Big land, small schools: Inside the politics of rural education in Wyoming

The thought of one-room schoolhouses evokes dirt floors, dusty chalkboards, and Little House on the Prairie. But Wyoming, America’s least populated state, still has 18 schools with three rooms or less.

Small schoolhouses and rural education in the Cowboy State are rooted in Wyoming’s constitution, which guarantees a right to an education and outlines the state’s funding model. Students across the state are legally entitled to equitable access to resources, regardless of geographic location.

“Not every state has a constitution that even talks about education,” said Barbara Hickman, assistant professor at the University of Wyoming’s College of Education. “To have it in the constitution that there is a requirement from the people of Wyoming to appropriately fund our public education system, that matters.”

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The block grant funding model sets benchmarks for funding across the state. Counties that generate enough revenue to fund their schools independently are designated as “recapture” counties and feed their excess dollars back to the state.

The majority of the state’s counties are “entitlement” counties, which means that they rely on state funds and counties with surpluses to help cover their educational costs. Funding levels are adjusted for the state’s smallest districts.

Fremont County School District #6 Superintendent Troy Zickefoose helps teach a child at the Crowheart Elementary School on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Fremont County, Wyoming

"I think that the model has been put together to try to be equitable and adequate across the state. So if you’re a smaller district, you get quite a bit more money per student,” incoming executive director for the Wyoming Association of School Administrators Boyd Brown said.

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This reality plays out in schools such as Park County’s Valley Elementary, built in 1918. Nestled along the South Fork River and backdropped by the Absaroka mountains, the school has eight students ranging from kindergarten to fifth grade. Michelle Dean has taught at Valley for eight years.

Dean and other teachers in these schools face unusual challenges In addition to grizzly bear-proof fences and brutally long winters, teachers must manage curriculums across multiple grade levels and access points for learners across grade levels.

This spring’s project centered around vermicomposting (composting with earthworms) and challenged students to develop their own. Students based experiments around questions like “Can worms jump?” “Do worms like music?” and “Can you train worms to do tricks?”

“I didn’t want the students just working at their desk, at their own grade levels. So I was thinking of how to bring them together and create a community of learners,” Dean said.

Dean noted the challenge of multi-curricular teaching but argued that it paid off in the level of individualized education students receive and said that the students can mentor and teach each other across grade levels.

The kids of Slack Elementary in Sheridan County, Wyoming hang out with their class dog

“Students have more freedom to explore their interests, if they need more time to work on a concept, they have it,” Dean said. “My fifth graders are super supportive of my kindergarteners, and my kindergarteners just bloom with that.”

Schools like Sheridan County’s Slack Elementary, built in 1937 and tucked into the base of the Big Horn mountains, often act as anchors in some of the state’s most rural areas. Many students hail from ranching families and get to school on the same roads their parents took. School events, such as Slack’s beginning-of-year ice cream social and Valley’s annual Christmas play, are gathering places for the surrounding communities.

“The community that shows up. It’s not just the kids that are here, it’s the community that shows up—not just from the kids that are here, but anyone who lives out here,” Principal Ryan Fuhrman said.

The students of Valley Elementary School in Park County, Wyoming give a big hug to retiring principal Larry Gerber

Karin Unruh has taught at Sublette County’s Bondurant Elementary for over ten years and said that one of her favorite parts of the job is being embedded in the community. She firmly stands by the quality of the education offered in Wyoming’s smallest communities.

“I think a lot of people don’t understand that rural schools can still have access to really good resources and can provide a high level of education to the students. The students can still learn a lot, have their needs met, and actually get more individualized attention than in larger schools,” Unruh said.

Once the students at Bondurant, Valley, Slack, and many other small schools in Wyoming are old enough to travel alone, they will have to brave multi-hour bus rides into the nearest town. To Unruh, investing in rural schools is an investment in the communities’ futures.

Recess at Crowheart Elementary School on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Fremont County, Wyoming

“If there aren’t schools in the community, it’s harder to bring in new families, so having a school in a community really keeps the community alive, and keeps people involved in the community,” Unruh said.

While these small schoolhouses may not be the cheapest way to educate students, Larry Gerber, principal of Valley School, says their existence is grounded in the needs of the students.

“If you’re a five-year-old, do you want to spend four hours on a school bus? Is that what’s best for you? Especially for our little guys, to be able to be on a bus for fifteen minutes versus two hours, it’s a dramatic difference,” said Gerber. “The people I always talk to are always surprised that someone would pay that much money for eight kids. What I always retort is, what if one of those eight kids was yours?

Cy Neff reports on Wyoming politics for USA TODAY. You can reach him at [email protected] or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @CyNeffNews

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Big land, small schools: Inside the politics of rural education in Wyoming