This one-room schoolhouse is located on Richmond Road in Fleetwood, PA. It is serviced by a single teacher and there are up to twenty two students at a time. The Mennonites, like the Amish, usually attend school from first grade up to eighth grade. The Willow Creek school has a school year of 180 days with the students attending for eight hours a day, while the Pennsylvania state average school day is only six hours seventeen minutes and the Berks County schools average school day is only five hours fifty nine minutes. The children who attend this school are primarily members of the Wenger Mennonite sect. This particular Mennonite sect has five other one-room schools in current use in the area. You know it’s not an inner city school when you see the children carrying a small milk can to the school each morning from the farm next door.
I shot this as seven bracketed RAW frames at 1/3rd stop increments and then combined them into an HDR with Photomatix Pro and finally, tone mapped that image. One of three one-room schoolhouses that I shot on Saturday 8-7-2010 thanks to my Dad who played taxi driver while my leg is still on the mend.
