Rocky Mountain Schools: Top educational experience in a smaller package

In Cowley, we sat down with District No. 1 Superintendent Matt Davidson, Rocky Mountain Middle/High School Principal Betsy Sammons, Rocky Mountain Elementary Principal Eric Honeyman and longtime teacher Chris Townsend. Here are their responses.

If you were going to tell someone from another part of the state or elsewhere about Rocky Mountain schools, what would you say to give them a first impression?

Eric Honeyman: When I first moved here, what stood out the most to me was just the strong community. It seemed like you had a community that was truly invested in their kids and their education. I just think that, as a community, we all want to have student success for everybody.

Betsy Sammons: That’s the benefit of a small community. You know the kids, so you’re helping out in more ways than just … It is really community. It isn’t just school related. It’s everything, I guess.

Chris Townsend: It takes a village. We love our kids. These are our future community members, business owners, neighbors. We’re growing kids.

What kind of educational culture are we building here?

Townsend: That our students belong here. We want you to be here. You’re welcome here. We take everyone.

Matt Davidson: I’d say nurturing and growth oriented.

Honeyman: I’d just say we believe in nurturing, not just academic skills, but also critical thinking, creativity, resilience. You know, we’re trying to teach our kids to be resilient. Rocky Mountain, I think, is a place where you see a lot of smiles and just a love of education, not only for the students, but for staff as well.

Sammons: Like Eric said, it’s a culture of staff working to get better, to provide instruction for our students that’s relevant for right now.

How do you strive for excellence? Can you tell me about the quality of education in our schools?

Honeyman: I guess our teaching practices; it’s our professional development, our curriculum development, our student support services, like we continue to strive to get better in all those areas to help our staff and students. I think, data wise, it’d be like toward our graduation rates. That’s always a positive thing, to make sure we have the highest percentage of kids graduating, and standardized tests. That’s always a focal point. We want our kids to score the best on WY-Topp, at least be above the state average.

Sammons: I think, too, that we have a lot of different course offerings, and we set high expectations for academics. But in addition, we have a big push on vocational things right now, too, and so I think we offer a really good variety of course offerings. We have college courses that we offer. We have a really qualified staff to teach some of those courses when we’re not partnering with the college. We had lots of kids earn industry recognized certifications this year like an OSHA certification that they can get through CTE. There’s business certifications that they can get. I think we did something like 10 or so industry scholarships this year. So I think we’re having more of a balance of what traditional academics is, compared to bringing in more focus on some of the vocational things.

Townsend: One of the structures that we have in place are PLC teams, professional learning communities for teachers and support staff, to meet on a regular basis to talk about student data and successes and need for interventions.

Davidson: I would just add on how we strive for excellence that one of the blessings of being smaller is that we can do that one by one, so one student at a time, or one staff member at a time. I think that personal approach lends itself well to growth and everyone progressing.

How do our schools stand out compared to others? What makes our schools unique?

Sammons: What really stands out to me with a small town are some of the traditions that we have. Being a small town, it allows for small-town activities where you have everybody involved in homecoming and the homecoming parade and things like that. We still do promenade at Rocky where the kids all learn to ballroom dance. You can’t do those things at big schools, so that’s something a little bit unique, but it also offers unique opportunities in the classrooms, too, because of our size, the different things kids are able to do in the classroom.

Honeyman: It’s like the field day. The high school and middle school kids help with our field day for the elementary at the end of the year. At Christmas, the kids came over to the high school and read to our students. I think with it being such a smaller community and smaller schools, you can have that involvement. Another thing that I thought makes us stand out is just our personalized approach to education and the needs of all of our students. That involves the PLCs Chris talked about and how we talk about each student and help them be the best version of themselves. There’s a lot of extracurricular activities that we talked about – STEM and different things – that our kids get an opportunity to do, as well.

Townsend: And right now we have summer school, which is called Camp Invention, and it’s a STEM approach to a week-long camp that is free for our students. They go from 8:30 to 3:15. They don’t have to pay for that, and it’s a lot of fun.

Davidson: What I would add to that is, because of our setting, our schools still are the hub of the communities, and everyone’s involved: parents and grandparents and neighbors, and the community culture spreads from the community to the school and from the school to the community, and feels like it really is a team approach.

What are the benefits of public-school education at Rocky Mountain schools?

Townsend: (One is) pulling from our different communities to try to become one. It gives them experience and getting to know a broader sense of student population, which is, I think, real world.

Sammons: A big part of that, I think, is kids learn to deal with struggles and become problem solvers that way. In a public school environment they have to learn to interact and do hard things that maybe aren’t always the outcome.

Davidson: I think public school trains citizens, right? It really is the basis of our citizenship across the country, and that’s been a history of public education for hundreds of years. You learn to deal with other people, all kinds of people, and all kinds of circumstances, and how to navigate that and contribute in those settings. I think that prepares well for the transition into adulthood.

What kind of educational experience do our students have, from the classroom to the field and gym to the stage?

Sammons: First, I think it gives all kids the opportunity to participate in (a variety of) things, if they choose to, because of our size, and that’s a benefit of our schools. We’ve had kids transfer in that maybe didn’t go out for basketball because they wouldn’t make the team, but it takes everyone here, and so everyone can be involved, which I think is a huge benefit of our community. And we do offer lots of different things. Of course, we have all of the athletic opportunities, but we also have things like modern band, where we’re doing an actual band with our music department. We try and offer a lot of things that big schools can offer, but everybody has the opportunity to do it, which I think is huge. You can be in the musical, the high school musical, and you can still be on the track team at the same time.

Honeyman: There’s just so many opportunities for hands-on activities, just like Betsy talked about. There are so many different things from elementary to senior year.

Sammons: You can take college level math classes and a variety of things that way, too. So, I think we have high end on not only extracurricular, but more academic as well.

Davidson: I think we provide a good foundation in fundamentals and exposure to lots of other things that allow students to maybe broaden their perspectives and prepare for a pretty diverse world.

What challenges do you face as a district moving forward?

Honeyman: The state home school voucher. I think that’s a big concern on everyone’s mind. I think that is worrisome in regard to just the funding aspects that it impacts us.

Townsend: Yes, like numbers and student population and staff that would be needed to support certain numbers, just kind of that uncertainty -- continuing to do more with possibly less.

Sammons: I think the challenge is figuring out what we can do to help the flexibility of families, to give them the public-school education and be flexible enough that we’re doing everything that we can that allows them to do, because they want flexibility.

Davidson: I would add teacher recruitment, getting excited, qualified young teachers. We are seeing less and less choose teaching as a career, and it’s getting harder and harder to recruit good teachers. That’s an issue.

I think seeing national politics being applied to a local setting is creating lots of disharmony in education, not only in our district, but across Wyoming right now, and that’s created a public perception that education isn’t doing its job well, which I believe is untrue. That’s a narrative that’s being shared out there by certain special interest groups. That certainly isn’t true in our district, and I would say across Wyoming. I sure didn’t feel like we had much support in this last legislative session from those who are elected, in my opinion. They should be advocates for public education and not trying to dismantle it.

Townsend: The decisions that were being made or considered, the bills that were being proposed, caused stress to the faculty.

Davidson: A good example is every district in Wyoming right now is dealing with this concealed carry law that’s going into effect on July 1, and it’s a hard issue to wrestle with for communities and school boards and staff. It feels like that that ought not be on our plate. I think it distracts us from what’s truly important.

I think another challenge is how rapidly we’re seeing technology evolve, and how that’s shaping jobs and trying to help young people be prepared. I think trying to thrive in that kind of world is a challenge for education right now.