The last country school in Scottsbluff shuts its doors

SCOTTSBLUFF, Neb. (Flatwater Free Press) - Reginald Preston arrived at the rural school’s last hurrah, a barbecue to celebrate its long history, before his wife. Katey Preston taught music, English and math at the small building 6 miles east of Scottsbluff, but had spent much of the day consoling Lake Minatare School students. They had been grieving off and on since January, when the local school board voted to shut Lake Minatare’s doors.

Reginald walked into the dimly lit gymnasium where he and the rest of the Lake Minatare School Parent Club had hosted a soup supper every winter to raise money for a scholarship fund. Now, the gym was staged for the next day’s graduation. The Prestons’ youngest daughter, Morgan, would be a fourth-generation graduate of Lake Minatare, following in the footsteps of Katey, her maternal grandma and two great-grandfathers.

Reginald stood at the center of the gym and pointed to the east wall, where six banners hung high above the gym floor. “These are some of the other schools in the county,” he said. “Lake Alice is straight north of here. Highland is straight east of here. Haig is way west of town.” Katey — known better around Lake Minatare as Mrs. Preston — found Reginald in the gym.

“We’re just going through the list of other country schools,” he told her.

“We really are the last of the Mohicans,” she said.

When the Prestons moved back to Scottsbluff after Reginald’s retirement from the Navy in 2023, they enrolled Morgan in an elementary school in town but quickly realized it was a bad fit. They considered private school, but Katey knew of one other place to try: Lake Minatare, the school where she had decided she would one day be a teacher and where her grandpa once rode a horse to attend. Morgan flourished, and Katey joined the staff last fall.

By the time they moved back to town, every other country school in the county had closed. Nebraska lawmakers in 2005 required every school district to offer every grade, forcing Class 1 districts, those with only elementary schools, to merge with larger districts. More than 100 elementary schools closed statewide by 2007. There were 194 Class 1 schools in Nebraska in 2005. When school starts again this fall, there will be five left.

The school board in Scottsbluff blamed a more recent change in state law championed by Gov. Jim Pillen when it voted to shutter Lake Minatare this January. Lawmakers in 2023 limited how much revenue school districts could collect in an effort to reduce property taxes. Scottsbluff administrators said the change forced them to slash millions of dollars and dip into the district’s reserve to stay afloat. They said closing Lake Minatare would save them $750,000 a year.

The Prestons, like most Lake Minatare parents, don’t buy the district’s rationale. They accuse school administrators of fudging the numbers and using the law as a scapegoat to shut down the smallest elementary school in a western Nebraska district that wasn’t getting any bigger. They largely blame school administrators and board members, not state lawmakers.

But Katey didn’t want to bring her bitterness to the school’s last barbecue. A third grade boy to whom she taught English and language arts had cried three times that day. Katey had been crying a lot, too. She resolved to let the celebration be one.

In the gym, she said hello to her own kindergarten teacher, an 86-year-old who retired in 2008 but has remained such a fixture that the Lake Minatare students of today still know her as Mrs. Baker. Katey left the gym, stopped by her classroom, greeted her mom, Sandy, and made her way back to the gym. There, she found Clark Schanamen, an old classmate whose son was in the same class as Morgan. Clark’s dad, like Katey’s mom, had gone to Lake Minatare, too.

“Do I know you?” Katey joked, as the two hugged. “How are you?”

“It’s hitting pretty hard today,” he told her. By Clark’s count, 31 Schanamens had attended Lake Minatare, and they were one of two families to squeeze three generations into the building that opened 61 years ago. His dad, Mark, was in second grade when it opened. His son, Mark, would be among the last graduating class. His two younger children would go to school in town next year.

“It’s quite the heartbreak,” Clark told Katey. “I didn’t realize it was such a staple and fabric of our community. They ripped this out. How many tournaments? How many ball games? How many of your neighbors and your friends and your …” he said, before trailing off.

“It’s more than a school,” Katey said. “It’s a community. It’s a legacy.”

“And it’s something to be proud of,” Clark said. “And to lose it, it really hurts.”

***

A standing-room-only crowd packed the Scottsbluff Board of Education’s special meeting in early January, when the board was set to contemplate the fate of Lake Minatare School — again. The school’s future had felt so uncertain for so long that the prior superintendent issued a memo to parents in 2021 aiming to ease their anxieties. But things had changed since then, Superintendent Andrew Dick told parents at the start of the three-hour meeting.

The main culprit, he said: LB 243. Meant to cut property taxes, the law placed a 3% cap on the annual growth of district revenues — not just from property taxes, but from nearly every revenue source, including state aid. District officials said at January’s meeting that expenses were rising faster than the new law allowed them to compensate for.

Facing rising expenses, dried-up COVID-era federal dollars, the revenue cap and reduced state aid, the district had dipped into its cash reserves and cut a combined $3.1 million from its last two budgets, cutting elementary science teachers and scaling back construction projects to balance the books. District budget officials said they would need to cut another $950,000 this time around. They recommended closing Lake Minatare to help get there.

Parents argued the estimated $757,000 savings was misleading since the district would lose more than $400,000 in annual state aid provided specifically to districts that maintained a “country school” like Lake Minatare. And for years, that had been true, administrators conceded. The aid, known as an elementary site allowance, had long meant the district was unlikely to save much money by closing the school — particularly if a critical mass of Lake Minatare students transferred to nearby districts like Gering, Minatare or Bayard rather than be bused to school in town.

But the state-imposed revenue cap made state and local funds “work against one another,” a district budget expert told the board. If the school stayed open, the district couldn’t ask local taxpayers for another $400,000. The cap prevented it. But if the school closed and the district lost the state aid, the board could raise the local property tax rate by 2%, capturing the same amount of revenue with one less school to fund. The school was performing well, administrators acknowledged. It had received an excellent rating through the statewide assessment system last spring. But the new law had changed the fiscal math.

The future, too, played a role in the district’s calculus. Mike Mason, the district’s executive director for curriculum and instruction, told the board that the number of births per year in Nebraska had dropped by around 1,900 over the last decade, and things weren’t any better in the Panhandle. Every school district in the region had seen dips in enrollment since 2016. A 16% drop in Alliance. A 10% drop in Gering. A 5.6% drop in Scottsbluff. At Lake Minatare, enrollment had hovered around 70 kids when the school stopped offering sixth grade in the fall of 2013, four years after it eliminated seventh and eighth grade.

More than two dozen parents, teachers and other Lake Minatare advocates signed up to make their case. Katey was the second name called.

“I brought something for you guys just to look at real quick,” she told the board, handing off a photo album that had belonged to her grandfather’s sister, who died of polio when she was 14. In it were photos of Katey’s grandpa, Jack Douglass, and the horse he rode to the original one-room Lake Minatare schoolhouse in the 1930s.

“All the other country schools have been closed,” she said, choking back tears as board members flipped through his family’s photo album. “Those communities are declining, families have left a once-vibrant neighborhood that congregated around the country school. The very heart of their community has stopped beating because their school no longer remains. Lake Minatare is the heart of our community. It still beats strong.”

Dick, the district’s superintendent, thumbed through the album as Katey finished her plea and returned to her seat near the front row. More speakers followed. A series of Parent Club members combined to walk through a presentation questioning the district’s spending priorities and the amount it held in its reserve. They said the district’s plot to replace the lost state aid with local dollars contradicted the new law that administrators claimed had forced their hand.

After hours of testimony, the board’s president, Scott Reisig, thanked Lake Minatare’s advocates for the decorum and their passion for the community they had helped build. “That’s something to be proud of,” he said before inviting the board to begin its discussion of the school’s fate.

“I don’t know if there’s anybody who wants to go first,” he said. Seven seconds passed.

“Draw a straw,” said Mark Lang, a board member, in a voice so soft the board president didn’t hear him.

“Hmm?” Reisig said.

“Draw a straw,” Lang repeated.

Instead, Paul Snyder, another board member, made a motion to close the school, kicking off 23 minutes of deliberations punctuated by long periods of silence. One by one, five of the board’s six members made it clear that they would follow the superintendent’s recommendation.

“It comes down to the numbers for me,” said board member Tory Schwartz. His hands sat folded in his lap as he addressed the audience, glancing between his notes, his laptop, his fellow board members and the parents hoping he would change his mind. “And the environment that we’re in — I just, your kids are going to be fine, if that’s where it goes.”

Another member, Robert Polk, said the decision was the hardest one he had ever made — not just as a public servant, but in his life. Three hours and one minute after the meeting started, the board voted 5-1 to close Lake Minatare. Lang was the sole opponent. Seconds later, they adjourned.

Sixteen minutes stood before the start of the school’s last graduation ceremony. Katey was weeping, but trying not to, as her principal and then her mom consoled her in the school’s front hallway. She had stayed up until midnight baking a cake for the school’s nine fifth-graders. Staff had decided that all 66 students would get a diploma. They would all be Lake Minatare graduates.

Sandy, Katey’s mom, had a pit in her stomach as she found her seat in the gymnasium, a metal folding chair with the initials “LA” scrawled on its back. The chair had been property of Lake Alice School before it closed 17 years ago. As she prepared to watch her granddaughter’s graduation, Sandy wondered if she had done all she could to prevent Lake Minatare from meeting the same fate.

Katey led the school’s 11 kindergartners through three singalongs before they walked the stage. She had no experience as a music teacher before she took the job at Lake Minatare, where she was one of five teachers. After the last kindergartner accepted his diploma and grinned for a photo with his teacher, the rest of the school’s students took their place on the risers. Morgan, the Prestons’ daughter, stood in the front row, right next to Mark Schanamen. Sandy snapped a photo from her spot in the fourth row. Seven of the nine graduates had gone to the school since kindergarten.

The group sang three songs, ending with the Lake Minatare School song. Katey flashed two thumbs up to the students as it ended and then lifted her glasses to dab her eyes with a tissue. The fifth-graders returned to their table as the rest of the students heard their names called to receive their diplomas: 10 first-graders, nine in second, 13 third-graders, 14 in fourth.

Soon, one by one, the fifth-graders walked the stage, too. They accepted their diplomas, shook their principal’s hand and posed for photos with their teacher, Tracie Barrett, for whom graduation day marked the last in a 27-year career at Scottsbluff Public Schools. Reginald hustled from his seat across the gym to photograph Morgan.

When the ceremony ended, Reginald found his wife, holding a bouquet of flowers gifted to her by the school for her one year of service. She had decided to resign from the district at the end of the year. The Prestons posed for photos in front of a balloon arch. First Reginald, Katey, Morgan and her sister Molly. Then Morgan and her grandparents. Then Morgan, Katey and Sandy; three generations of Lake Minatare graduates in one photo.

The family shuffled to Katey’s classroom to sort out what would stay and what would go. A photo album went home with Sandy. Kateys’ desk chair would stay. A call over the intercom interrupted progress. The school’s principal recalled teachers to the balloon arch for one last all-staff photo.

“I think you’re being summoned,” Reginald told Katey. “I think that may be the final announcement ever over the —”

His wife intervened, telling him which boxes stay and which ones go.

The staff posed for a photo, too, in front of the arch built for graduates. The teachers lingered as the last of the parents tore down decorations. Slowly, they made their way from the gym to a hallway behind it. The teachers made lunch plans. One said she might go for a drive. They would finish packing up later, they decided. They’d come back.

“I’ll tell you what: I’ll take the daughters,” Reginald told his wife. “I think I got all the stuff. Call me if you need me. I’m gonna go home.” He hugged her again.

Heather Neu, the kindergarten teacher, and Leishel Soule, first grade, thanked Reginald for everything he did in the final months of Lake Minatare, for the fight he put up. They hugged him, too.

As Reginald headed for his truck, Soule turned back to Katey, who was crying again. “Katey, are you OK?” she asked.

“No, I’m not OK,” she said.

“I know,” Soule said. “We lost a lot today.”

“We really did,” Katey said. “We really did.”

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