like, holy cow."

The first month Gossard said he knew he was going to either "sink or swim" in the new position and spent long hours at the school planning lessons.

Since then things have become much easier.

While Gossard has seen only one student graduate during his tenure, he said he thinks that despite the small setting, students leave well prepared for high school.

The independent skills they gain working on their own helps them adapt to a new setting, he said.

The town's remote location is part of what makes Cooper Landing such an ideal educational setting, he said. There's only one TV channel, peer pressure is essentially non-existent and bullying is at a minimum. He touted the quality of life, pointing out the nearby access to a plethora of outdoor resources.

Those are at least a few of the reasons Gossard sought to raise his own family there, and part of the reason why the community clings so tightly to the school.

The community's challenge now is to convince others to see and want that same quality life for themselves, specifically people with school-aged children.

"There's a sense of urgency now," Dawson said.

He said the enrollment decline didn't come overnight and it wasn't a complete shock.

"It's not a highly uncommon thing," he said, "The slope of decline, it's more noticeable in a small community setting, but it's the same thing that's going on on the entire peninsula. It's just under the microscope here."

With the school on the line now, people are motivated to find a solution.

One of the simplest options, according to Dawson, would be to expand the school's grade offerings through high school. Dawson said he thinks the area offers a draw for older students.

"The only real reason to go into town is if you're a kid involved in activities," he said.

Even if a high school student going to Cooper Landing wanted to play sports at a larger school, that remains a possibility. Meanwhile, Internet courses allow students to take classes offered elsewhere in the district.

With a number of pre-schoolers in the community poised to enter the school system in the next few years, Dawson said it appears the school could regain the 10-student threshold in the near future.

According to longtime Cooper Landing resident, Mona Painter, the student population in the town has fluctuated constantly in the half century she's lived there. The problem now, Painter said, is that land is harder to come by, especially for young families looking to put down roots.

"There's property available but it's very expensive," she said.

Getting people to move to Cooper Landing is easier said than done, but both Gossard and Dawson said it will be the key to sustaining the school's long-term enrollment future.

"People are brainstorming all sort of ideas," Gossard said.

Since year-round work in Cooper Landing is scarce, Gossard said community leaders are hoping to attract people who don't need to live close to their work or only work for part of the year. The community is also banking on the advancement of communications technology that makes it possible for some to work from home instead of an office.

Hope School has been in similar predicaments in recent years. In their case, though, the school was able to lure in home-school students from the community.

That's not an option for Cooper Landing.

"There's nobody in the woods here," Dawson said.

In years past, Dawson said, families that live in Cooper Landing through the warmer months have sometimes enrolled their students in the school in the early fall, giving them an enrollment boost through the early part of the school year. Another option being considered is trying to attract students from other schools.

There's one option Dawson said no one is considering: Closing the school.

"We'll beat the bushes," he said. "We'll do whatever it takes to make it stay."

Dante Petri can be reached at dante.petri@peninsulaclarion.com.