Waiting for the traveling teacher
Published by The Hechinger Report, in collaboration with The High Country News.
Robert Mitchell wishes he could move to the rural town of Campo, Colo. In his five years visiting the schools in this region, he’s learned to appreciate the things that make such remote places special.
Campo, Colorado, located in the southeastern corner of the state, is part of the High Plains. Cattle ranches dot the landscape, but extreme droughts have made ranching more difficult.
CAMPO, Colo. — On the long drive south, as the land on the horizon turned from mottled green to dusty brown, the college professor’s Subaru carried four cartons of doughnuts, two bags of fresh produce and a bin of children’s books.
All of it was destined for rural schools. It would be a drive of nearly four hours from the outskirts of Denver to a sparsely populated corner of Colorado where the flat skyline bleeds into Oklahoma, New Mexico and Kansas. It’s a trip that Robert Mitchell has been making once a week for five years, arriving on a Monday, sleeping over in the locally owned, $55-a-night Starlite Motel in Springfield, then turning the car north to return home two days later to his wife and son.
Unless you’ve been to Campo, and met the people in this town of 103 residents, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would endure that drive
The small town of Campo, Colo., has a population of just 103 people, but civic engagement is high, including intense public support for its tiny school district.
Robert Mitchell, who is 6-foot-3, has a disarming smile and a repertoire of goofy things to say, setting people at ease in communities where few outsiders visit.
With fewer than 50 students, the Campo, Colo., school district has just one school building, a playground, a dusty baseball field, a workshop for wood- and metalworking and a nonfunctional pool.
There were just four graduates this year at the Campo, Colo., school district. The halls of the school district have decades’ worth of photos of past graduates, evoking the feeling of a family home.
The Campo, Colo., school district treats its graduating class of just four students with humble but personal touches, like cookies and balloons set out on a table with a lace tablecloth.
Taped signs reserved seats at graduation in the Campo, Colo., school district. Although the senior class was tiny, nearly every seat in the auditorium — which holds a full-size basketball court — was filled that day.
Malcom Lovejoy, who is attending Rice University in Houston this fall on a scholarship, did not have a dedicated math teacher in high school, but he worked hard to independently learn higher math needed for college.
