I graduated high school in 2008. My graduating class had something close to 20 people-- I think maybe 21? Or 22? I don't remember.

The year before mine had I think 30 or so, and it was the largest class in our school's history (or so I was told. I've never bothered to actually fact-check that, and I don't intend to start now).

Here's how our school was organized.

K-6 was in one building, 7-12 was in another. We referred to them as the Elementary and the High School respectively, regardless of whether a student was technically in "middle school" or "Jr. High" or whatever. I don't know if this is typical of most small schools, but at least at ours the two schools were right next to each other and shared a lunchroom. The lunchroom was in a third building, situated halfway between the two. I'd say it was about a 10 minute walk from one to the other. Elementary had their lunch first, and High School had their lunch after. Sometimes, if there was a delay for whatever reason, we'd have to stand awkwardly outside waiting for the Elementary students to finish eating and exit the building before we were allowed to go in and get food for ourselves. After we were done eating, if time allowed, we were allowed to hang out in the pavilion area at the High School.

We mostly had different teachers for each subject. Again, my memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall we had about a dozen teachers overall. The English teacher, for example, only taught English, but he taught it for all grades 7-12. By the time I graduated, certain AP students could participate in a program called "distance learning", where we sort of outsourced a teacher from another school (a local community college, I think). The distance learning classroom was basically like what I imagine things like for students during COVID-- there was a big screen that the teacher was projected onto, and that teacher was using a webcam or something. We were all sat at desktop computers, and she could see us via a camera and microphone placed in the room. There was a local teacher in the room with us, who acted as facilitator-- to troubleshoot any technical issues that came up, make sure we weren't ignoring the lesson by going to other websites, etc.
These distance learning classes would take place with other students from other schools as well. Funnily enough, my first girlfriend was actually a girl from another school who I met during one of these classes.

I want to say that it wasn't typical to combine grade levels, but now that I'm really thinking about it I'm not sure that's true. Some classes did have combined grade levels, some didn't. I can't swear to it, but I think that it was divided along more "typical" High School lines-- so Grade 7 & 8 could take the same classes, and Grades 9 & 10 could take the same classes, but Grades 8 & 9 could not.

We had two math teachers, one for the "lower" grades and one for the "upper" grades, but besides that each subject had its own teacher. Class sizes varied-- I remember some of my classes, especially the ones with combined students, had about 20 or so students in them at one time, which always felt crowded. Others, like some of the higher level classes, would have less than ten. For example, I remember my English class had around twenty or so students, but my Algebra class had around six.

Anyway, I never liked the small-town aspect of my childhood, so I don't keep in touch with hardly anyone from those days. However, as is often the nature of such small towns, I know that I'm very atypical in that sense. My younger brother is still in touch with most of his friends from those days. Basically, you grow up with these people-- the classmates I had in the 4th grade were largely the same classmates I graduated High School with. I did not go to our High School Reunion, so I do sometimes worry I might have burnt some bridges there but oh well.

Oh, and like dozen people I knew back then later turned out to be gay. That's big news in a small town, I guess.