Voices from the Field: BJ Cross, Cascade, Montana

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BJ Cross did not grow up in the rural Montana town where she teaches. In fact, she spent her formative years halfway around the world, well beyond the American educational system.

In 2003, she graduated from a rural high school in her home country of Australia and went on to college, ultimately earning a master’s in criminology from the University of Sydney. She worked in public service for several years before deciding to try something new. 

“ I got bored with the office thing and went, ‘You know what? I'm going to go on an adventure and teach in Japan’ — for initially a year. (I) fell in love with it, took like a duck to water and took it very seriously while upping my English skills so I could be a good English teacher. 

“I also worked on my Japanese skills. I hold N2, which is the second highest level of proficiency in Japanese. So then I was like, ‘Well, I really love this. This is my career path. I've been doing it for a decade. I may as well level it up and take me to get a teaching degree and get in there again and actually be the classroom teacher as opposed to the assistant.’"

In the fall of 2022, she pursued an opportunity at Montana State University in Bozeman to earn her education degree. And in 2025, she started as a history teacher at Cascade High School in Cascade County, Montana, a school with about 110 students. 

Though she had moved far away from the offices of Australia and the classrooms of Japan, those varied experiences came with her into her classes.

“Japanese is one of those really popular things that kids love, whether it's manga or anime or just the language,” BJ said. “They just want me to throw bits and pieces in there. But it also gives me a historical frame of reference— especially as a social studies teacher — not just a history that is taught in traditional American textbooks, but the history from multiple perspectives, which is something that is been a shift in history specifically since I had graduated high school 23 years ago, when it was pretty much just memorizing names, dates, places and events. 

“And now we're looking at things like agency and various stories and the stories that are not told. And instead of history being an objective thing, it's a subjective thing from around different perspectives and different ways of looking at it. 

“So it allowed me to overlay this deeper concept, especially into my history students to analyze history and open up their worlds a little bit. 

“And that's one of the drivers for me as a teacher is I want to — especially as a social studies teacher — send students out that have robust civic skills and can make decisions and aren't just going to consume the media out there and say, ‘Uh, well, that's that because <insert program> told me or <insert podcaster> told me or <influencer> told me.’ But to have a more critical view going, ‘Okay, this is one point of view. What else do I know? Where are the biases?’ And teaching that in history and having the background to be able to access all of those histories and apply them has been very useful.”

BJ tapped into her background as a gamer to enliven the study of history. She did not want it to sit on the page as a series of dates and distant photographs. 

“The teacher before me basically made them take rote notes out of the textbook,” she said. “That was how they learned history. That was how they studied. 

“And I don't like using textbooks as a base. They're useful here and there, but there's no one textbook out there that I feel like hits the nail on the head 100%. Does it give you some good background information? Absolutely. And so, some days I'd be like, ‘I don't know what to do for this. You know what? I'm gonna set up a scavenger hunt in the textbook so they can get the information but still gamify it a little bit so it's not just taking notes out of a textbook.’"

Though BJ had come from a rural school herself, Cascade was smaller, and many of the kids had grown up together and had developed long-term relationships and understandings of one another. And as someone not just from another city, but another country and culture, it took time to build connections with her students. 

“In a rural school, especially a small one, it is absolutely vital,” she said. “Because if you don't have that relationship, you don't have a working relationship in your classroom. And so, there were a couple of classes I struggled with cracking into them, but by the end of the first year, I was doing really, really good at getting a lot of the students onto other things other than just their trust. And that was the biggest issue coming in for me. What was really cool, though, was there were a lot of students that were just dying to hear and touch the outside world. Because that's the other part of being a rural student: you don't always have access to all the really cool things.

 “The closest big city is Great Falls, and that's only half an hour up the road, so it's not too far away. But that's still a hike, and if you are a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old kid, you don't have access to free travel to get up the road, up the freeway to get to the cinemas or go shopping or do something.

 “So there's a lot of craving from students, especially without mobility, to find their footing and find their independence, and having somebody who can bring a little bit of that into the classroom is always a boon to those students, and it gives them something to at least latch onto till they get a bit more physical freedom.”

BJ found a support system through other teachers, both in Montana and beyond. She became part of Rural Schools Collaborative’s Emergent Educator Advisory Committee and connected with rural teachers around the country, many of whom had encountered classroom challenges similar to hers.

As part of the EEAC, she received a $500 grant to help pay for a trip to Fort Missoula, which served as a Department of Justice Alien Detention Center from 1941 to 1944 during World War II. It is the largest internment site still intact from that time. 

 “A lot of them said they came away with this new appreciation of how life is different for people that don't look like them,” BJ said. “Especially in Montana, a large portion of the population is white, and the diversity is really kind of low, so I think it was a bit of an eye-opener to go, ‘Oh, we talk about these things, but it's actually real for people when it's not necessarily real for us.’ …  

 “I got them to make a two-page biography of somebody who was interred in a camp. It didn't have to be Missoula, so some people did famous people like, George Takei, Pat Morita, who's Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. He was interred as well. Daniel Inouye, who was a politician in Hawaii, and then some people just found individuals that had spoken up and learnt more about some of the experiences they had there. The whole project was designed to help them understand experiences that would not have necessarily been passed down in their family stories.”

As with many educational experiments, some students were excited. Others just saw the trip to Missoula as a day off from school. Teachers can expect the better students to explore, to be curious, but what about those not academically invested, who don’t necessarily see college in their future? One such student came up to BJ the day after the visit to Missoula. 

“We had a good long conversation about how it's just sort of how a lot of humanity works,” she said. “We fear the outside, and we haven't quite got to that point where we accept outsiders — people from other countries and people from other communities — as ourselves. Like, we still have that barrier. Once upon a time it was a me versus them, and now it's an us versus them. And that as modern-day citizens, we need to start breaking down some of those barriers and start working towards a larger goal of humanity. And they were very driven and said something along the lines of while their chosen vocation after school will have nothing to do with this, they're going to go out there and be kinder to people that don't look like them because it must be hard being in a place where people fear you for how you look.”

Such moments are critical, because for many of her students, farming comes before history assignments. In the fall, some would miss days while helping move cows down the mountain. In spring, it would be branding animals. And then the draw of football games, or FFA events would leave her with nearly empty classrooms.  “It was a bit of a shock to see how much time out of the classroom the kids were getting,” she said. “A little disappointing, because I was there to teach them, and I love teaching, and they just weren't there for me to teach some days.”

The school, however, was a centerpiece of the community, and parents were connected to what was happening inside the building. “ Having that support as a teacher was really good and having the community invested in the school,” BJ said. “And that's one of the reasons I do like a rural community — a rural school — is you don't just have to invest in the students, you get to invest in the community.”

With her lengthy career before teaching, BJ was not like most entering a rural American high school for the first time. Still, there were bumps on the gravel road, lessons to be learned to find the right way to win over her students for a successful educational experience.

 “Don't be afraid to try things and trial out things. Often rural kids are screaming for connection and screaming for opportunities that they don't get. They might be reticent because they're teenagers and, you know, or especially in high school, and that's just what you do. You just fight the status quo. But they do appreciate anything that strays from the norm, anything that gives them an outlet to be them. Also, look for other programs that will support you as well, or give you other opportunities. …

 “Not every kid is going to be in the FFA. Not every kid is going to be in a sport. Some kids are looking for a different way to have an extracurricular connection to their school and to their content, and you might just be that connection. Don't be afraid of bringing your own weird into the classroom.”

Thank you to BJ Cross for sharing your rural teacher story with Rural Schools Collaborative. BJ was nominated to share her story by RSC’s Montana Hub Lead. Would you like to nominate someone or share your story as a rural educator? Fill out our online submission form here.

I Am A Rural Teacher shares the stories, experiences, and aspirations of America’s rural teachers. By highlighting the narratives of veteran, new, and future teachers, I Am A Rural Teacher strives to support an education ecosystem where rural teacher-leaders are front and center. This project is supported by the Rural Teacher Corps: A Community of Learners.