Posted on 01/05/2004 5:10:48 AM PST by Theodore R.
Wyoming's vanishing small schools Small town economies are tied to schools, some think
By Jessica Lowell rep5@wyomingnews.com Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
MEDICINE BOW - Schools have the same smell, no matter where they are.
Even though the old school in Medicine Bow has been closed for five years, the aroma of public education remains: heat, dust, paper and old books.
The yellow brick building, built piecemeal over the last 40 years, still plays a role in this northeast Carbon County community. The library is there, and the gym is still available for use by anyone who has an open gym pass.
P.J.'s Dream Boutique serves as a makeshift grocery store in one of the vacant classrooms.
Like many schools, the elementary, junior and senior high building holds generations of memories.
Don Mayfield's sons graduated from the high school in 1977 and 1978. Mayfield himself walked across the same gymnasium stage in 1948 when he graduated.
"I was second in my class," he said. "It was a class of three," he adds, laughing.
The old school was replaced by a new school a number of years ago, and it was briefly used again when construction on the new school sent students across town. But even the new school stands mostly empty, because Carbon County School District 2 closed the high school five years ago, sending the town's kids 17 miles east to Rock River in Albany County or 19 miles west to Hanna Junction.
Mayfield was on the front lines of the battle to keep the school open. "That was just one of the wars I got involved with when I came back here."
It was hard-fought and ultimately futile.
"I told them if they closed the school, it would be like a knife in the heart of this town. They would just kill it."
The fight was just as passionate and just as vain in Albin, where the junior-senior high closed at the end of the last school year.
A way of life changes
School closings are becoming a more common occurrence in Wyoming, as districts grapple with the shrinking student population.
For many - like Mayfield - closing a school is an emotional issue. Schools are a social center, as well as the site where children learn to read and write.
But for the school districts that own them and the towns where they are located, another problem crops up: what to do with the old buildings.
"There's all sorts of uses for them," Laramie County School District 2 Board of Trustees Chairman Todd Fornstrom said.
"But we haven't had anyone want to come in and take over the building. If someone wanted to give us $1 million for it, we'd sell it," he said with a wry laugh. "We'd probably sell it for less than that."
Across Wyoming, and across much of the middle section of the country, communities are facing the same situation. Dropping enrollments make schools in small, rural communities less and less practical.
When the students are moved to larger schools in the area, a common fear is that the town will die.
"Who will want to come here if there's no high school?" Bennie Borstead said one day recently.
She leaned behind the counter at the Panhandle Co-op, a convenience store at the east end of Albin. Even though it was a school vacation week, business was slow across the tiny town.
She and her family moved to Albin 11 years ago from Rapid City, S.D., because her husband got a job there. Now he makes a daily commute to Cheyenne, 50 miles away.
In the last year, her own work schedule has changed. She works at the co-op one day a week, for about six hours a day.
Last year, she worked in the kitchen at the school, one of three staff to serve all the Albin students their lunch.
The district cut the number of workers to one after the junior-senior high school closed, and she was offered the job. Her doctor advised her not to take it for the sake of her back.
So Borstead fills in one day a week at the store. "Sometimes I substitute at the elementary school," she said.
While she said the cut in her work hours hasn't affected the household economy, "We have to be careful about what we buy."
And in about a year, whatever they buy will be bought elsewhere.
"My daughter's a senior down in Pine," she said, using the local shorthand for Pine Bluffs. "When she moves on, we will too."
Their options are moving closer to Cheyenne or to Texas.
"It'd be one thing if I had a job here or a high school to get involved with, but I'm stuck at home," she said.
Down the street at Country Hair Designs, the closure of the school is an emotional scar that Chris Lemaster can still feel. She has two children: Her daughter attends the elementary and her son is in the Albin Academy, an online school.
"It's just not the same here anymore," she said, as she puts the final touches on Evelyn Miles' hair.
The senior citizens depended on the high school for entertainment, she said. They supported the plays and attending sporting events.
"They don't want to drive all over," Lemaster said.
Studying school facilities
In Wyoming, school reform has shoved public education into a whole new realm.
State lawmakers, with the state Supreme Court looking on, have been engrossed in a complex, contentious and expensive process that's supposed to bring better education to all the state's students and resolve the differences between the mineral-rich counties and the mineral-poor counties.
Now the Wyoming School Facilities Commission is examining building needs in the state's school districts to determine what's going to be needed to provide adequate education facilities for all state students.
The commission's monthly meetings have been spent reviewing plans that school districts have for building new schools or maintaining existing ones.
While it's not the job of the commission or the school district to shore up the economies of small towns, their decisions still have an economic effect.
"Let's be honest," economist Dick O'Gara said. "School systems are a critical factor in any community. If you don't have schools, it's hard to have economic development."
O'Gara is the director of the Center for Economic and Business Data at Laramie County Community College.
The economic loss from the school closure in Albin comes from the loss of the income and jobs in that community.
School district records show that most of the people affected, unlike Borstead, were able to fill jobs in other parts of the school district, so the overall economic impact in the county is very small.
Albin is mainly an agricultural town, and that hasn't changed, O'Gara said. Unless the major industry has been hurt, the economy of the town won't be greatly altered.
Loss and opportunity
The story in Medicine Bow is a bit different. Coal and uranium brought jobs and people to the area, swelling the town's population and prompting the development of three new subdivisions to prepare for the influx if people.
When the coal mines closed and uranium dropped out of favor, the expected growth evaporated.
When the work went away, so did the workers. And they took their children with them.
In its heyday, Medicine Bow boasted several full-service service stations and a grocery store. Town residents contributed to a public pool.
Now there's one gas station, and the grocery store has closed. The pool is closed because the town can't afford to keep the water heated. And the subdivisions have been foreclosed on.
As Mayfield remembers, one of the school board members to vote against closing the school ran the local grocery.
At about the same time, the store consolidated with the one in Hanna.
"I asked him where we were supposed to shop. He said we could go to the one in Hanna because we would be taking our kids there anyway."
Mayfield said he's never been to that store. He and his wife shop in Laramie, 57 miles away.
For all that the town has lost - and not all because of the loss of its school - Medicine Bow stands to gain something back.
People like Carol Cook and Kay Embree have seen opportunity come knocking and leave them cold, so they are understandably reticent about talking about what some people are calling a miracle.
That miracle hinges on another underground resource the region is famous for: dinosaur bones.
"It's amazing how many people come in and ask about that," Cook, the Medicine Bow town clerk, said. "At one time, we had tours out here to where the biggest dinosaur skeleton was found."
The tours ended when the rancher on whose property it was found got sick of the litter and trash and closed the site.
Embree had fought the closure of the school that she had graduated from in 1975, when the town had 1,200 people and 270 were enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade.
She also started Bow Area Economic Development, and information on economic development started trickling her way. Embree would catch wind of economic development prospects for the area, but they would never materialize.
At one point, the town made a deal with the school district to take over the old school. The district sold it to the town for $10, with the provision that it could be used for storage and that it couldn't be easily resold.
There had always been interest in the fossils at Como Bluff, east of town.
In the last year, that interest has gained considerable momentum.
Last year, the University of Colorado at Denver submitted a proposal to the town to take over the old high school and turn it into a science research center and museum of natural history.
The proposal on file at the town office describes the project as an integrated research and education facility for teachers and scholars worldwide that would be operated year-round.
Cook said the town had to advertise the sale and the university submitted the winning bid for $1.
The deal is not completely closed. It hinges on a list of conditions, which include the university raising the $3.5 million refurbishing the school will cost and a lease with the Carlin Ranch to use the quarries there for research.
"We were all having lunch about this one day, and I said to Mike, 'Can we get excited about this?" Cook said. "He said, 'I am a busy man. If I weren't excited about this, I wouldn't have come here.'"
Mike is Michael Marlow of the University of Colorado at Denver, one of the drivers of the deal.
Medicine Bow's experience is unique; fossils aren't likely to bolster the economy of ag-supported Albin or any of the other communities that stand to lose schools.
But if the project goes forward, the university is estimating maintaining and running the building and its support facilities will create jobs in Medicine Bow. Program participants will want to buy goods at local stores, and the museum would capture some tourist trade who may do more than stop to visit the historic Virginian Hotel.
"Hopefully, this will go through like they want it to," Embree said. "We do have the dinosaurs. No one can take that away from us."
| Rank | Location | Receipts | Donors/Avg | Freepers/Avg | Monthlies | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | Arizona | 205.00 |
5 |
41.00 |
346 |
0.59 |
95.00 |
9 |
Thanks for donating to Free Republic!
Move your locale up the leaderboard!
It's not a pleasant smell.
A pollster called called me at home in New Hampshire last night to ask questions about primary candidates.
He couldn't read the questions off his computer screen. I had to help him.
The deficiencies of public education are glaring and obvious.
Our school passed NCLB last year; all other schools in our district did not. We do not receive the funding levels that most schools do but our kids are doing fine. Reason is that most have strong families, kids do not face drug & social pressures found in other places, and the community polices itself. It is like the community is one big family in many ways.
Our biggest challenge is economic. The feds closed down most small businesses as we are located near a park. They stopped mining, dredging, hunting, and many family operations. They would rather people on welfare than earning a paycheck, no joke. Bad for a community when people learn to live from the post office rather than work and produce a product.
First, a special interest group hires a lobbyist....
Here's the rub. 4-5 students that fail NCLB testing in a small rural school will fail the entire school. In our school, the kids we are worried about are the ex-homeschoolers. I also realize most homeschoolers do a great job with their programs; not against homeschooling. Just somehow after passing NCLB last year, you would think several new students could not affect the nx years results; but this is a big problem with NCLB.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.