The long road to a rural school

CHEYENNE - Seven-year-old Emmitt Anderson stood tall in the Wyoming House of Representatives gallery Wednesday. With his cowboy hat off and his hand over his heart, he enunciated each word in the Pledge of Allegiance.

His little sister, Waverly, peeked down at the House floor full of lawmakers below, wearing a bright pink dress with two pigtail buns bouncing in the air. On Tuesday, the children's parents, Anna and Carson Anderson, drove the family to the Capitol from the Slow and Easy Ranch near Garrett, an unincorporated community in northern Albany County, where the family has lived for generations.

It was a big day for the Andersons.

Included in this year's 2025-26 biennium state budget is an allocation from the school maintenance fund for site work and to provide a rural school facility in Albany County School District 1. The only students at the school will be Emmitt and, one day very soon, 4½-year-old Waverly.

A long road and lots of history

The family lives 40 miles on dirt roads from Rock River, but isolated schools for ranch children are nothing new. Carson's great-grandpa attended a school near Garrett in about 1910, and his mom and uncles also went to school in the area. Carson attended school in Wheatland, but he spent the summers on the Slow and Easy Ranch.

"I finished college in the spring of 2005, and came home to my grandparents. I stayed on the winter of 2006," Carson said. "They made me a partner in 2009, and now we're running the ranch."

Anna also comes from a Niobrara County ranching family going back generations. Being out on the ranch, far from town, a lack of services, schools and even other people is nothing new.

"When I married Carson, this lifestyle was not new," Anna said with a laugh.

But when the Andersons started having their own children, the Garrett school had been closed for many years.

In the late 1960s, the Wyoming Education Code set forth general criteria for organizing school districts across the state, and several years later, Albany County residents were unified under one district. A memo dated Feb. 14, 1972, from the School District's Organization to the Department of Education, available through the Wyoming State Archives, said that schools would long be established for students living in isolated areas, when it was in the best interest of the pupils and families. Further, the memo recognized that there would likely be an ongoing need for rural schools.

"The Planning Committee recognizes the fact that there may always be a need for one-room rural schools in the more isolated areas of Albany County," the memo reads.

After the 1990s, there simply were no kids living permanently on the windswept plains near the Slow and Easy Ranch. That meant there was no need for a school.

In 2019, Anna and Carson began talking to Albany County School District 1 about placing a movable school facility near their ranch. The ACSD1 Board of Trustees voted unanimously to approve the Buckle School in February 2022, but then the family was notified by then-Superintendent Jubal Yennie that the district would not be going forward with the project, saying that it was not "economically feasible."

The Andersons petitioned the district court to issue a writ of mandamus to compel the district and state to form a rural school, but that effort was dismissed by both the district and the Wyoming Supreme Court.

Make the drive, move to town, homeschool or virtual school

The family was left with no option for schooling that fit their lives.

"I think a lot of people think we should just homeschool, and I am 100% here for my kids, but that does not make me a teacher," Anna said. "They need that outside opinion, that outside perspective, that they would not get from mom and dad. We support homeschooling, but we know that you need to be passionate about it. We are not."

She also works with Carson on the ranch, leaving little time for homeschooling. Virtual school, many learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, pales in comparison to classroom instruction, so people began suggesting that Anna and the kids move to town.

"Splitting up the family and us moving to town, that's not great," Anna said.

Putting Waverly and Emmitt on a bus to ride 40 miles from the highway in the brutal Wyoming winter also wasn't feasible.

"There is the safety piece with the road," Anna said. "We can't just drive our kids back and forth in the winter months. It's Wyoming. Winter can come at any time."

So the Andersons began approaching lawmakers. In fact, several were scheduled to visit the Slow and Easy Ranch last fall, but didn't make it due to snow.

"The day we visited, it was an early winter snowstorm. Not really winter yet, but there was a snowstorm," Rep. Ken Chestek, D-Laramie, said. "We tried to drive up there in a snowstorm, 40 miles on dirt roads. We got lost, somebody got stuck. We got there, but just barely."

The family didn't plan it that way, Chestek said. They deal with that kind of weather all the time.

"In the winter, the only way to get those kids education is to have a one room schoolhouse there on site, with a teacher living on site," Chestek said.

The $300,000 budget allocation "is probably an outside range," and a facility will likely cost less than that, Chestek said. The Andersons are not looking for a new building. They've offered to work with the district on facilities and favor the idea of a movable building that could be used for rural classrooms, moved from site to site, to where Wyoming children need it.

Other lawmakers at the Capitol expressed support for the family this week.

"I don't know why we would not fund (the school). It's about our children, our posterity, our future," Rep. Jon Conrad, R-Mountain View, said. "If there's a need, a desire that has a beneficial impact on Wyoming's future, I don't know why we wouldn't fund it."

The Andersons say they were told the burden on taxpayers' dollars was justification to deny the rural school. But they are also taxpayers, they said.

"We pay taxes on our buildings, land and personal properties, and we pay the state to lease school sections," Carson said before the Joint Appropriations Committee before the session began.

Sen. Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, a member of that committee, agreed that the family has a legitimate need.

"I understand their concerns and empathize with their challenges," Nethercott said, adding that a $300,000 allocation in a $3.7 billion budget is not significant enough to deny the children an education.

"I don't think the circumstances are unusual in providing rural school services," Nethercott said. "Evaluating it in totality, in this circumstance, it is a prudent and responsible use of state dollars."

Other school funding and what's next for the Andersons

Inside the Capitol, the debate continues about what school projects are funded, after the Senate voted Thursday to suspend all new building projects in the state's capital construction budget. Anna knows that her fight is not over. She'd like to see legislation passed one day that permanently protects rural families from the struggle she's had.

"We want to protect other kids in this state. We want to see laws protecting rural schools at a state level," Anna said.

Rep. Trey Sherwood, D-Laramie, said that, while the House and Senate budget bills still must go through conference committee before a spending plan gets to Gov. Mark Gordon's desk for ultimate approval, she's optimistic that funding for the family will stay in the bill.

"However, it is unfortunate that the Senate took out funding for other schools. Thus, next week I'll be working with the budget conference committee to restore funding for all of Wyoming's school facilities," Sherwood said. "The goal is to get a budget bill to the governor's desk that provides all our communities with equal access to a quality education."

John Goldhardt, superintendent for ACSD1, said in an email to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle that if the $300,000 remains in the state budget, the Andersons will have to restart the process to get a school on the ranch. They will have to provide the board of trustees with an official application, which the trustees will have to vote on. If that is approved, the state superintendent will need to approve, or deny, the request.

That, Goldhart said, would all be dependent on "full legislative approval of the $300,000 required for the project," from septic tank, well, electric hookups, moving one trailer for a teacherage, one trailer for a classroom, and satellite internet connection.

Anna, Carson, Emmitt and Waverly are ready.

"Moving forward, we do want to work with the district and the state. We want to work with them to collaborate, and get better legislation in place that protects rural children.

"We take pride in being the Equality State," Anna said. "And if God puts something on your heart, you don't just quit."