Education Amid the Rubble : Ghost Town School Has 76 Students

The 76 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students assemble in the quad each morning to salute the American flag and hear announcements, like millions of schoolchildren daily across the nation.

Surrounding the school are 381 homes, eight churches, two other schools, parks, a shopping center, bank, beauty shop, cafe, laundromat, barbershop, post office, variety store, gas station, bowling alley, two bars.

All are boarded and abandoned.

Roofs and shutters for many buildings have been blown apart by the wind and scattered. Dead trees litter the area.

Eagle Mountain Elementary School is a schoolhouse in a ghost town--the mining town of Eagle Mountain in the Mojave Desert, 175 miles east of Los Angeles. A town that died July 31, 1983, when the mine closed.

The school lives on.

For 39 years, about 3,750 men, women and children called Eagle Mountain home. It sat at the foot of the huge Kaiser Steel iron mine, one of the largest operating iron ore mines in America.

Eagle Mountain was a company town for the 1,500 miners employed by Kaiser Steel.

“We didn’t run out of ore. We ran out of customers,” said John England, 55, mine manager since 1978. He is on the job at mine headquarters to complete salvage operations with 11 others, all of whom live at Desert Center, Lake Tamarisk and other tiny desert communities miles from what was the thriving town of Eagle Mountain.

When the mine closed and the final residents of the town moved on, it was decided to continue using Eagle Mountain High School as an elementary school for children living in desert communities within 50 miles.

They are bused in each day to the ghost town, which stands in the shadows of a mountain of tailings.

‘Too Valuable’ to Abandon

“We locked up the original grade school and the middle school, but the high school was too valuable to walk away from, especially since there were enough students in the area to put it to good use,” said June Capp, 39, school district secretary.

This year there are five teachers. Next year there will be enough money for three unless money from the state lottery is received in time. There is no school nurse because the school cannot afford one, Capp said. The closest doctors are in the nearest towns of any size, Indio and Blythe, each 65 miles away.

The school district was once as rich as the one in Beverly Hills, and although that is no longer the case, a legacy remains.

Boys and girls from kindergarten through the eighth grade have daily lessons in using computers. Excellent art and music rooms are still in use.

All the musical instruments from the band are still here. Music teacher LeRoy Burdick has enough instruments for every student, and then some. All the uniforms are here. Uniforms for the band, for the high school athletic teams--too big for the students. And the footballs, basketballs, volleyballs, tennis rackets and tennis balls.

The school has a modern cafeteria but no one to prepare and serve the food, so the students carry brown bags.

The science room, a home economics room with ovens and refrigerators, shops and many classrooms remain empty. Lockers lining classroom walls are not used. Bicycle racks have no bikes.

Weeds choke the football field and the baseball diamond. The huge gym has bleachers for 500. But students do not use the gym. The Olympic-size swimming pool has no water.

Rylie McDowell, 47, Eagle Mountain High football, basketball and baseball coach for 21 years, has not left. He teaches fourth and fifth grades.

“It’s terribly sad to look out classroom windows at the town we lived in and loved for so many years, to see it crumbling before us,” said Veronica Moody, 46, kindergarten teacher for 17 years.

“What’s really sad,” said Capp, who graduated from the high school in 1964, “is there will never be any homecomings, no class reunions, nothing. We lost our hometown.”