Brief by Central Staff
Education – November 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Amish farmers, with their old-fashioned lifestyle, are associated with Pennsylvania. But they do live in other states — now including Colorado. In July of last year, Amish families from Missouri, Michigan, and Wisconsin bought land near Monte Vista in the San Luis Valley, and now there are about 65 people.
They educate their children only through the eighth grade, and they run their own schools. Rio Grande County Commissioners granted them a permit to build a one-room eight-grade schoolhouse.
But there’s a problem. The Amish shun modern technology (like autos, electricity, tractors, and telephones), and that includes indoor plumbing. Thus their schoolhouse plan proposed a path and a privy, although it would be vaulted to meet modern health codes.
The county had no problem with that, but the state’s plumbing code requires that school toilets be in the building, even if they’re vault toilets rather than flush toilets. But it’s not hard to imagine that the aromas from the vault might distract from the classroom.
Since the county’s conditional-use permit for the school requires that it meet state requirements, this could mean some sort of legal or political battle is in the offing.
We’ll note that our editor, Martha Quillen, started school in rural Michigan with an outdoor privy near a two-room schoolhouse, and she doesn’t believe her education suffered on that account.
So we hope the state finds a way to grant the Amish an exemption, and allow an external privy. After all, Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all managed to become educated without indoor plumbing.