Utah Centennial County History Series - Rich County 1996

teachers currently employed there.55Faced with a difficult decision, the school board considered several options, including taking three grades from Woodruff and placing them at Randolph and consolidating the Garden City elementary classes with those of Laketown.

The latter proposition met with some opposition in Garden City. A majority of eligible voters in the precinct signed a petition asking the school board to allow at least three grades to remain at Garden City.

After considerable debate the school board decided to stay with their original plan, and the Garden City school was closed. The school district sold the building to the LDS church for two thousand dollars.

Some board members felt that the price was too low; nonetheless the majority of the board felt that the building would best serve the needs of the community if placed in the hands of the local bishop.56 With the two Bear Lake communities consolidated at Laketown, it once again became evident that facilities countywide were not equal. A review team from the Utah State Board of Education visited the county in March 1966. They reported that while "the elementary school program tends to met basic requirements, the secondary The review school program appears to be woefully inadeq~ate."~' team made three main recommendations: consolidating the Woodruff school with the Randolph elementary, renovating North Rich High School for elementary purposes, and consolidating the county's two high schools at Randolph.

The consolidation of elementary schools was one thing, but high school consolidation was quite another. Few things typify the geographic peculiarities of Rich County more than its educational development. Garden City residents opposed high school consolidation for more than twenty years, even going so far as to send their children to the high school at Paris, Idaho. In many respects, Garden City retained closer ties with the communities of Fish Haven, Paris, and St. Charles, Idaho, than they did with Laketown. Laketown, on the other hand, maintained little affiliation with Randolph and Woodruff. Few things had changed over the years. In 1946 Laketown school board member Vernon Robinson stated that only about three families would be willing to send their children to Randolph for high school. The feeling remained about the same in 1966.

It appeared that these issues had to be approached with great