She Trades Texas for One Room

--In 1983, Janice Herbranson earned the dubious distinction of being the nation’s lowest paid teacher, earning $6,300 a year as the sole teacher in rural McLeod, N.D., for 16 years. Then the school closed in 1986 for lack of students, and Herbranson went to Texas to teach at a substantially higher salary of $25,000 annually. But Herbranson’s heart was home on the range, and when the McLeod school board asked her to return this fall to teach five children through grade six now living in the district, she jumped at the chance. “The whole community feels that something is back to life. It’s exciting for all of us,” said Herbranson, 54. She said she did not know how much she would be paid but that it would be significantly less than her Texas job. But Herbranson considers McLeod, a community of 45 people in wide-open cattle country, to be her home. And she called the reopening of the one-room schoolhouse a victory of sorts. “It’s a good type of education, there’s no doubt in my mind,” she said.

--The dean of the Senate, 87-year-old John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), received a thunderous standing ovation from his colleagues as he presided over the final appropriations bill of his career. Stennis, who was first elected to the Senate in 1947 and now is its president pro tempore by virtue of his seniority, is retiring at the end of this session. Although confined to a wheelchair after losing his left leg to cancer in 1984, Stennis has been chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee for the last two years. As such, he helped assemble the $282.6-billion Pentagon budget bill passed by the Senate and now headed for a Senate-House conference to iron out differences. Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia called Stennis “a man of the highest integrity who has demonstrated the kind of character that every man and woman should try to achieve.” Stennis, who was born and raised on a Mississippi cattle and cotton farm, once put it more modestly. “I want to plow a straight furrow right down to the end of my row,” he said.

--”Mother and baby are both doing well,” according to a spokesman at London’s Portland Hospital. So well that the Duchess of York and the still-unnamed princess were scheduled to leave the hospital today. The duchess, better known as “Fergie,” gave birth to the 6-pound, 12-ounce girl Monday. She and her husband, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, are expected to introduce their daughter, who is fifth in line to the throne, to her grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, next week at a royal family gathering at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. As the nationwide guessing game over the baby’s name continues, the favorites so far are Charlotte, Annabel, Elizabeth and Victoria.