Original Research by School Decision on Clawson Elementary
Clawson Elementary sits in Horse Creek, a tiny unincorporated community in western Laramie County, along a rural state highway roughly thirty miles northwest of Cheyenne. The area is high-plains ranchland with no downtown core, no sidewalks, and no commercial activity to speak of. The community once had a general store and bar that served workers at a nearby limestone mine, but that mine closed years ago and the post office shut down in the early 2010s. Residents today commute to Cheyenne or surrounding areas for work and services. The school itself is part of Laramie County School District #1, the county's large district headquartered in Cheyenne, but Clawson operates as its own small outpost serving kindergarten through sixth grade.
This is an extraordinarily small school. Total enrollment sits at just a handful of students spread across the early grades, with most of them in kindergarten and first grade and none currently in the upper elementary grades. The student body is predominantly white with a small Hispanic presence. Free-or-reduced-price lunch data, individualized education program rates, and English learner counts were not reported, so it is not possible to characterize the economic or special-population makeup from what is available. A parent considering this school would want to ask the district directly about those details.
Academically, almost nothing can be said from the state testing record. The school did have a fourth-grade student participate in Wyoming's WY-TOPP assessment in math, English language arts, and science, but proficiency rates were not reported. This is typical for schools where the number of tested students is so small that publishing results would effectively identify an individual child. The same suppression applies to average scale scores and participation figures. There is no multi-year trend data available either. State testing data, as a practical matter, cannot tell a parent much about academic outcomes at Clawson, and the reason is the tiny tested population rather than any indication of performance one way or the other.
Because the school does not serve high school grades, there is no graduation rate to report, and that is expected for an elementary configuration. Chronic absenteeism figures were also not available. The neighbor comparison, which positions schools relative to districts in Laramie County, could not place Clawson on proficiency, graduation, or attendance because the underlying values are missing. No staffing, course access, discipline, or attendance data was provided, and no program offerings were listed. The district brief turned up little of lasting parent-relevant change, so there is nothing to relay on that front.
What a family is looking at here is a rural, multi-grade elementary school in a community with almost no local infrastructure. The setting means small class sizes and likely close attention from whoever is teaching, but it also means limited peer groups, especially as children move into the upper elementary years where current enrollment is zero. A parent would want to understand how the district handles instruction when grades have no students enrolled, whether children are combined across grade levels, and what happens when students age out of sixth grade and need to transition to a larger school closer to Cheyenne. Transportation is another practical question, given the distance from Horse Creek to the district's main facilities.
For a family already living in or drawn to this remote corner of Laramie County, Clawson represents a deeply personal, small-scale educational setting. Whether that fits depends heavily on what a parent wants for their child's social environment and academic routine, and the available data cannot answer that on its own. Conversations with the district and a visit to the school would be the next step.
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