SANDPOINT — In rural America of the 19th through the mid-20th century, the one-room schoolhouse was the place where farm kids went to learn.

More than 150 years later, the idea of clustering multiple grade levels in the same classroom has again gained favor in an educational movement called “experiential learning.” The approach will be rolled out in the Lake Pend Oreille School District for the 2014-15 school year in a pilot program superintendent Shawn Woodward hopes will have a much larger footprint over time.

The first such class — to be taught by Nicole Dash at Farmin Stidwell Elementary School — will have 23 students in grades 1-6. Finding the kids to fill the class was the easy part, according to Woodward, whose first outreach was met with surprisingly strong response.

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