PARSHALL – Parshall High School principal Mark Grueneich said the faces in his school building have changed quite a bit since he first came there some 28 years ago.

“When I first came here, almost the entire staff was from North Dakota,” said Grueneich. “Everybody lived in town or not far out of town. Very rarely, we had people who drove here to work.”

In the past few years, it has been harder for the district to attract locals to teach in Parshall.

“We have more out-of-state people than we do in-state,” said Grueneich. “We’ve had to go national to attract (people.)”

Teachers in the district come from states as far away as Georgia, New York, Florida and Alabama.

“They make up the bulk of our staff,” said Grueneich. “It makes for an interesting dynamic in school.”

The increase in teachers from other states has not carried over to the student population, said Grueneich. Most kids in Parshall have grown up in North Dakota. But the students have benefited from the diversity of experiences their teachers have had.

Kids are able to ask their teachers, “How do they do things where you used to live?” and find out about differences in cultures in other states.

“It makes it interesting for the staff to mingle with each other,” said Grueneich.

He said many of the new transplants are also quite young.

“Eighty percent of our out-of-state applicants are younger teachers,” said Grueneich. Most who apply have told him they had difficulty finding jobs in their home states. The younger teachers are the ones who are more comfortable with moving across the country to take a job in a small town like Parshall.

The oil boom did affect Parshall, but not in terms of the student numbers. Grueneich said there has been a lot of construction in the Parshall area, but most of the men who came to North Dakota to work in the oil business either did not have families or left them behind in other states. The school district had to purchase housing for its faculty and staff to live in because of the high cost of rent in the area during those years.

Grueneich said some of their staff also commute longer distances to get to work in Parshall. One drives from Stanley, one drives from Max and one drives from Minot. An hour-long drive in the morning and an hour at night is grueling and it can be difficult to hang on to staff who are in those circumstances. Grueneich said it is particularly challenging if the roads are bad due to a winter storm.

Parshall has also changed in other ways since Grueneich came to the district.

Students have more opportunities than they once did when it comes to class offerings, said Grueneich. Kids in small towns can take classes over interactive television or earn college credits through Williston State College. Students at the school can also take Hidatsa language classes.

The student population has also gone from about 30 percent Native American decades ago to 75 to 80 percent Native American.

Grueneich, who is also the biology teacher at the high school, said educators have an opportunity to affect the lives of the students they teach.