♪♪ I'm Larry McNutt.

I'm the K-12 School Principal here at Diagonal.

♪♪ (bell rings) Larry: We have 113 students in K-12 and then we also have a preschool on campus and also we have a daycare.

♪♪ Larry: Our ratio is pretty good.

In most classes it's about 7 or 8 students to every teacher.

Anna Newton: I'm Anna Newton and I'm a junior.

With the smaller class sizes, we know the teachers a little more.

We're a little - so, some of the teachers we know outside of school too.

You answer a lot more questions because there's less of you.

My parents graduated here.

I get a lot more one-on-one time with teachers.

It's kind of home.

Larry: A lot of it is our community.

They are very adamant that they want to keep a high school here.

So you see a lot of towns where they've lost their school, the town goes with it.

And our community wants to be a thriving community and they want their kids to go to school at Diagonal.

So that's really the big thing.

And we feel like our small numbers is very beneficial for the students in the classroom.

Our teachers can do a lot of hands-on activities with our kids where you get bigger schools and there's 30 kids in a class you can't do that.

So, the kids get a lot of individual attention they wouldn't necessarily get at a bigger school and we feel like that's a big benefit that we can offer.

Anna: Our community is very hands-on with each other.

So we know everyone, everyone knows you, whether you like it or not.

We are -- I feel like we're just really close knit as a - we're practically family around here.

Larry: I think we have a lot of small town small school pride.

Our staff really works together and I would say our students do the same.

We have very few discipline issues.

Our kids are really well-behaved and they want to do well in school and life.

And we're a small farming, rural community and everybody is willing to help each other out to be successful.

Anna: I like how close we are as a community.

You don't get to see that in a lot of other places.

I like - there's a whole bunch of role models over here that you see almost every day.

Larry: They always say it takes a village to be successful and that's really what we have here.

Everybody, if you need help with something there's always people there willing to help and I think that is really what makes us special.

(nature sounds & kids playing)