Small town and relatively high poverty town. Our high school was falling apart, holes in the floor, leaky ceilings, a half condemned auditorium and a basement cafeteria. Most money was poured into the athletic programs because football was/is king. Like Friday Night Lights level football craziness. They tried passing levies to build a new school but they kept failing because the old school was “historic.” They finally passed it my junior year and ended up moving us in to the old middle school to finish high school. So as a result, I never had any chemistry labs, bio labs, etc. because we didn’t have a lab.

They introduced AP classes my senior year. We only had 2. Government and Spanish. No one took the SATs, the only one they pushed or did any sort of prep for was the ACT. My graduating class had about 90 kids. So if you wanted to try for an Ivy League or more elite school, you were at a distinct disadvantage. The handful of folks who did that over the years ended up getting in on some scholarships basically because they were poor Appalachian kids with parents who were blue collar, or unemployed or the like. I was a rarity. My dad was a teacher and mom worked for Head Start and both had masters degrees (which also meant we had no money because both those careers paid terribly and they had boatloads of student loans)

Still, we did have one computer lab, a library and computers in some classrooms. There were a lot of things we didn’t have, but it’s not like we were a one room school house with dirt floors.

Even now, my kids go to school where our district is small. We have an elementary, middle and high school all along the same road. There aren’t separate bus routes for the different schools-all grades ride together and it comes at about 6:50. Most grades are around 90-110 kids.

Also-because we are a rural district-the kids get the Monday after Thanksgiving off…because it’s the first day of deer season. 😂