Even though Wendy Wyman doesn’t discuss it much, there is a moment that she most likely remembers clearly. Standing over 10,000 feet above sea level in Leadville, Colorado, a wind-battered old mining town, and witnessing a school district so on the verge of collapse that state sanctions seemed almost certain. bleeding from enrollment. The level of community trust is below zero. Test results that garnered unwarranted attention. In that kind of silence, it’s difficult not to wonder what keeps someone upright.
Eight years have passed since then. When other struggling rural districts wonder where to start, Colorado education officials now point to the Lake County School District.
What Wyman and her group created was not a polished turnaround narrative created in a conference room by consultants. Compared to that, it was messier, slower, and more human. About a thousand students are served by the district, many of whom are the offspring of immigrant families who travel from Leadville to work at resorts in Vail and Copper Mountain. learners of English. households with low incomes. a population that other districts might discreetly dismiss as challenging. Because they lacked the luxury of selectivity, Lake County may have been compelled to take what works seriously.
The first thing Wyman appeared to grasp was that community trust isn’t a communications issue, which may seem apparent but isn’t. You can’t get into it with a newsletter. Parents in Leadville, including those who had attended those same schools, had been quietly counseling one another for years: keep your kids in elementary school, then get them out. Over time, that kind of tacit agreement solidifies into something nearly structural. It took presence, not spinning, to reverse it. board meetings that resembled genuine discussions. instructors who remained long enough for pupils to get to know them. Little things, building up.
Reading what the district did gives the impression that they resisted the temptation to transform into something different, which is a temptation that consumes a lot of struggling rural schools. Around the same time, a school board in a rural area of Iowa was eliminating FFA chapters and welding programs to finance robotics labs in an attempt to project a suburban image that would never work. Perhaps instinctively, Lake County recognized that a mining town in the Rockies has a distinct identity that should be protected. the landscape of the mountains. The diversity at altitude that no one anticipated. If small districts would stop dismantling themselves to appear competitive on paper, they would be genuinely irreplaceable due to their close-knit social fabric.
Lake County graduate Eudelia Contreras, who went on to become president of the school board, explained the change as follows: her children used to be split up and not fully seen. The culture then shifted. Teachers began to want every child to succeed, not just those whose parents attended every class.
Quiet as it may sound, that change in expectations is crucial. It’s the kind of thing that cannot be mandated by a state capital or funded by a grant. Either it grows or it doesn’t.
The district’s rise was noted in state evaluations. Funders from philanthropy took notice. Leadville began to be promoted by the Colorado Department of Education as a true model for rural turnaround, rather than merely as a curiosity. Wyman’s team even started an outreach program called School Turnaround GPS, which sent monthly guidelines to other superintendents in rural areas, sharing their knowledge of how to pace change without exhausting those implementing it.
Whether what worked in Leadville can be successfully transferred elsewhere is still up for debate. Locations are important. It’s not exactly a replicable ingredient to have a superintendent who can turn “who would want to live at 10,000 feet” into a real selling point. However, the fundamental ideas—start with trust, stop copying areas you’ll never look like, and start with what you already have—are what drive those journeys.
Third graders in Steubenville, Ohio, emerged as the state’s best readers. Not by chance. Before anyone could see, someone in that tiny district made the decision to take the work seriously. These stories typically begin like that. Silently, without cheers, and in defiance of whatever the odds were that year.
