Rural Town Struggles to Save Its School, and Soul

There have been glorious days in this small town. Its history is that of boom and bust, rags and riches tethered to the demand for minerals that lie well beneath a thin coat of topsoil. Among the few constants here are the wind, trout that slash and linger in deep pools. And basketball.

In 1968, people lined the highway to welcome home the Medicine Bow High School boys’ basketball team, which had traveled to Laramie, 60 miles to the south, and tested the hearts of the community in the semifinal game against Arvada.

Down by one point in the closing seconds, the Wranglers strapped on a full-court press in a desperate attempt to take possession of the ball. Jim Tollefson stepped forward at midcourt, cleanly picked off a pass, and with time running out, drove hard to the bucket and laid the ball in to win the game. The Wranglers went on to claim the championship title, and, as their bus returned home, the whole town was on hand to greet them.

Team members were paraded in convertibles in front of the short business strip shouldering the historic Virginian Hotel on Highway 30. Then they gathered at the high school for a victory bash.

In the coming years, there would be much to celebrate in this high prairie town. Heavy equipment would bite hard and deep into the surrounding hillsides, producing yellow cake and coal around the clock. People came from all over to share in the prosperity. In the late 1970s, nearly 1,000 people lived here, and in 1978, there were 267 students in kindergarten through Grade 12.

But the good times seem never to last here. In the 1980s, mines started to close, and the community’s downward spiral began. Many moved away as suddenly as they came, some of them loading their houses on trucks and taking them rather than attempting to sell during the exodus. During that same time, a sleek new interstate rerouted traffic around the town, and suddenly there was even less reason for coming here. The bank closed, the newspaper closed, then came rumblings of what some felt could be the fatal blow.

Angry Medicine Bow Residents Form Group

There had been talk for years about closing Medicine Bow Junior/Senior High School, but by last October, school district trustees, confronted with dwindling enrollment and anticipated cuts in state funding, began talking more seriously about consolidation. The talk was that students would be bused to Hanna-Elk Mountain Junior/Senior High, a school of about 150 students 20 miles away. Medicine Bow residents, angered and saddened by the possibility, wrote letters and formed a group called Save Our Schools.

The school was the heart of the community, they said. If they thought bigger was better, they wouldn’t be living in Medicine Bow, a town of three bars, two restaurants, one grocery store and 360 people. But for the same reasons they saw beauty in their small community, they saw hope in their small school. It symbolized the future, a place where young people became.

On the simplest level, the burning issue for Medicine Bow became how to keep its little school open. But beyond that, the town’s struggle illuminates how the culture of rural America continues to fade, especially in the Plains communities that are not sharing in the nation’s general economic well-being. Shriveling, they struggle to hold their center. And most frequently, that center is a school.

Thus, the fate of Medicine Bow Junior/Senior High grew into a metaphor about values and priorities in the heartland.

With consolidation, students would have access to more programs, like vocational agriculture and foreign languages. They would be exposed to a greater variety of teachers with different teaching styles. And with more students, there might even be a greater sense of competition to increase student motivation, according to Larry Mowry, superintendent of Carbon County School District No. 2.

Kenda Colman, a 20-year resident of Medicine Bow, member of the Town Council, wife of a teacher and mother of a basketball player, saw the benefits but said they weren’t worth the trade-offs.

The time spent on buses would result in longer days for students, perhaps 12 hours for those participating in after-school activities, she said. What happens in winter, when the highway turns icy? Who’s going to want to move here if there’s no school? And what happens to the senior citizens, about half of the town’s population, who attend games, concerts and plays at the school? “It’s going to kill this town,” Colman said.

Last year, there were only 62 students, K-12, in Medicine Bow. About 20 were high school students, and on the first day of school, only five boys, Grades 9 through 12, were expected to walk through the doors. It was rare that the school had enough boys to field a football team, but there has always been basketball.

Basketball Season Is Canceled

With the coming of winter, it became evident that there was a good chance the school would be closed. Early in the school year, when it appeared there would be too few players for a basketball team, the season was canceled, and a meeting was held among all the boys in Medicine Bow High School--their number had grown to seven--at the Colman residence.

Three Federer brothers, who had moved away four years earlier, had decided to move back and stay with their grandparents. Two of them were of high school age. If all seven boys played basketball, they could field a team.

There was only one problem. At their former school, Carl and Jimmy Federer had chosen wrestling over basketball, the seasons running simultaneously. Carl, the older, had even qualified for the state tournament the previous year. In sports like football and wrestling, when there weren’t enough Medicine Bow students to field a team, students were given the option of competing for Hanna-Elk Mountain.

Carl was willing to forgo wrestling to enable the Wranglers to field a basketball team in what could be the school’s final season. Jimmy, however, was set on wrestling.

At the meeting, the other boys told Jimmy they didn’t want to put pressure on him, that if he wanted to wrestle, it was his choice, but in order to field a team, they needed at least seven players.

Jimmy agreed, and the next day all seven boys walked into the principal’s office to tell him they wanted to field a team. Because the school already had canceled the season, the principal said, he had to get the school district’s approval. Then he had to find a coach.

Dan Solyst, a young math teacher, agreed to take the helm, and a schedule was patched together. There was more welcome news when C.J. Tanner, who had moved to Utah, arrived back in town and became the team’s eighth player.

Just as Tollefson, nearly 30 years earlier, had changed apparent defeat into victory, the Wranglers revived their season. There were no cheerleaders, no pep band. There was, however, a town in support of eight young men, who had come together and in their own way were trying to keep something alive.

The Wranglers narrowly lost their first game to a freshman crew from Laramie but won their second outing. Once again there was reason to cheer in Medicine Bow.

Medicine Bow’s Ills Are Wyoming’s

In many ways, what’s wrong with Medicine Bow is what’s wrong with Wyoming. It has been mired in a boom-and-bust economy, overly reliant on natural resources. The state is attempting to diversify its economy, but a study done for the state Steering Committee for Business Development last year painted a grave picture.

“Wyoming is in the unenviable position of having gone from one of the best performing economies the ‘70s and early ‘80s to dead last in the late ‘80s and ‘90s,” the report found.

The nation’s least populated state last year had 5,800 fewer students in kindergarten through fourth grade than it had 10 years earlier, the study found, a 15% decline; and from 1990 to 1996, the number of people 25 to 34 years old dipped nearly 24% as they fled to other states to find work.

“Job growth has virtually disappeared in recent years,” the report states. “Wyoming has fewer jobs (covered by unemployment insurance) in the first quarter of 1997 than it did in 1981.”

While unemployment has dropped to 4%, the state’s labor force has fallen steadily, says state economist Wenlin Liu. “It seems that when people lose their jobs, they leave the state to find work,” Liu says. “They go to Idaho or Nevada or Colorado, where the economies are much stronger.”

While the state is attempting to diversify its economy, Medicine Bow is working on a smaller scale to boost its own fortunes. Kay Embree is head of the Bow Area Economic Development Commission Inc. To help fund the program, she once sold plastic ducks, each with a number painted on the bottom. Two hundred ducks were sold for $5 each, then dropped into the Medicine Bow River. Purchasers of the first three ducks to cross the finish line, a quarter mile away, won the pot, minus $1,000, for economic development.

“A wind came up, and it took forever for the ducks to float downriver,” she says. “The next year, we used a 2-foot-wide irrigation ditch.”

Sometimes saving a town happens a dollar at a time, but possibilities of all magnitudes must be explored, which is why Medicine Bow Mayor Gerald Cook got on the phone recently and called Nike.

He heard that the giant corporation was looking to build a new facility and that they were talking to folks in nearby Colorado. “Why not Medicine Bow?” he asked a woman with the company. He briefly held her attention, but then she asked about access to an international airport, and from there the conversation coasted to a congenial thank you and good-bye.

A Member of the School’s First Team

Driving through town in his Ford Tempo consumes the hours and eventually the days in Lester Cheesbrough’s life. There are still 24 hours in a day, he says. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed, and, somehow, the 86-year-old Cheesbrough must fill those hours. So, day after day, without destination, he drives.

In the late 1920s, Cheesbrough first laid hands on a basketball, a game he had neither witnessed nor contemplated. He was a member of the school’s first team and through the years established himself as the Wranglers’ No. 1 fan, rarely missing a home game. He was in his usual seat again last season, a few rows up at center court.

Despite a promising start, there would be few wins for the boys of Bow. They lost one game by nearly 50 points, but the season was never about glory or, for that matter, victory. It was about something far more important, a likely curtain call for an important part of their small-town life.

It wasn’t just the hometown fans who cheered them. Sometimes even their opponents’ supporters cheered for them, recognizing that the Wranglers were underdogs in a state of underdogs.

“We knew we had to stick together,” said Josh Allison, a junior last year. “We never gave up because we’re not that way.”

In the game against Midwest, five players fouled out. Tanner joined them on the bench when he went up for a rebound and twisted his ankle upon landing. For the last two minutes, only two Medicine Bow players remained on the court: Carl Federer, the wrestler, and Glen Franklin, a freshman who was playing basketball for the first time since sixth grade.

Even with victory well out of reach, the two didn’t concede. If anything, they tried harder. This is not a place where people give up easily, as winters alone are enough to weed out the fainthearted.

The basketball team didn’t add to the cache of trophies crowded into glass-covered cases in the gymnasium lobby, but they proved an important point, says Kenda Colman.

“They took a killing all season long, but they played with their hearts,” she says. “You can’t learn that from a book.”

All Eyes Turn to Deciding Vote

The feisty nature of the community was reflected at a school board meeting in May, when the trustees decided the fate of Medicine Bow Junior/Senior High School. It was deadlocked, 4-4, to close the school when all eyes turned to Robert Merrill, the deciding vote.

“It’s a sad day for Carbon County School District No. 2,” Merrill said. And with that, the school’s fate was sealed. The final vote was 5-4 to consolidate. Medicine Bow residents responded with tears and anger and, in time, a lawsuit.

Save Our Schools is represented pro bono by lawyer Philip Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wyoming and a candidate for governor. His brother, David Roberts, used to own the newspaper in Medicine Bow. The suit asks that the district keep the school open this year to allow another lawsuit, scheduled for trial in April, to be resolved.

In that case, a coalition of almost half of Wyoming’s school districts, including Carbon County No. 2, is challenging the state’s newly enacted formula for funding districts, contending it doesn’t provide many less populated areas with enough money to operate their schools.

“What has happened in Medicine Bow is an example of that,” says Tim Kirven, the attorney representing the coalition. Kirven says that about 18 school districts will receive less funding under the new formula, and three may be faced with closing schools.

Judy Catchpole, state superintendent of public instruction, says the new formula is a work in progress that will be carefully monitored and fine-tuned as needed. “I don’t think there’s anyone out there [in the Legislature] that’s saying let’s take money from the small school, so I think they’ll revisit some of the items as soon as we can see what this formula does.”

The district expects a cut of about $165,000 this coming school year, says Supt. Mowry. In two years, it is expected to reach $450,000, perhaps more if district enrollment continues to fall.

What has happened here is not unique. School consolidation is frequently discussed in areas of the country where there is a heavy reliance on natural resources, says Jack Shelton, director of the Program for Rural Services and Research at the University of Alabama. The concept of consolidation, he says, dates back to the 19th century and educator Horace Mann, who studied the German industrial model and wanted to bring its efficiency to American schools.

But this should not be merely a matter of efficiency, said Don Mayfield, who heads Save Our Schools. For the town to lose so many jobs, so many neighbors, so many businesses, that’s one thing. “But this isn’t about money,” says Mayfield. “This is about kids.”

Students Will Choose New School Nickname

When classes begin at Hanna-Elk Mountain High School this fall, barring changes resulting from the lawsuits, students will choose a new name to reflect the consolidation. The school’s nickname, the Miners, might be changed as well.

Some Medicine Bow residents say they will send their children outside the district to Rock River, 17 miles away, wanting nothing further to do with the district. Some say the parents are making a bigger deal out of it than the students.

“I’m trying to make it a positive experience,” says Josh Allison. “I would have loved to graduate from Medicine Bow, but it will be good to be around more kids.”

Many residents wonder if the elementary school, whose enrollment is expected to be in the 20s this fall, will be next to close. Or will it be the school in Encampment, also located in Carbon County No. 2, where it has been announced that a timber mill is shutting down.

Most Medicine Bow residents say the town will survive. It always has, but about 35 miles north of town is an eerie reminder of what some here fear.

When the uranium mine was going strong, a community sprang up at Shirley Basin. By 1980, it was home to more than 400 people. There was a grocery store, restaurant and elementary school.

Not much remains there now except for the rusting skeletons of three mobile homes, a school bus and an orange pickup truck. At the far end is the weathered shell of what once was part of the school. Weeds push up through cracks in the asphalt. No one lives there anymore.

Last spring at Medicine Bow’s graduation, two people from the old and new came together. Back in 1931, when the school graduated its first high school class, there were two boys and three girls; and because they handed out diplomas in alphabetical order, Lester Cheesbrough became the first person to ever receive a diploma from the school.

They still go alphabetically, so when C.J. Tanner, who moved back from Utah to play basketball and graduate from Medicine Bow, was the last of seven graduates to receive his diploma, he became what in all likelihood will be the school’s final graduate.

Cheesbrough and Tanner stood side-by-side for photographs after the ceremony.

Cheesbrough still drives around town, his pace steady at about 10 mph, while Tanner did what many young people in Wyoming are forced to do. He moved to Colorado and found a job.