The Clark County (Nevada) School District (CCSD) has permanently closed Goodsprings Elementary School after 113 years.
The campus in unincorporated Clark County about 45 minutes south of Las Vegas had been considered the oldest school in the state. But as the school year ended, it had only two students.
Goodsprings Elementary School opened in 1913 and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The school board in April approved the repurposing of Goodsprings Elementary School and the reassignment of any K-5 students in in the Goodsprings area to Sandy Valley Elementary School.
The rural schoolhouse had staved off closure in the past, but with only one student expected to attend next year, district officials determined the $1 million cost to keep the school running was not worth the price.
Its two employees have accepted other jobs in the district.
The school district says the Goodsprings Historical Society has pushed to turn the school into a museum. The Las Vegas-Clark County Library District has also shown interest in relocating its adjacent library into the historic building.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that the town of Goodsprings made its name as a mining hub, but has shrunk substantially over the last century as industry went elsewhere, according to Mary Blake, the secretary of the Goodsprings Historical Society.
An abundance of lead and zinc in the nearby Yellow Pine Mine made Goodsprings a prime place to harvest minerals used in bullets and batteries during World War I, Blake said. At one point in the 1910s, the town’s population of around 2,500 people made it bigger than Las Vegas.
But demand for zinc and lead dried up post-war, and after the town’s ore processing mill burned down for the third time in the 1930s, the mine went out of business, Blake said. The latest census data puts Goodsprings’ population at 162.
