Tucked high up in the snow-swept Laramie Mountains is a public school with just one teacher, Rebecca Rodgers, and her lone pupil, Joe Kennedy, a 7th grader.
Cozy Hollow Elementary is the best way Wyoming authorities have found to educate Joe, whose family owns a hardscrabble cattle ranch. The nearest larger school lies 40 miles down a gravel road that blizzards often render impassable.
“It was awkward at the beginning,” Rodgers said, so much so that when classes began last fall Joe was not sure whether to raise his hand to ask questions or just speak up. Rodgers urged the latter.
“Now it feels pretty good,” Joe said. “There’s nobody else to bug us.”
Cozy Hollow Elementary is unusual but not unique, although nobody seems to track precisely how many single-student schools there are across the nation. Wyoming has three, Nebraska six, Montana two. North Dakota has one.
The challenges of educating students in rural states are enormous. They include attracting young teachers to truly remote places, supervising their work and finding ways to prepare students such as Joe, raised in isolation, for the bustle of college campuses.
The tiny school at Cozy Hollow, about 100 miles northwest of Cheyenne, is one way educators teach children who live on far-flung ranches and Indian reservations. Wyoming, the least populous state, is experimenting with other strategies too. Flush with revenues from rich coal and gas reserves, the state has spent $24 million to install instructional video cameras in each of its 76 high schools, according to Trent Blankenship, Wyoming’s superintendent of public instruction. The state hopes the cameras can help bring advanced courses like calculus and astronomy to schools that may have only a few dozen students, he said.
But for all the technological advances, flesh-and-blood elementary teachers such as Rodgers, 23, are still a critical link in the educational chain.
Joe feeds the horses first
Just out of teachers college, she keeps the school day businesslike when it begins sharply at 8 a.m., after Joe has fed the horses, walked past the corral to the school and taken his seat. She marches him through a traditional schedule of 45-minute periods, with the early morning devoted to the three R’s.
Rodgers lives with her husband, a graduate student in astronomy, in a trailer attached to a second trailer that serves as Joe’s classroom, but this is not home schooling. She is a certified public school teacher; her annual salary is $25,720. Joe must pass the same standardized tests that bedevil students in more traditional schools.
In the Albany County No. 1 School District in southeastern Wyoming, the job of supervising Rodgers’ work falls to Charles Cashman, principal of the 120-student Rock River School, who set out the other day for the 40-mile trip to Cozy Hollow. A few miles down a two-lane blacktop, he turned east onto a gravel road leading through sagebrush and grasslands rising toward the Laramie Mountains.
Test scores show that the individual instruction at tiny rural schools is extremely effective, Cashman said, eyeing a herd of Black Angus as a golden eagle soared overhead.
“But you better hope you get a match between the student, teacher and family, because if you don’t, it can be miserable,” he said.
An hour later he pulled into the ranch and braked to a stop in front of the school. Inside he found Rodgers and her student seated across from each other, engrossed in a math lesson. Joe correctly calculated the height of a tree, based on the length of its shadow.
“Good job, that’s awesome,” Rodgers said. “Now let’s go for some geography.”
Joe read aloud from a textbook about how experts divide the world into regions, based on political, linguistic and other criteria. He read fluidly, but stumbled on the word spiritual, pronouncing it “serpital” until corrected.
There was time for a lesson on genetics and heredity before Rodgers dismissed Joe for lunch. At the ranch house, he sat at a table where his father, his mother, his uncle, Cashman and a reporter were passing around steaming platters of roast beef, baked potatoes and peas.
Talk turned to the early 1900s, when Joe’s great-grandfather homesteaded the ranch, which sprawls across 50 square miles. Children from ranches in the area, including Joe’s forebears, have been educated at Cozy Hollow since the school’s founding in the early 1930s. Joe shared a teacher with older brothers and cousins until autumn 2002, when they moved on to regional high schools.
If schools such as Cozy Hollow are a rich part of Wyoming history, the state appears likely to rely on technology in the future to help educate rural students.
The other day John Tinnin, a math teacher based at the Kaycee High School in north-central Wyoming, was teaching calculus to seven students there. Also participating–listening and watching on video monitors and occasionally asking questions–were 10 students at three high schools separated by hundreds of miles of mountain roads.
Tinnin congratulated Jim Harlan, a Kaycee student, for using an unorthodox approach to solve a calculus problem involving what are known as the Fibonacci numbers. A moment later, he urged a student at Lyman High School, 360 miles to the southwest, to pay attention.
“Jenn, you look bored to death,” Tinnin said, to the chuckles of students spread across western Wyoming.
Cozy Hollow Elementary has no video hookup, but it is not primitive. A satellite dish provides a high-speed Internet connection, and after his return from lunch, Joe took a seat to practice touch-typing on a new Apple PowerBook.
The school has no science laboratory, however. For a biology exercise last fall, Joe collected a horse hair and a fleck of manure from the ranch yard, and Rodgers arranged a visit to Rock River so he could view them under a microscope.
One reason for making the trip, Rodgers said, was to give Joe time with other students.
`My best friends are cows’
“So far my best friends are cows,” he said, only half-joking. On a visit to Rock River in his 6th-grade year, he said, he met a nice 5th-grade girl. He looked for her eagerly during his most recent visit to the school, but she was gone.
“I’m thinking she moved to Laramie,” he said.
When the school day ended at 3 p.m., Joe joined the men in the corral, where they were slaughtering a cow in a freezing wind. He drove a tractor with a front-end loader across a pasture to deposit the cow’s entrails on a bone pile.
Rodgers lingered for a time in her classroom.
“I like the one-on-one thing,” she said. “I get to know what Joe finds hard and what’s easy. But being isolated out here is a big wake-up call. There are no other teachers to talk to.”
