T he school in Grass Range, Mont., is looking for two new teachers: one to teach agriculture, and one to teach math. These positions come with affordable housing and a modest salary of $30,000 a year. The class sizes are small — very small. The school has a population of 82 students, kindergarten through twelfth grade, with a graduating class of eight this year.

The school’s small staff assume multiple roles, often teaching across several age groups while also coaching sports and leading student organizations like the Future Farmers of America. The school and its teachers are treasured by the families of Grass Range. In fact, in many ways, the school is the anchor of the community. The town is composed of a few homes and businesses nestled in the center of several sprawling cattle ranches. Because of its remoteness, local citizens are eager to both attract new teachers and to retain their graduates. There is a palpable sense of community throughout the small town; residents each know one another by their given names.

My wife and I stopped by the school, a recognizable navigational landmark on my smartphone, in order to meet an old friend, who was then going to lead us down a series of meandering Montana roads to their home. Because we had a few minutes before heading out, we went inside the school to learn a bit more about education in the less densely populated region of our country. My wife’s mother taught and my own sister still teaches, so it is a familial point of interest.

I have empathy for Grass Range’s situation. I grew up in an agrarian community in northeastern Indiana. My father had graduated from a small school in the town of Orland, with just over 20 classmates. My grandfather graduated from a school in the village of Flint, with eleven classmates. When I was young, all the small outlying schools were consolidated in a new school built on the heights of the prairie that straddled two counties (and hence became known as the Prairie Heights school). That school is still going strong.

But the small towns around it have struggled to retain their identity and populations. Orland still exists, but on a smaller scale, and Flint has dwindled to a handful of houses and the 150-year-old white steepled Methodist church. I felt the loss of association across my life of nearly 60 years. My 80-year-old father mourns it. As rural America depopulates, other towns are experiencing similar struggles nationwide.

Grass Range and the few small towns of Montana that sparsely dot the Big Sky landscape have a larger challenge. The ranches and farms of the West are big because they must be. In the Midwest of my youth, we noted how many cows that could be raised on an acre of land. In the West, they measure how many acres they need to graze a single head of beef. They even have a specific term that I, who had grown up on a dairy and crop farm, had never heard before: the “AU,” or animal unit, which denotes sustainable stocking rates for grazing lands in the West.

This results in a sparser human population density. It is not uncommon for school sports teams, when they have enough students to field them, to spend hours on a bus driving to the other schools in their conferences to compete. This is a condition that both students and their parents, who often follow along in caravans of Ford Expeditions, Chevy Suburbans, and the ubiquitous pickup trucks cheerfully accept. The high-school basketball team, made up of players from Grass Range and Winnett, another small town 30 miles east (and also including an eighth grader), reached the state tournament this year. The photo of the team is displayed prominently in a glass case in the school’s entry brimming with trophies revealing the students’ successes in everything from sports to Future Farmers of America competitions. Yet, because of the lower population density, the school also has trouble finding new teachers, which surprised me.

There is something about the West that is inherently American. The big skies, the vast ranges, where the deer and the prong-horned antelope literally still play, and men (and women) can make a living as a “cowboy,” call out both to those of us who have lived in this country all our lives and even those who seek to immigrate here. If there is a young teacher who is just starting out with dreams of a purpose-driven life, or an older teacher, perhaps one who is retired with a pension already in hand, they ought to “go West” to Grass Range, or to any number of schools, where there are still rivers to run and mountains to climb. Small towns there are eagerly looking for their skills.

Teachers who make the trip would find themselves within a couple hours’ driving range of some of the most wondrous experiences that our nation has to offer: winter skiing, summer mountain climbing, whitewater rafting, horseback riding, fishing, hunting, and hiking. During my drive across the region, I saw prairie dogs, antelope, deer, and majestic buffalo.

They would also find small class sizes, where a teacher’s skills can have outsized effects on students’ lives. And they’d be welcomed by eager parents and supportive administrators, as well as a sense of community and belonging that is all too often missing in our big cities and corporate schools. As a dying character in a now classic movie said, “I would like to have seen Montana.” Perhaps, for some young or mature teacher, now is the time.