bad year for horses

Kind of interesting article, in light of me complaining about the rudeness of the world right now

I didn't realize this, but four staff/faculty members have horses, before the previous music teacher left we were a five horse community.

I guess I am surprised that there are so many horses. Mostly because I never think of the Adirondacks as horse country. There are a lot of horses though.

And now three of the horses have not been so good, in fact one --- Legs --- needed to be put down last night. Sad. I see the bond with horses is different, perhaps stronger, than the one people have with their cats and dogs. Two others are going through difficult times, one with a nasty leg infection, the other perhaps suffering a stroke.

One of the difficulties of this is where I live is in the middle of nowhere. I say it is not needed to say: "drive an hour and turn right" when giving directions, since everyone knows, that is how far you go before you really are close to some place. When you need a large animal veterinarian, they make a four hour house call or you trailer the animal to the vet.

It's a long horse ride out of Dodge.

Which is one of the most difficult things for alternative education in a small school. Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) is suppose to serve rural schools like us with services that would be difficult to afford in a little town of 1,700. Like auto mechanics, cosmetology and some special education services. Our BOCES is centered an hour and a half away from us, most of our BOCES students are on a bus for two hours a day. There are 4-5 small schools in a 30 mile radius of my school and all of them need to put students on a bus. How nice it would be to have a BOCES facility that is in the middle those schools.

As fuel prices climb, the cost to educate six to 10 students escalates. The downfall of a small school is it will eventually costs more to educate a third of the student population as it does the other two thirds. Worse, if a small school can't survive, then it costs that much to educate everyone, as you put all students on buses to the next town.

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