A 500-Square-Mile Colorado District Builds Belonging Through Community Ties
In a Rooted + Rising reflection, Carmen Anarella argues that rural education in South Routt County, Colorado, cannot be understood by the label rural alone. Drawing on Yampa and the Soroco school district, which spans 500 square miles, she describes a school system whose strength comes from long relationships between students, families, teachers, neighbors and alumni. For Anarella, the defining feature is not remoteness but the way the community keeps showing up for young people — in classrooms, at milestones and during emergencies.
Rural is not the whole description
Carmen Anarella begins with a correction to the easy label. Yampa, Colorado, where she grew up, is rural, but she says that is not what makes the place distinctive. “There are a lot of rural places,” she says, and being rural is “not a very good descriptor” of Soroco, the South Routt County community and school district she uses as the frame for her account.
The more precise fact is scale without density. Soroco is “very big” in land: the school district draws from 500 square miles. That creates an obvious question she names directly: if there is a lot of land and not a lot of people, how does that become a strong community?
Her answer starts with a scene. When Anarella drives home from college in Boulder and stops at the gas station just inside Yampa, she says that as soon as she steps out of the car, she can “feel the love of the community pouring in” from the full 500 square miles. She qualifies the feeling with the fact that she has lived there her whole life — all 20 years — but still offers it as the most accurate description she has.
The point is not that rurality automatically explains closeness. In South Routt, distance does not keep people from knowing one another, responding to one another, and making young people feel seen beyond the school building.
Kindness shows up in an emergency
When Anarella asked a friend, Vicki, what makes Soroco stand out, Vicki’s answer was “the kindness.” Anarella uses that word not as a slogan but as a way to explain how the community behaves under pressure.
The example she gives is an evacuation. In August, while she was moving to college, a forest fire came close enough to her home that she had to evacuate. That morning she had been scheduled to babysit for Vicki’s two sons. Around 5 a.m., watching the flames move in, Anarella texted Vicki that she did not know if she could come. Vicki told her it was okay and that home was where she needed to be.
But Anarella says the story was not only Vicki’s understanding. It was the immediate network response around the evacuation: text messages, FaceTime calls, Facebook posts, offers to help her get safe, help evacuate, cook a meal, or do whatever was needed. She emphasizes that people showed up even from 45 minutes away.
Our community showed up instantly.
The same web of concern that appeared during the fire also helps explain how she describes school life. The people who know whose house is threatened by fire are also the people who know whose child is playing volleyball, graduating, being inducted into NHS, or walking into kindergarten.
The school is not separate from the community
Carmen Anarella’s central point about education in South Routt is that the school and community are mutually embedded.
The community is the school, and the school is the community.
She acknowledges the simple demographic reason this is partly true. In a small place, many residents will naturally have ties to the school building. But she says the relationship is deeper than that. Community members are invested in young people even when their own direct ties have passed. Teachers, advisors, mentors, coaches, neighbors, and people whose children graduated years earlier still appear at volleyball games, NHS inductions, and other student milestones.
This is how education in South Routt extends beyond the classroom. The support is not confined to the staff directory. It comes from people who have been a student’s neighbor, grandmother, teacher, coach, family friend, or audience member. In her own childhood, Anarella says she felt that support in kindergarten, when her neighbor and grandmother were her teachers. She felt it again at graduation, when “every person” she had known since age five was there watching her class walk the stage.
That continuity changes what school feels like in her account. Students are not simply enrolled in a district spread across hundreds of square miles. They are known over time by people who keep showing up — in classrooms, at games, at ceremonies, and in moments of crisis.
A label can miss the relationships that make the school work
Anarella is speaking from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is studying elementary education after a full day of teaching. But she explicitly chooses not to focus on what education looks like for her in Boulder Valley. Her subject is the place that formed her: Yampa and the broader South Routt community.
That choice matters because “rural” names the setting but does not explain the social structure she is describing. The details carry the meaning: a gas station where coming home feels immediate; a fire evacuation met with calls, posts, and offers of help; adults who keep attending student milestones long after their own children have graduated; a kindergarten classroom where family and neighbors are also teachers; a graduation ceremony filled with people who have watched a child grow up.
Anarella is not offering a general account of all rural schools. She is asking for a closer reading of one community where education is tied to long relationships, practical care, and repeated presence. In South Routt, the school is not just a building serving a wide area. It is one of the places where the wider community shows young people that they belong.