After its leader’s death, KY’s last settlement school fights to preserve a legacy
CORDIA, Ky. — Tensions flared late last month for the second time in six years between the Knott County Board of Education and a remote and beloved settlement school that has fought to preserve its place in the Appalachian community it has served for nearly a century.
With students set to return next week, the school district said it needed an updated structural engineering report and proof of liability insurance for Cordia School, which is owned by the nonprofit Lotts Creek Community School Inc. and leased to the district.
The district set an initial June 1 deadline for the documents, but the nonprofit failed to provide them on time. The school board extended the deadline four times, at one point warning that students could be reassigned to other schools if the paperwork wasn’t produced.
All the documents were finally delivered by July 23, two days before the final deadline, averting an immediate crisis just weeks before the start of the school year.
The scramble over paperwork illustrates the challenge of preserving one of Eastern Kentucky’s rare surviving settlement schools after the loss of Alice Whitaker, the strong-willed former director who spent decades holding together its finances, community relationships and sometimes-fragile partnership with the public school district. Whitaker died in April 2025.
Donations to Lotts Creek Community School Inc. have fallen by 50-60% since 2020, and programs once sustained by Whitaker’s fundraising — including individualized college scholarships for nearly every graduating senior — have been impacted. Now, as the nonprofit tries to rebuild, some of its board members fear the loss of Whitaker has also left Cordia more vulnerable to pressure from a school district that has, at times, had an uneasy relationship with the independently owned public school.
“They’ve been trying to consolidate us since 1975 when all the other schools consolidated into Knott County Central High School,” said Joel Melton, a teacher and nonprofit board member. “The original crest for Knott County Central had a lion head in it; Cordia was supposed to be a part of that consolidation, but our founder fought and got us removed from that consolidation.”
Cordia is a school unlike others
Cordia School began in 1933 as a settlement school, part of a movement of individuals and community members to bring education, health care and other social services into isolated communities throughout Central Appalachia. Geographically isolated pockets of the region made public schools scarce and hard to reach, and settlement schools filled that gap, often serving as more than just schools by providing access to basic services in impoverished, rugged communities.
Improved roads and the spread of public education in rural areas reduced the need for many of those schools in Eastern Kentucky. Some switched missions and continued operating, like the nearby Hindman Settlement School that transitioned into a specialized center for dyslexia tutoring and cultural heritage. Harlan County’s Pine Mountain Settlement School is a destination today for environmental and traditional Appalachian learning.
But Cordia remained a pre-K-12 school, because the unique needs of the community never really shifted, said Deanna Wicker, the school’s principal and another nonprofit board member.
“If a child walked in this building right now and has, God forbid, an accident or something, we’ve got the facilities here to take care of them physically and emotionally in ways only a place like this can,” she said. “Our community supports us because they know that we support them. They know that they can call at whatever time and say, ‘I need food,’ and we’re going to find a way to get them that food or clothes, or care.”
The school now serves about 180 students from preschool through 12th grade in a remote Knott County holler.
The unusual arrangement whereby the district leases the property owned by a community-oriented nonprofit gives Cordia something other schools in the district don’t have: a nonprofit outside the school system that can raise money and respond to needs that may fall outside the public school district’s budget.
The nonprofit operates a local food bank, and Cordia provides a natural point of distribution for food, clothing and other necessities, said Wicker.
People see the needs of Appalachia through its children, said Ron Worley, Whitaker’s son and new director of the Lotts Creek Community School nonprofit.
“Cordia school is the backbone of this community,” Worley said.
The loss of a fundraiser and a bridge
Whitaker, who died unexpectedly last year, has left a hole in the nimble relationship between the nonprofit, the school and the public school district that board members say they’re still trying to fill.
She served as an intermediary between Lotts Creek and the county board of education, helping smooth over disputes between the nonprofit that owned the building and the district responsible for educating the children inside it.
“Ms. Whitaker took care of the lease, Ms. Whitaker made sure everything was done,” said Melton. “And then, suddenly, she dies, and we’re left looking around saying, ‘I didn’t know I was supposed to do this, I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.’ We’re still learning to this day.”
Monetary donations to Lotts Creek Community School have sagged by more than half since 2020, partly due to pandemic-era financial stress. Whitaker’s role cultivating donors not only in the mountains but nationally isn’t lost on the board. She developed relationships that allowed the nonprofit to offer programs and assistance that otherwise would have been difficult for a small, rural organization to afford.
That included the college scholarships that were a signature for the school. Last year, Wicker said the nonprofit simply didn’t have the money in its budget to offer the program. The board is desperate to rebuild its fundraising operation for both monetary gifts and in-kind donations.
“We don’t know what all Miss Whitaker did behind the scenes, because she just did it,” Wicker said. “We’re still picking up the pieces now that she’s gone.”
Whitaker’s fierce, outspoken advocacy for the school her aunt founded ruffled some feathers. She made plenty of friends in and around Lotts Creek, Wicker said, but she made enemies, too.
At least two prior attempts to shut it down
Whitaker fought hard in 2018, when the state and school board almost closed the school as Cordia grappled with safety problems that included a roof at risk of collapse and inadequate heating.
A 2018 lawsuit in Franklin County Circuit Court by school supporters sought a court order to keep the Cordia School open was successful, and the injunction was permanent, although the court order mandated that the group must have a lease agreement with the school board.
Parents in 2018 expressed concerns about students having to ride buses for long periods to get to other schools, limiting their ability to take part in extracurricular activities.
The incident harkened back to familiar resentments that had built up in the community after the state determined in 1994 that an original stone building the school was holding classes in was no longer up to code. Then, the community banded together to raise donations and build the building the school occupies today.
After that incident, Whitaker lobbied state lawmakers and was able to secure legislation that protected the state or district personnel from closing settlement schools unless they didn’t meet minimum health and safety standards.
Likewise, in 2018, Whitaker assembled a band of citizens to block trucks sent by the school districts to haul off Cordia school property to a school in Hindman, “15 miles away accessible on a windy mountain road,” said Ned Pillersdorf, the nonprofit’s volunteer board attorney.
When state police sought Pillersdorf’s help intervening in the clash, he said he refused.
“I said no — told the state police the citizens were on private property, and that the case was still in active litigation in Franklin Circuit due to Cordia being a historic settlement school that could not be closed,” he said.
“When I asked Alice how she was able to assemble such a citizen blockade so quickly — she said it was in their blood — that the citizens were mostly the descendants of the Widow Combs.”
Pillersdorf told the Herald-Leader that in the 1960s, a woman named Ollie Combs famously blocked the coal company from strip mining her property by laying down in front of a bulldozer and was arrested.
“This happened in close proximity to Cordia,” said Pillersdorf, “Many of her descendants are still in the area and many of the students have the last name Combs.”
Whitaker’s blockade during the Franklin County court case around 2018 was successful.
“After we won the injunction, there was no appeal,” he said. “The injunction is still in place.”
A familiar fight over Cordia’s future
The latest dispute with Knott County Schools has revived older fears among some members of the Lotts Creek board that the district would prefer to eliminate the unusual arrangement and consolidate Cordia into the broader school system.
In mid-July, Knott County Board of Education Chair Harold Craft said the public school district wasn’t trying to close Cordia School but wanted to obtain documents that assured the safety and well-being of students, staff and visitors, as laid out in the 2018 court order.
The lease agreement between the Knott County Board of Education and Lotts Creek Community School Inc., signed on June 1, stipulates that a general liability policy must be in place and that the school must undergo an inspection by a structural engineer yearly. That’s more than four times as often as most other schools in the state require, said Wicker.
“The other schools operated within the district are owned by the Knott County Board of Education,” Knott County Board of Education Attorney Denise Davidson said in a statement to the Herald-Leader. “The Knott County Board of Education has the responsibility and obligation to ensure other schools in the district are structurally sound and safe in which to operate a public school.”
Davidson said she could not speak to how often most districts inspect their schools, but it’s not uncommon for privately owned buildings used by public school districts to receive an extra layer of scrutiny.
A letter from Alchemy Engineering Associates Inc., received on July 23 stated, in summary, that the building is structurally safe for occupancy.
In fact, Superintendent Greg Conn said he helped the nonprofit secure a new general liability insurance policy during the latest episode after the Lotts Creek board’s prior insurance had lapsed.
The board seeks to preserve a legacy
For now, Cordia is staying open.
“The bottom line is this wonderful school which exists in an isolated mountain region and serves a substantial number of low income families is not closing.” Pillersdorf said.
But the larger challenge facing Lotts Creek Community School Inc. is less easily resolved. The nonprofit has lost its most effective fundraiser, organizer and intermediary. Its donations have dropped dramatically. Programs that once seemed routine, including college scholarships for graduating seniors, have become difficult to sustain.
At the same time, the community is trying to preserve the qualities that made Cordia a settlement school in the first place.
That means continuing to educate children in an isolated mountain community. It means having food available for families who need it. It means providing shoes when children don’t have them and scholarships when students are ready for college.
And it means maintaining an institution that has served as a gathering point for a community for nearly a century.
“About 92% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch,” Wicker said. “So, yes, the need in this community is still here. It’s still very real.”
The challenge for the nonprofit now is not simply keeping the doors open; it’s figuring out how to replace the network of relationships and institutional knowledge that Whitaker spent decades building — while ensuring that the school she fought so hard to preserve remains capable of doing the work she believed it was meant to do.
For a community that has already fought once to keep Cordia alive, the question is whether it can carry that legacy forward without the woman who, for so long, seemed to be holding it all together.