As 4 rural schools become 1, students embrace their new shared identity

As dozens of people mingled between food trucks and information tables, many wearing name tags, sports uniforms or black-and-gold T-shirts, Chelsea Endicott leaned in close to a group of girls chattering excitedly.

Chelsea, 14, had just gotten her schedule and toured her new school. She and dozens of others were gathered in a school parking lot for a “meet the Eagles” event two days before the first day of classes.

“It’s really big and very confusing,” Chelsea, a new freshman, told one of the girls in the group, dressed in a cheerleading uniform. 

She, like many of her peers, is used to attending much smaller schools. Her old community high school, Hurley, had enrolled hardly more than 200 students for the past decade.

Now, nearly 800 students in grades eight through 12 from every corner of Buchanan County are in class together at the just-finished Southern Gap High School. 

The school, built over two years at a cost of $92 million, consolidates four high schools on a new campus high above the county’s valleys. Educators hope it will give students like Chelsea better opportunities — the same opportunities many of their ancestors once dreamed of, and worked for, for their children, as they toiled away in the mines that birthed these communities. 

The school itself, spanning 57 acres and three stories, with a cafeteria that feels like a mall food court and eight shop bays for classes like welding and carpentry and automotive, is a dream come true for some educators and school leaders — but rallying the community around it hasn’t been easy. 

Declining population, shrinking schools

The hallways of Southern Gap are lined with exposed steel beams, which stretch like tunnels from the building’s brick-clad center. The design was intentional, according to the architects. It’s meant to evoke the long tunnels of the coal mines that formed the county’s industrial heritage.

Buchanan County is coal country. It lies in the southwest corner of Virginia, bordering Kentucky and West Virginia in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. 

Though Buchanan County covers more than 500 square miles of land, its population is small and dispersed. About 19,000 people lived there as of the 2020 census. 

Many families have been there for generations. Timber first shaped the county, but commercial coal mining brought a population boom. More than 36,700 people called Buchanan County home in 1960. By 1980, that had risen to nearly 38,000. 

Because of the mountainous terrain and the contours of the valleys, people living in small communities scattered across the county often remain isolated. Their schools served as community centers, gathering places and sources of local identity.

But over the years, the cost to maintain aging, under-enrolled facilities became a burden. 

Three of Buchanan’s four now-closed high schools were built in the 1960s, before families left the region as coal mines closed, before the internet and personal computers and career and technical education redefined K-12 education. 

The four schools — Council, Grundy, Hurley and Twin Valley — that were once centers of their tight-knit communities had become outdated and under-used.  

Superintendent Sherry Fletcher was born and raised in Grundy, and her dad and her husband both worked in the mines. She remembers when the school system served nearly 10,000 students. By 2005, enrollment had dropped to 3,500 students. Last year, it was down to 2,200. 

Alumni and those who still live in the county remain proud of their schools’ histories — of Grundy’s legacy as a state wrestling powerhouse, of Hurley’s football field created by blasting off the side of a mountain. But their love for their schools couldn’t prevent floodwaters that threatened some of them or the changing tides of the community.

Fletcher has seen what happens when the population dwindles: Schools close and consolidate.

“It’s bittersweet,” Fletcher said one August morning walking into Southern Gap. “You remember the schools before and the people who have had to leave and find jobs in other places.” 

Four schools under one roof

School consolidation has happened before in Southwest Virginia. In 2015, neighboring Dickenson County opened Ridgeview High School, which consolidated Clintwood, Ervinton and Haysi highs and is now one of Southern Gap’s biggest rivals.

In the decade since, Virginia’s public school enrollment has declined about 3.2%, while Buchanan County’s has dropped 24%.

But the decision to close schools is rarely any easy or quick one.

In December 2020, the Buchanan County School Board voted 4-2 to consolidate Grundy, Hurley and Twin Valley high schools on a new campus at Southern Gap. 

For years, the county, with the help of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, had been working to floodproof or relocate the Buchanan County Career and Technical Center and Hurley High School, which, like many areas in Buchanan County, is in a floodplain dating back to the flood of 1977.

Only when federal disaster relief funding became available in 2019 did those dreams become a reality. 

Though Hurley High was eligible for floodproofing money, officials ultimately decided moving and consolidating multiple schools would be a better use of the millions that the Army Corps was contributing to the project. 

Some Buchanan County families raised concerns about the location for the new school — situated on former coal mining land on a high mountaintop — and the long bus rides it would require for some students. 

As in many rural communities, bus drivers are hard to come by and narrow, winding roads can slow buses down, particularly in inclement weather.

Chelsea, for example, will spend over an hour on the bus each day to get to Southern Gap, which is a 45-minute drive by car from her home. Hurley High was about 10 minutes. One of her classmates said she’ll get picked up by the bus at 5:50 a.m., though the first bell doesn’t ring until 8:15 a.m. 

At the time of the 2020 vote, then-school board member Robbie Cline, who represented Hurley, argued against the location chosen for the new school.

“A majority don’t want this,” he said. “Nobody is against a new school; they’re just against the location. It’s not right.”

Council High, which is even farther from Southern Gap, initially wasn’t part of discussions for many of the same reasons. In August 2025, a school board vote to add it to the consolidation plans failed.

The debate came up for a vote again in February 2026, at which point the school board voted 4-2 to to include Council in the consolidation plans in order to give the school’s 100 students “the opportunities, the same programs, the same courses and the same quality education” the county’s other students would get at Southern Gap, board member Brian Looney told WCYB at the time.

Building new traditions

Every Southern Gap student was called into the gym on the first day of school last month. 

Assembled together, they filled the bleachers on one side of the massive fieldhouse, which houses three full-sized basketball courts.

Each student was given a black-and-gold Southern Gap Eagles T-shirt. Staff members had received their own polos — well, most of them had. One of the few boxes misplaced in the move was filled with polos, principal Mark Cooper said.

“From day one, we’re going to preach family,” Cooper said in an interview a few days before school started. “We’re not bringing anything from the four schools. We’re not bringing anything from Hurley, Grundy, Twin Valley or Council, and no longer are kids from Hurley, Grundy, Twin Valley and Council. Everybody is one, everybody is from Buchanan County.”

The adults in the community have been more concerned about the consolidation than the students have, Cooper said. Both he and Fletcher noted that kids have been playing in Little League and rec leagues together for years.

“The hardest people to really sell this on [are] the adults. But once they see the kids coming together, working together and being one, it will take place,” Cooper said.

Rachel Tackett, a senior, previously went to Grundy, but she also took courses at the career and technical center and had friends all over the county, she said.

“I have a lot of friends from the different schools, so I was really excited to all be together,” she said.

She was one of several students who worked with local artist Johnny Hagerman to design and install a brick sculpture of an Eagle at the new school.

“It’s really cool to know that I’m going to be a part of the school, like from the ground up,” she said.

Despite the long histories of the other schools, Cooper decided the new school was “starting from scratch.”

Though the student body and the staff are the same — no employees wound up jobless through the consolidation, according to Fletcher and Cooper — few remnants of the other schools are apparent in the new building at Southern Gap.

Fletcher said she sought advice from superintendents in other communities that had consolidated schools. Sports trophies were a particularly sensitive decision, she said.

Council’s will remain at the old school because county officials are in talks to turn it into a community center. Grundy’s decades of wrestling trophies and other sports memorabilia will be displayed in town somewhere through funding from the Grundy Industrial Development Authority. Where Hurley and Twin Valley’s will go isn’t clear — Hurley High and the old career and technical education center are being torn down.

But none are on display at Southern Gap. 

Only teachers’ personal items and some of the library books came over from the old schools. The furniture is new. So is the equipment in the large career and technical wing of the building.

That wing of the building houses shop bays for welding and carpentry, computer labs and classrooms outfitted with design software and 3D printers, a cosmetology studio with pedicure chairs and salon stations, and nursing rooms with hospital beds and full-sized bathrooms for students training to be home health aides. 

It also houses the school’s more than 130 teachers and staff members, many of whom are praising what they say are incredible opportunities for students.

Kayla Cantrell, an engineering, drafting and drone instructor and the robotics coach, is excited to finally “be all in one building.”

She previously taught out of the CTE center, and students who wanted to take such courses — which often offer college credit or the chance to earn industry credentials — had to ride the bus from their home campus to the CTE center in Grundy. 

For Council High students, the ride was over an hour, limiting their options depending on their schedule. 

“Now our kids don’t have to choose between taking a half a day of classes at the CTE [center] and missing out on something at their school. Now they can just go down the hall and do both,” Cooper said.

Now, Cantrell and other teachers hope students will be able to take advantage of every opportunity the school offers — and in turn, maybe the school can help the community thrive as well.

“I would love for Southern Gap High School to be just that centerpiece of our community that everyone gets behind, that our local businesses and our organizations can support — and we can partner and do things together, so in turn, that helps them grow,” said Megan Wolford, a teacher and coach who previously worked at both Grundy and Hurley high schools.

The benefits of the larger school also go beyond academics, school leaders say. 

Sports teams that previously had struggled to field a full roster now have varsity and junior varsity teams. Some, like the girls volleyball team, even had to cut students who tried out.

The school’s athletic teams compete in the Class 2 of the Virginia High School League — a step up from Class 1, where the four schools previously competed due to their smaller student bodies.

In recent years, Hurley High’s football team had about 18 kids. Grundy saw some of its lowest numbers last school year with 22 players, and Council didn’t even field a team, Cooper said.

This year, the Southern Gap Eagles football team has 46 players.

In previous years, the band director was shared among all four high schools, according to the superintendent. Now he has a full-size band room down the hall from a massive auditorium.

“We used to have one of the best bands in the area,” Cooper said.  “Now our band is up in numbers. We’re going to have enough kids for theater, drama, and our choir.  These kids have an opportunity. Because there were kids with talent that couldn’t be seen because we didn’t offer that.”