'Meeting the kids where they're at': Life inside Wyoming's smallest schools

Do you know that Wyoming still has 18 schools with three or less rooms? Hell, I'm Sai USA Today's morning. Recently, a journey through the snow, rain, clouds and sunshine of springtime wiling to visit these 1-2 and three room schoolhouses and see what educations like for children in the most remote parts of our country. Wyoming's constitution has a guaranteed right to an education and a block grant funding model, which means that students across the state, no matter the county, have access to the same resources. These smaller schools often only have a handful of students, team kindergarten and 3rd, 4th or 5th grade. Wyoming educators say this allows for individualized education and for kids to teach across grade levels. Essential thing about one room school houses is meeting the kids where they're at, but literally. And so that's a hallmark of what we do in this district and I think this is just the perfect encapsulation of that. A lot of these schools serve ranching families and act as anchors for wiling smallest communities. Take the Valley Elementary School, which is built in 1918. Every year we put on a big Christmas program. So it's kind of like the party during the winter for all the community. We have a big old fashioned potluck with the kids, put on a play and song and the kids are these schools. I talked with Jace, who had done an experiment to see if worms could jump or not. Jace also had ideas about what worms do. Probably like do composting or like play tag like Michael Polo. Yeah, because they don't have any eyes and that's probably the only time that game they can play. I tried to interview the children at Crow Heart Elementary, but it was recess time and they had more interesting things to be doing. I popped down the kids at Slack Elementary and their class dog who were making flower pots from others. Surprise me even having a lot of questions about what it's like being a journalist. And if you want to know more about life at these rural schools in Wyoming, check out my latest article.