3 Rs: Rags to Riches to Rags for Lowest-Paid U.S. Teacher of ’83

Janice Herbranson, who gained national attention in 1983 for being the nation’s lowest-paid teacher--at $6,300 a year--said today she is giving up a $25,000 job in Texas and returning to this town’s one-room school.

Herbranson, 54, took a job teaching toddlers in Progreso, Tex., after the school closed in 1986 when the rural district had only one remaining pupil.

With five children through grade 6 living in the district now, Herbranson--the school’s lone teacher for 16 years--will be back when classes start again on Aug. 29.

She said she was happy teaching in Texas but that she considers her home to be McLeod, a community of 45 people in wide-open cattle country.

“It keeps the community going. We don’t want to be dying out here,” Peggy Sveum, whose two children will attend the grammar school, said today.

Sveum said her daughters, first-grader Erin and kindergartner Lisa, no longer will have to endure a 45-minute bus ride to a school in Lisbon, about 25 miles away.

Herbranson said she does not know how much she will be paid in McLeod now but that it will be a substantial pay cut from her Texas job.

“It doesn’t cost me anything to live here in comparison to down there (in Texas),” Herbranson said. “It doesn’t even out. But it’s not a drastic difference.”