Little itinerant learners.

October 14, New Bloomfield.

Every day at nine o'clock Natalie, or sometimes Casey, take Georgia by the hand and they walk over to school. But instead of walking to the curb to wait for the school bus their walk is never more than a few minutes long, if that much, for at the circus school is always at your doorsteps.
The Kelly Miller Circus school is at the cook house every week day for two hours. Dee Dee McGavy-Perez teaches ten kids aged five to 12 in coordination with the Hugo, Oklahoma, school district, where they are enrolled in winter. Hugo is where the circus is based and most of the performers' family live there during the off season, from November to March. "Most of the time they're honors students," says Dee Dee.
The most challenging thing about teaching circus school is having to switch gears between the big ones and the little ones, she adds. In July the Rosales twins, now five years old, entered the school, adding one more grade to the group. There are other challenges, like the weather; like the circus itself the cook house is a tent and it gets wet and cold and hot and breezy, circus life is in the open, but always there is school.
Dee Dee came into the circus gradually after encountering a collegiate circus when she went to college at Illinois State in Bloomington. When friends left to work for the Kelly Miller Circus, then under David Rawls' ownership, she followed often to visit and soon ended up quitting her job and moving there herself, working as "the all-around useful person." She started teaching by accident and found out that was her calling; between the Universoul Circus and Kelly Miller Circus she has taught for more than ten years, following generations of circus kids.
Like Jessica Perez, 12, who now often steps in as her teaching assistant.

Jessica (left) answers Dee Dee as Girard looks on during school.