‘Hard pill to swallow.’ Board votes to close rural Kentucky school over protest
For decades, there has been an elementary school on the south side of Pine Mountain in Letcher County, sparing young students a bus ride over the steep, imposing peak to the next-closest county school.
That will change when school resumes in August.
The Letcher County Board of Education voted 3-to-1 Monday evening to close Arlie Boggs Elementary School, over the protests of parents and grandparents of students at the tiny facility.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow,” said Clinton McComb, whose daughter is in the second grade at Arlie Boggs.
Arlie Boggs, in the Eolia community, is the only elementary school in the county south of the mountain, separating it from the county seat of Whitesburg and the rest of the county.
The county, as in much of traditional coal country in Appalachian Kentucky, has seen a significant drop in population as coal jobs dwindled, people moved to find work, and deaths outpaced births.
That has shown up in a loss of students at Arlie Boggs.
The school had 121 students at the end of the 2023-24 school year, but currently has just over 100 and was projected to have only 86 students in grades 1 through 8 next school year, according to the longtime principal, Freddie Terry.
Terry said there were only a few kindergarten students registered to come in next school year.
Superintendent Denise Yonts said district officials realize the importance of the school to the community, but that the drop in enrollment had made teaching more difficult.
The low number of students required combining some classes, with kindergartners and first graders in one class, for instance, and in the middle school, teachers have to handle more than one required subject area in multiple grades.
“It’s just a big task,” Yonts said.
The school was once rated among the best in Kentucky based on test scores, but placed in the bottom 5% in testing last year, and students there weren’t progressing on pace with other schools, Yonts said.
The need to better serve the students led to the discussion of closing Arlie Boggs, she said.
At an emotional meeting Monday at Cowan Elementary — the school on the other side of Pine Mountain where Arlie Boggs students will be next school year — parents and grandparents made a last-ditch plea to keep the school open.
Several said the teachers at the school worked hard to help students and provide one-on-one attention, lauded the family atmosphere at the school and said it is the centerpiece of the rural community.
“These kids are getting what they need there,” McComb said.
Parents said closing Arlie Boggs would knock some students out of participating in sports and other after-school activities because their families won’t have the extra time or money to get them to a school farther away.
And several raised concerns about a longer bus ride for young children and having to cross Pine Mountain, saying rocks sometimes fall in the winding road and that there can be fog or slick pavement at the top even when conditions are clear at the bottom.
“That mountain is a whole different ballgame,” said Kenny Anderson, a county magistrate. He asked if board members if they wanted to risk “one of them buses flipping over Pine Mountain?”
McComb asked the school board to consider keeping Arlie Boggs open at least one more year to provide time to try to boost test scores and enrollment.
The board did not vote on that, however.
Angie Holbrook, who taught at Arlie Boggs for 28 years and represents the area on the school board, said closing the school would be a harsh blow for an area that already faces challenges that include poverty and lack of water service.
“I’m not going to destroy my community,” she said.
However, board Chairman Robert Kiser said that while he didn’t want to hurt the community and felt Arlie Boggs teachers are doing a “phenomenal” job, he felt closing the school was in the best interest of students.
Some people wept over the vote, and some angry parents and grandparents berated the board as police officers hovered nearby.
“You should be ashamed for what you’ve done to these kids,” one woman yelled.
Some parents said many current Arlie Boggs students will go to school in neighboring Harlan County, in the community of Jenkins or across the state line in Virginia, rather than go to Cowan Elementary.
The district plans to have Arlie Boggs students tour Cowan Elementary and meet their future teachers and classmates, and hopes to schedule an open house for parents, Yonts said.
Yonts said she understands the hurt over closing Arlie Boggs, but hopes that will fade in time.
“If they give Cowan a chance, they’ll love it as much as Arlie Boggs,” she said.
