Bill, Wyo.
Here’s one of the great things about being a student this year at Dry Creek Elementary, the K-8 public school in this sage-dotted prairie town alongside the railroad tracks: At recess there’s no waiting for the seesaw.
Two seats.
Two students.
Perfect.
These days, when the sun shines bright and the oncoming autumn puts a snap in the air and the crazy winds of a Wyoming winter aren’t yet threatening to tumble the students into the nearby pasture, Maggie Pellatz and Mercedes Tate – the entire student body of Dry Creek Elementary – couldn’t be happier.
They race from the schoolhouse for recess and take their places on the seesaw. They sit sidesaddle, pretend they’re on horses and wave rodeo-queen style – fingers together, a slight side-to-side wrist action – at the cars that race by on Wyoming 59.
“It has two saddles,” said Maggie, who is 6 1/2 years old, just like her friend and only schoolmate, “so we can be rodeo queens together.”
Maggie and Mercedes do just about everything together.
“We get along really well. We are definitely best friends,” Mercedes said.
Dry Creek Elementary is one of 13 schools in sprawling Converse County, in northeast Wyoming, and one of the county’s four designated rural schools.
And is it ever.
The settlement of Bill consists of a handful of homes and a general store – the Bill Store. The town was named in the late 1800s, according to the history of the place, because there were four homesteaders and all of them were named Bob.
Just kidding. They were all named Bill.
The Dry Creek school is a double-wide mobile home/portable classroom that has rested on the same piece of prairie for three decades. The nearest traffic light is in the town of Doug las, 35 miles to the south. It’s where the Dry Creek Elementary kids will attend high school. But for now, children from this open land of ranches, railroads and coal mines are driven by their parents to the school by the highway and spend their days with teacher Sherrill Kilpatrick, who has worked in the school district for 26 years and taught at the rural school for most of that time.
Rural schools in Wyoming are kept open at the discretion of the local districts based on population in the area, distance to the nearest larger school and how long the school has existed.
“If my two students had to be bused to Douglas,” said teacher Kilpatrick, “they’d be on the bus at 6:50 a.m. and wouldn’t get back home until 5 at night.”
Kilpatrick, who was raised in Cheyenne, lives with her husband outside Douglas.
Now on a typical day, she sees about 100 antelope. And two cute, bright-eyed first-graders.
“They’re just the nicest children,” Kilpatrick said. “I never have a disciplinary problem with them. Which is a good thing because the principal’s office is 35 miles away.”
The girls will receive a traditional education. And plenty of attention. Red-haired Mercedes, who lives 5 miles south of school (“My father drives a train!”), loves that about the two-kid school.
“We don’t have to wait for Mrs. K to answer our questions,” she said.
Maggie, whose full name is Magdalena, lives 6 miles north of the school. She moved to this unpopulated land from Casper. Her parents are building a home on the prairie.
“Another family came to Casper looking for a house,” she said. “They didn’t have one. So we sold them ours.”
Until the new house is ready, maybe by Christmas, Maggie spends time at her grandfather’s ranch up the road. These days antelope hunters are living in grandpa’s garage and bunkhouse.
Soon, the hunting season will end. Winter will lock this land in snow and ice and frigid wind. Kilpatrick said on one particularly stormy day last winter, it took her an hour and forty minutes to drive the 35 miles from her home to the little school.
But inside there will be plenty of warmth.
“We had school pictures the other day,” Mercedes said. “They took pictures of me and Maggie together. Then they took pictures of us alone. I liked the one where we were together.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
