Hot Little High School in the Land of Fire : Education: Students live miles away and ride a non-air-conditioned bus in 115- to 125-degree heat to get to classes. Death Valley High is the community’s center.

There will be no senior prom at the local high school this year.

No boys. The seniors are all girls.

And they decided not to elect class officers.

“We don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings by competing against one another,” explained Jean Stotts, 17.

There are only three seniors--Stotts, Darby Watterson, 18, and Valerie Holms, 18.

Death Valley High School in this tiny Inyo county town has a total of 16 students--seven boys and nine girls. Besides the seniors, there are five juniors, four sophomores and four freshmen.

For six years, Death Valley has been the only high school in the state that holds classes four days a week.

“It took a special act of the state Legislature to get the four-day-a-week program, to save money and to reduce student bus travel time through some of the hottest country on earth,” explained Frank Behnke, 64, principal of Death Valley High and one of the school’s four teachers.

Shoshone, population 75, is 15 miles east of Death Valley National Monument and 20 miles west of the Nevada state line by way of Charley Brown Highway. The nearest city of any size to Shoshone is Las Vegas, 90 miles southeast of here.

Students who live 60 miles away at Furnace Creek in Death Valley catch the bus at 6 a.m. to arrive 1 1/2 hours later at school. The bus travels through the Funeral Mountains and Resting Spring Range. School is out at 3:45 p.m. and students who live at Furnace Creek get home at 5:15 p.m.

Temperatures have been a sizzling 115 to 125 degrees the first month of school. “The bus doesn’t have air conditioning. It’s like sitting in a furnace,” Watterson said with a sigh.

In the past, Death Valley High has had girls volleyball, boys and girls cross-country, and boys basketball teams. But this year, the entire sports program is on hold. The physical education teacher quit.

“We’re looking for a new P.E. teacher. Because of the remoteness of this little town, we have a hard time finding teachers,” noted Robert Williams, 66, superintendent of the school district, which includes a high school, junior high (five boys, two girls), an elementary school (30 students) in Shoshone and another elementary school (30 students) at Furnace Creek.

Death Valley High does have a newspaper, the Scorpion Stinger, and a yearbook, Tomesha, a Shoshone Indian word meaning, appropriately, “Land of Fire.”

Five of the 16 high school students are Shoshones, a tiny band of Indians who live in Death Valley National Monument.

Scorpion is a nickname of the school athletic teams when the school has athletic teams. Another appropriate name.

“This place is alive with scorpions,” said Ken Smith, 47, a teacher here for 20 years. The other two high school teachers are Dan Simmons, 46, here four years and Vaughn Talsness, 42, who just started teaching this school year.

Death Valley High has existed for 33 years, and it is the center of this community. Academically, its students do “as well, if not better, than those attending much larger high schools,” said Smith.

He credited the individual attention each student receives and said nearly every graduate, year in and year out, goes on to college. The three seniors agreed.

“Students don’t fall through the cracks at Death Valley High,” Holms said. “It’s not in one ear and out the other in our classes,” added Watterson. “You learn more in a little school like this,” Stotts chimed in.

At Death Valley High, “Every student knows everybody in school on a first name basis,” observed junior Bryan Barkley, 15.