It Takes a Daily Trip Out of State for These Students to Get to Class

In the chilly fall darkness just before sunup, eight high school students huddled together inside the small shed high on the eastern slope of 10,023-foot Mt. Hawkins. They were waiting for a school bus.

When the headlights of the Alpine County Unified School District bus rounded a bend on the steep, two-lane road and came to a stop, the students dashed from the shelter to join 34 other youths for the ride down the mountain and across the state line to Douglas High School in Minden, Nev.

Alpine County on the eastern crest of the High Sierra, the least populated of the 58 counties in California with only 1,200 residents, is so small it is the only county in the state without a high school.

It also is the county with the highest average elevation. Its lowest point is more than a mile high, and more than two dozen peaks within its borders are more than two miles high.

Switzerland of California

They call Alpine County, with its towering mountains, glacial lakes, dense stands of pine, fir, birch and quaking aspen, the Switzerland of California. It is one of the most isolated areas of the state, especially in late fall, winter and early spring when most of the county is buried in deep snow.

That is why all but three of Alpine’s 45 high school students go to Douglas High School in Nevada. (Three youths who live in Bear Valley on the other side of the mountain go to Bret Harte High School at Arnold in California’s Calaveras County.)

“We would send our kids to the South Lake Tahoe High School--about the same distance as Minden--but we can’t get to Lake Tahoe in winter. The road over 7,740-foot Luther Pass is closed by snow,” said James Parsons, 41, superintendent of the Alpine Unified School District.

Not only is Luther Pass closed by snow much of the year but so are three of the four other roads leading into the county. Those roads cross 8,314-foot Monitor Pass, 8,573-foot Carson Pass and 8,730-foot Ebbetts pass. Only California 88 dropping down the mountain to Nevada is open year round.

There are three schools in Alpine County, Diamond Valley with 120 students from kindergarten through eighth grade, Kirkwood with five first graders and one kindergarten pupil, and Bear Valley with 19 in kindergarten through eighth grade.

Lloyd Lingelbach, 51, drives high school sophomore Katy Chandler, 15, and her brother Gary, 13, a freshman, in a school bus 23 miles each school day from Kirkwood to Woodfords, where they transfer to the regular Alpine County high school bus for the remaining 23 miles to Douglas High School. It takes the Chandler youngsters three hours a day to commute back and forth from their home to high school.

Many of the students who live in remote places in the mountains are picked up at home. “Sometimes they oversleep and we have to wake them up,” said bus driver John Jackson.

Tire Chains Used Often

“Lloyd (Lingelbach) holds the record for chaining (the tires on) his bus more than 100 days in one school year,” said Jackson, 34, who drives the 42 high school students up and down the mountain range every day to the Nevada school.

Both Lingelbach’s and Jackson’s buses have slipped off icy roads and been stuck in snowbanks on a few occasions over the years. But never has there been an injury in the incidents.

“It goes with the territory,” Jackson said. “We know the roads by heart. . . . Every winter it gets so bad at times the kids get snowed in and stuck on the mountain unable to get to school.”

For the young people of rural Alpine County there is quite an adjustment to go from an elementary and junior high school of 120 students to Douglas High School, with 1,040 students.

“We fit in pretty well down there, but it takes a little while for a freshman like myself to get settled in and make new friends,” said Clint Celio, 14, who is picked up by the bus at the front door of his home in Woodfords at the same time as his mother, Sandy, 39, leaves for her job as a silver miner.

Senior Aaron Holt, 17, moved to Alpine County with his family last summer from Alameda. “California high schools are much harder, longer hours and more homework,” Holt said during the ride down the mountain.

“Don’t tell Nevada that,” chimed in Susi Kuhl, 16, a junior. “I still have another year to go.”

‘Like Brothers, Sisters’

George Coyan, 17, a junior, said that most of the students have gone to school with one another since kindergarten. “We’re so close,” he said. “We’re more like brothers and sisters. So the boys tend to have girlfriends that live in Nevada and the girls boyfriends who live there.”

“What happens is huge phone bills. It cost me $200 one month to call my girlfriend, $700 by the time we broke up. My dad put a lock on the phone.”

His father is Gary Coyan, 55, head of transportation for Alpine County schools and a fill-in bus driver. He has been driving buses in Alpine County for 23 years. Coyan recalled that before 1940 “Alpine County high school kids boarded with families in Minden when they went to high school.”

“My mother, Elizabeth Coyan, who is 92, went to high school from her Alpine County home to Nevada from 1908 to 1912, living with a family there,” he said.

Special Permit

“In 1940, when there were five Alpine County kids going to Douglas High School, one of the students was given a special driver’s permit and paid to drive the other four to school. My sister, Betty, was one of the students who drove with him. School buses have been used since 1945.”

Superintendent Parsons noted that there isn’t a movie theater, a barber, a practicing doctor or dentist in Alpine County. There are three small country stores.

“We don’t disown the kids when they go to high school in Nevada,” he said. “We are very much involved with them, dealing with any and all problems. Our school district pays $3,687 per student per year to Douglas High School for their education.”

David Sheets, 46, vice principal of Douglas High School, said the California students “get the best of both worlds. They are eligible for both Nevada and California scholarships. If California graduates of Douglas High go on to state universities in Nevada, out-of-state tuition is waived.”

California students are encouraged to go out for sports and get involved in clubs and other activities at Douglas High. Alpine County runs a second bus for students who stay late.