LAGRANGE – One day in January, Charlie Meier drove U.S. 85 from LaGrange into Torrington. 

She was near the midpoint of her 45th year of teaching at LaGrange Elementary School – the smallest school in the county in its southernmost population center. She drove past Bomgaars, past the grocery stores, and turned from Main Street toward the Goshen County School District No. 1 Central Office. 

About a block from the Central Office, she says she had a funny feeling in her stomach, and then a sense of peace came over her. 

Tucked beside her in the car was a letter to the district announcing her retirement from the only teaching job she’s ever held. In her heart, she just knew the time was right. 

“I have such a peace about this decision,” she said. “I thought I would have a lot of trouble with it. When I wrote the letter in January, I thought ‘how am I going to write this letter?’ It just came right out of me. The only time I had any kind of qualm about it was when I was about a block away from Central. I had a little funny feeling in my stomach. That was it. I have such a peace about this. It’s time.” 

When the final bell rings for the 2018-2019 school year, it will be the last time Meier leads her troop of kindergarten and first grade students from her classroom and out to the buses. That bell will signify the end of an era in LaGrange, and when school starts in August, a new teacher will be waiting for those students.

“It’s time,” she said. “Sometimes, you just know.”

The long road to LaGrange

It’s hard to imagine now, especially after Meier has been such a pillar in the LaGrange community and has taught most of the people in southern Goshen County how to read, but she didn’t always want to be a teacher. 

Meier was born in Minnesota, then her family moved to Iowa. By her own admission, school wasn’t something she enjoyed growing up – but she beat the odds and attended Iowa State. She originally majored in distributed studies. Her interests were in art, math, design – and pretty far away from education. 

“I didn’t originally go to college to be a teacher,” she said. “I spent about a year not sure what I was going to school for, but I was going on to school.”

Meier originally tried her hand in the insurance industry during a summer break in Kansas City, where she mostly handled clerical tasks. The position was good for two reasons – it made her realize she didn’t want to work in the insurance business, and it indirectly provided her first experience working with kids. She spent that summer living with her sister and brother-in-law, who had friends with young children. Meier landed some babysitting gigs – and that was the seed. 

“All of them were saying to me ‘have you ever thought of working with kids? You’re really good with kids,’” she said. 

When she returned to Iowa State the next semester, she took an elementary education class. 

“One day, I took an elementary education class and said ‘hey, I think this is really what I want to do,’” she said. “I started working with different church groups. I did a pilot program through Iowa State where I did an extra student teaching, so I had more experience with the kids. The more I did it, the more I realized I enjoyed working with these kids.”

After she graduated, Meier spent a few months in limbo. She had an opportunity in Illinois that fell through, then took off to Los Angeles, Calif., to try her hand at finding a job in a big city. She came up empty-handed, and her parents told her to come back home to Iowa. 

“My parents got frustrated, called me and said ‘you get back here to Iowa and join a teaching placement service,’” she said.

“They would scout the country to find positions that were open, then for a fee they would give you listings of areas that had jobs. I went back to Iowa and joined this service. The first things they told me about were jobs in LaGrange and Anchorage, Alaska.”

Anchorage was out because of the cold. Meier called LaGrange Elementary School and interviewed with then-principal Harley Harris. Finally, he gave her the nod in October 1974. She got her start teaching third and fourth grade.

“I hopped in my car and across South Dakota I came,” she said. “The closer I got, the more I remember thinking, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”

‘The new 

schoolmarm’

LaGrange is a town that can make you feel like a time traveler. 

Thanks to a subpar internet connection, the kids in LaGrange spend a lot of time playing at the town park and at the school playground. They ride bikes around town and they play games. Cell phones are rare. 

The town has two places to grab a bite – the Longhorn Café and Stemler’s Café. Neither place will break the bank, and you’re greeted with a smile when you walk in either door. The probability of having a cowboy tip his hat in your direction on his way out is high. Even today, it’s basically an episode of Gunsmoke set in Mayberry. 

And in 1974, it was something Meier – right on the heels of her L.A. adventure – had never experienced. 

She spent her first night in Goshen County in Torrington, and drove into LaGrange the next day. 

“I stopped by that little church in the entryway,” she said, recalling her first trip to LaGrange. “There were some roofers out on top of the church. I hollered out ‘could you please tell me where the school is?’ One of them looked down and said ‘you must be the new schoolmarm.’”

Meier spent the day getting a feel for the school. 

“I looked at it and they offered me the job,” she said. “I looked at it and said ‘I can last a year.’”

The school looks a lot different in 2019 than it did when Meier arrived. At the time, it was a bustling building with elementary, junior high and high schools. The class sizes were larger – there were 28 students in Meier’s first class, compared to the classes of six or eight students that are common in LES today.

In 2019, LaGrange Elementary has four main classrooms – the library, kindergarten and first grade, second and third grades, and fourth, fifth and sixth grades. In 1974, it was the equivalent of a large, one-room schoolhouse with four certified teachers and one teacher’s aide who doubled as the librarian. 

“When I came here, this whole school was open,” she said. “There were no walls. When I walked in here, this whole elementary had no walls. It was one large, open room. The library was the circular core to the whole room.”

That layout was essential to the school’s teaching philosophy. Kids were still divided into grades by age, but would travel to whichever classroom was providing a lesson at the level they needed. Today, students are grouped according to age level, and the curriculum is dictated by that grouping. 

“The idea was that you ability-grouped the kids,” she said. “Once you opened the day in your area, then you went about going to whatever class you were supposed to be in. I taught science, social studies and art. I taught third and fourth grade reading, writing and English class, but if there were kids in other areas that needed to come into that from wherever they were, they would come in.”

Eventually, modern teaching trends and federal requirements caught up with LaGrange and walls were built between the classes. But, according to Meier, the people in LaGrange are what made her stick it out and call it home. 

“I fell in love with the people,” she said. “There were a couple of times I actually did look at other positions. I kept coming back here because teaching multi-grade classrooms is the best of all worlds. It has built in enrichment, it has built-in remediation and it’s right on grade level. “When I reflect back on the 45 years and I reflect on a couple of times I considered leaving, I realize that I had the best of all worlds here. I had gotten to work with kindergarten through sixth grade, all grade levels. I understood the scope and sequence so well of what different children should be able to do at different levels, and that helped me with the particular level I was working in. I keep going back to multi-grade levels. It’s a wonderful experience.”

And, of course, the kids made it easy to stay in LaGrange. 

“They have a good work ethic,” she said. “That comes out of the ranching community and the Bible school. They are respectful, not only of other people, but of property. When you look around the school, it’s pretty clean and they respect each other. 

“There’s just a respect for each other. It’s a throwback to another era. They’re not as worldly as kids in other areas.”

Meier enjoyed her work, and spent her weekends learning about local history and sight-seeing. She met Curt, her husband and current Wyoming Treasurer. That one-year commitment turned into a life and career. 

“This has just been such a wonderful opportunity,” she said. 

A master

Watching Charlie Meier with her class is to watch a master at work. 

Her students, between five and seven years old, are on task. She makes her way around the room, makes careful eye contact with each one to show that she cares about them and what they’re working on. She gives them suggestions, but lets them be themselves.

In her files, she has work from hundreds of students throughout the years. She sometimes gifts it to them as their time at LaGrange Elementary draws to an end, or sometimes even years later. As she was going through her files in preparation she found a piece of artwork from a student who is now a principal in Idaho. Meier said she plans to send it to her former student. 

There’s a lot of ways teachers are measured. There are ever-changing and increasingly-demanding accountability standards, principal evaluations, master’s degrees and National Board Certifications. Meier has something that cannot be measured by any of those metrics, but it’s apparent when she’s working with her students – an unbridled passion for her work. 

“I have had so many people tell me that, and it’s my everyday life,” she said. “I don’t know what it is that people see. It’s been a true blessing and when I reflect on the 45 years, I am so fortunate that the few times I considered leaving here, I didn’t.”

When Meier talks about her former students, her eyes wander around the room. Instinctively, after all the years, she can remember where students sat in her rooms. Her current principal, Tim Williams, sat in the back corner of the room when he was in her class. When she talks about him, that’s where she looks. 

“I told him the other day, when you used to sit in that corner, never did I think you’d be my boss someday,” she said.

Williams was the beneficiary of Meier’s passion, which he still sees on display when he visits her classroom. 

“I think to stick around for 45 years, you’ve got to like what you do,” Williams said. “She’s made a big difference in the lives of a lot of kids over the years. She definitely has a true passion for what she does. She’s been a staple in that community and in that school for a long time.”

According to Meier, it’s fun to see the cycle. 

“It’s a wonderful cycle of life, to watch kids grow up and have their families and see their little kids coming in. It’s just wonderful to be able to share in their lives. Life is a cycle and it’s wonderful to be a part of that cycle in so many families.”

She got to see that cycle with Brandy Thaler Evans, a former student, and her sons, Hadley and Hudson. Thaler Evans said she remembers doing the same activity with Meier on her first day of school that Hudson did this year. That, she said, triggered some memories of her own time in Meier’s class and made it easier to send her sons to school. 

“It made it less stressful to send our kids off to kindergarten, but I knew they were in good hands,” Thaler Evans said. “I knew they would get the best education possible and it gave me some security. I knew I would feel comfortable being able to go to her, knowing that with her experience I was getting good, honest feedback and insight as to what was going on in the classroom.”

A goal accomplished

Eventually, the calendar will turn ahead to August 2019. 

After a summer at home, the kids will come pouring back into LaGrange Elementary. They’ll be showing off their new clothes, new backpacks and sizing up one another to see who grew the most over the break. It will look like the start of any other school year at first glance, but there will be something missing. 

For the first time since 1974, Charlie Meier won’t be teaching there. 

The classroom she worked her magic in, the first one on the right, will be set up differently, her decorations and props that have become trademark will be gone and someone new will be greeting the kindergarteners and first graders. Current fifth grader Macy Tremain has never known school without Meier – who even taught Tremain’s aunts and uncles. She said it’s going to be different. 

“It’s going to be really weird to see the classroom because I’m so used to it,” Tremain said. “I’ll really miss her.”

Neither Hadley Evans, a current fourth grader, nor his mother, Brandy Thaler Evans, can picture it yet.  

“It’s going to be weird,” Hadley Evans said. “Her room is going to be all changed up and a lot of things are going to be different.”

“It is going to be weird,” his mother echoed. “We’re definitely going to miss her. She’s definitely a staple of LaGrange and the school for so long. You don’t think of the LaGrange School and not think of her.”

Even Williams, Meier’s former student and current principal who was tasked with hiring someone to replace her, will be facing his first year of school without Meier. 

“When somebody has established themselves – and look at how many administrators has she been through, how many superintendents has she been through – she’s been a staple there for 45 years,” he said. “When you take (Meier) away, it’ll be different for sure.”

But Meier is looking forward to the change. She said she plans to stay busy, and hopes to volunteer her time in a library or an adult literacy program. She also has two quilts that she’s been meaning to finish for the better part of a decade. 

“It’s time for me to do something else,” she said. 

And after 45 years in the classroom, Meier has accomplished her single, solitary goal – and she’s at peace. 

“My goal has always been to make sure every child has a positive experience in education,” she said. “They may not be a doctor, or a lawyer or whatever, but that’s not the important thing. It’s whatever they choose to do and do well and they’re happy with it.”