Pillar of America's educational past gives way to cost crisis.(The Orlando Sentinel)

KENANSVILLE, Fla. _ The school bus on Route 62 makes its first stop in Yeehaw Junction around dawn. It pauses along country roads eight times to pick up 11 students, who include two pairs of siblings, three grades and two boys named Dusty.

Its trips are numbered. At the end of the year, the bus will make its final stop at Central Florida's last one-room schoolhouse_one of two still operating in the state.

"It's not just the school. It's a member of the family," said Donna Beharry, whose son in kindergarten is the last of four siblings to attend what locals call the Kenansville schoolhouse, an annex of St. Cloud's Ross E. Jeffries Elementary.

"Small schools, I mean, that's what made the country great," Beharry added. "It was always the little two-room schoolhouse with a teacher and a few grades."

But the outlook for small schoolhouses is grim.

An hour away from the tourist corridor that made Osceola County's schools the fastest growing in the state, the yellow box of a building with a dirt circle parking lot bides its time. Enrollment at the Kenansville schoolhouse has …