Earlier this month, the 137-year-old University of Wyoming (UW) Lab School sent its students home for summer vacation for the very last time. Last year, UW gave the Albany County School District notice they wouldn’t be renewing their agreement to house the school. A last ditch effort by state lawmakers to pass a bill to rescue the school also failed.
The Lab School was started as a place to train teachers. That was way back when Wyoming was still aspiring to statehood.
Virginia Chai came to the school for her teacher training. Later, all four of her children attended, and, for over a decade, she worked there as the administrative assistant. Chai said the school’s final day of classes was painful.
“There [were] so many children that were really uneasy,” Chai said. “So many that lingered in the office wanting to say goodbye to special teachers. Lots of tears. Lots of hugs. So much uncertainty. I tried to encourage them, ‘It's going to be good. It's gonna be okay. These new schools are gonna be great. They're gonna welcome you.’ I don't really know that. I mean, I hope that it's going to be the same,” she said with tears in her voice.
When asked in what way it wasn’t going to be the same, she said, “I think the smallness of our school, not just class size, but that we only have like max 300 students at a time really has helped them. And I think they feel seen, and I feel like larger schools, it's just hard to be seen. It's hard to have connections. And some of our kids are, they're anxious kids. They need somebody to just say, ‘Hey, you're, you're good. We see you. We appreciate that you're here, even if you're late!’ I think that's how we're different.”
Chai grew up in a small town in South Dakota and said she’d never experienced teaching and learning like what she saw in those classrooms.
“A lot of it was student-led and really authentic learning. They were building tepees in classrooms and deep diving into Egyptian history and complex mathematics, where they would take certain problems and go at it in different ways. Just a very special place.”
Chai said up until recently, the school district treated Lab School teachers as experts in their fields.
“They were given freedom, they were given the chance to choose how they taught, and you could tell the students were just on fire for learning,” Chai said.
But the former head teacher of the Lab School, Meredith McLaughlin, said that changed three years ago when longtime principal Margaret Hudson retired. McLaughlin said the Albany County Superintendent John Goldhardt hired a replacement without getting input from the university or other stakeholders, something she said she didn’t think the district had ever done in the school’s history.
McLaughlin worked at Lab School for over two decades.
“Brooke Fergon was appointed as a principal; she was elected with zero stakeholder input. She fired and threatened staff and she could throw a party celebrating the closure of a 138-year-old school? Plenty of those teachers lost those jobs and she was moved into an assistant principal position at Laramie High School,” McLaughlin said.
“When people ask me what happened to Lab School, I'm like, ‘Really, only one thing happened at the Lab School. Lab School stakeholders couldn't choose their own principal. And that's it. That's the only thing that really happened.’ And now, who was empowered to prevent that from happening? John Goldhardt. We can talk about the College of Ed, and they certainly could have saved it. The University of Wyoming could have stepped up and saved it, but they were not the ones who killed it. The University of Wyoming was not, and I know because I was there. I lived it,” said McLaughlin.
She said the culture of the school changed when Fergon became principal. The school had long been known for its unique outdoor education and hands-on learning approach for students from kindergarten through 8th grade. Since its inception, McLaughlin said the school used a site-based management approach, giving teachers the creative space to develop curriculum. Now, the school district had different ideas.
“One of the things that happened to us. One of the reasons that I left is I knew I would be disciplined if I didn't implement Wit and Wisdom. I knew that was gonna happen, and I also knew I was an extremely successful English teacher who did not need that,” McLaughlin said. “It's a scripted curriculum program that is used as the hook, line and sinker curriculum by Albany County School District and of several other school districts around the state.”
McLaughlin said she doesn’t have a problem with the curriculum itself, even though it wasn’t developed by the Wyoming Department of Education but from a for-profit Virginia company called Great Minds. But she does have a problem with its implementation.
“For example, Patty Smith, who took my job, chose not to use the Wit and Wisdom curriculum. She had to have a weekly meeting with Brooke, the principal, with one instructional facilitator who demanded that she write down everything she was going to say in the classroom. Are you kidding me?” McLaughlin said. “It’s scary. It's terrifying. We really do need to find a way to restore education to the public and public to education. It's really imperative for a democracy right now. And if you look at the exodus around the state, other school districts around the state who are like, it's my way or the highway and you'll hear that all over the state. The term for it is moral injury. We suffered moral injury.”
McLaughlin was willing to share her story now because she is no longer an employee with the Albany County School District. She is currently a doctoral researcher at the University College London and moving to Illinois to teach educators there.
“Were we always way more qualified than we should have been to be teaching kids in school? Sure, we had multiple degrees, but we would've done it until the day we died because it meant something. It was a dialogue between families and children and you,” said McLaughlin. “When that was taken away and you were told that you must do something that you knew weren't what families needed or children needed or wanted, then you're doing something that's against your integrity, and if you are threatened with your job security to leave, then you're gonna leave because it is a moral injury to stay.”
Virginia Chai, the school’s administrative assistant, said, to the school district’s credit, they’ve hired some former Lab School teachers as part of an extension team to share their methods with other schools in the district.
But Chai has some advice for the district going forward.
“You have to allow your educators to be creative,” Chai said. “Otherwise, they're not going to stay. I know of probably 10 teachers who have left our district because it's just been really unbearable, the management of them.”
Wyoming Public Radio reached out to both former principal Brooke Fergon and Superintendent John Goldhardt for their comments. Fergon didn’t reply by press time. In response to questions about his hiring process and the change of culture at the school, Goldhardt replied, “It would not only be illegal, but highly unethical to discuss personnel issues,” and that, “The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees made a decision to close the Lab School. We are moving forward with that decision and preparing a positive transition for former Lab students to their neighborhood schools.”
