“I have a discussion with them before we ever start reading about the n-word,” Schamp said. “We don’t teach it in a vacuum … you get a safe environment for kids to think about those things.”

That includes teaching historical background — several teachers said they thought the time between the Civil War and the civil rights era was a gap in students' knowledge.

“The majority of the students have no idea what Jim Crow is,” Schamp said, referring to a series of laws that limited the rights of black citizens and promoted segregation.

Lori Hypes, who previously taught in Virginia, is in her first year teaching English at West. As part of teaching the text in Virginia, she'd had students look out the window at a building that once housed exclusively students of color as part of a segregated school system.

“We can see the building… but to the kids, what they think, that’s the community center now,” she said. “It’s just as relevant for me in Montana as it is for me in Virginia.”

Challenges

A curriculum challenge is the most common type of challenge Montana schools see, said Bobbi Otte, a librarian at Rocky Mountain College who sits on the Montana Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee.