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Moran School: vintage and visionary
The classes at Moran Elementary School are so small that kindergartners are mixed with first and second graders, while third, fourth, and fifth graders share another classroom.
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As Moran School’s two teachers and principal huddled together one fall afternoon, more than a dozen students sat at a cafeteria table behind them with open lunch boxes and sacks. Hot lunches typically aren’t served at the school, unless the students’ parents take it upon themselves to dish them up. It’s a practice that hasn’t changed since the school’s early days in a one-room cabin in the old town of Moran, below what is now the Jackson Lake Dam.
Since Moran School started in 1924, it has been combined with several other schools serving the remote areas north of Jackson. While technology is being used more than ever, the school remains a gathering place for a diverse group of families from locales like Pacific Creek, Buffalo Valley, Moran Junction, Colter Bay, Jackson Lake Lodge, Signal Mountain Lodge, and the Togwotee area. Annual events include a fall festival and a Christmas program.
Moran School is home to fewer than twenty students this year, many of whom travel long distances to attend classes. Former student Kathryn Turner lived only about six miles from the school at the Triangle X Ranch, yet she recalls a long bus ride each morning. “By the time we went and picked up the kids from Colter Bay, we were on the bus for one hour,” says Turner, who began attending the school in 1976.
Kids can get in all kinds of trouble when they’re on a bus for such a long time, she says. “Me and my friend, we got books from the library and learned American sign language. We taught ourselves. And then we would sit in the back of the class and the teacher would tell us to be quiet and we would keep ‘talking.’”
The school has been relocated several times since its start, first to Moose and then to a site across from the Pinto Ranch. The building the school now occupies was completed in 1956, and students from the Elk School joined Moran School that winter.
The entire article can be read in the Winter 2012 issue of Jackson Hole Magazine.
