The increase in numbers of residents between 1890 and 1920 in Walsenburg, the nearby town of La Veta, and the area’s many coal camps was accompanied by growing educational enrollment. Elementary age children residing in the coal camps typically attended camp schools, which were more often than not established and controlled by the mining companies. Those who lived in the towns of Walsenburg and La Veta, as well as the children from mining camps close to town, were more likely to attend the public schools in those communities.

By the 1910s, many schools built during the pioneer era of the 1800s had aged and were no longer capable of handling the numbers of students attending them. They were also sorely lacking in modern technological improvements such as centralized systems of heating, ventilation, plumbing and electricity. Although economic conditions differed from one locale to another in Colorado, many school districts in growing areas of the state experienced the same general concerns and challenges during the first decades of the 20th century. Through public debate and the allocation of funding, progressive supporters of modern education (who often also opposed child labor) led their communities toward the goals of constructing new schools, consolidating small districts into larger ones, and establishing public high schools to encourage families to seek a higher level of education for their children.

The first high school in Huerfano County was established in Walsenburg in 1892, with one teacher instructing eleven children attending grades seven through twelve. Graduation exercises were first held in 1897. Four years later the number of graduating students had risen to twenty-one and in 1901 the district inaugurated its first four-year course of high school instruction. These early classes were held in the Odd Fellows Hall in Walsenburg. In 1906 the school became known as Huerfano County High School even though it had no building of its own. Ten years later, classes were held in the Armory Building, which burned the following year. The high school then moved into the old Hill School and Chapman Hall, with classes meeting six days each week during World War I. In 1916 the combined population of both Walsenburg and La Veta High Schools was approximately 140 students.

During the 1910s, Walsenburg boasted three brick public school buildings, in which a total of twentyfive teachers were employed at an average salary of $98 per month. By 1919 the county school system was made up of forty-one districts with 110 teachers working at sixty-two buildings scattered throughout the countryside, a number of them at area coal camps. The county system in 1916 was educating a total of just over 3,500 students. These rural teachers made an average of $80 per month. All of the town and country schools handled primary grades one through eight, with some children from the two dozen coal mines immediately surrounding Walsenburg attending school in town. Walsenburg High School operated under the guidance of Principal Charles Albert Johnson, who remained in this position from 1917 through 1927 and was the new Huerfano County High School’s first principal after 1920. Walsenburg had over 1,700 children enrolled in its primary and high schools in 1919, approximately 140 of them in the upper grades. In addition to the public schools, Walsenburg maintained a Catholic school with a total enrollment of 500-600 children.

The small percentage of older children able to continue their education attended either Union High School in La Veta or Walsenburg High School. Most of the children from the coal camps did not attend high school at all, partly due to their restrictive distance from the schools at a time when traveling even five miles each way presented a major challenge for students with no access to transportation. Others did not attend because the mining camp mentality stressed practical learning, viewing higher education as an unnecessary luxury for children destined to become miners and miners’ wives. In addition, each family sending a child to high school was required to pay one dollar per month in tuition, a sum that struggling miners could not afford. Teenage boys typically ended up working in the mines, while the girls became wives and started having children themselves. The end result of this combination of discouraging factors was that few children from the coal mines attended school beyond the eighth grade.

Among the several thousand students receiving public school education in Huerfano County were hundreds from coal mining families, many of them with immigrant parents who were not only illiterate but spoke little English. In 1920, thirty percent of the students were classified by a recent census as of “Spanish” background, thirty percent of other undefined races (probably what would be classified as “nationalities” rather than “races” today), and the remainder of English, Scottish and Irish origin.

Attendance at school, for as many years as possible, was seen by civic leaders and reformers as the key to helping these children from working-class, immigrant households become Americanized, providing them with the tools they would need to succeed in life. The schools in Huerfano County acted as melting pots that brought children of many different nationalities together to forge a common bond as Americans. Even with this laudable goal, however, they often found the school environment filled with tension between different ethnic groups and between town-dwellers and coal mining families. Progressive reformers persisted though with their belief that education would eventually conquer these divisions. Together with securing adequate funding and hiring dedicated administrators and teachers, the most important factor in delivering on the promise of education was having modern school buildings in which teaching and learning could effectively take place.

By 1917 the building used by the high school in Walsenburg had aged and reached its limits to accommodate students. On November 1, the interior suffered fire damage and had to be rebuilt. Although this was accomplished within a few months, some of the families and civic leaders of Huerfano County began to press for the construction of a modern high school building for their children. However before the majority of citizens would approve the funding for a new school, the public had to be convinced that such a large expenditure was really necessary.