Then Briana and her classmates lined up around the flagpole to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It did not take long for the student body to assemble.

Ninety-six-year-old Goodsprings Elementary is a three-room schoolhouse with just six students: a fifth-grader, four fourth-graders and Briana, who is in first grade. If no one else moves to town, she will be the only student left at the start of the 2010-11 school year.

The board of the Clark County School District was poised to close Goodsprings Elementary in May, but protests from parents and residents persuaded the board to delay the decision a year.

The T-shaped, 1,800-square-foot, sand-colored building costs $220,450 annually in salaries and utilities, or approximately $36,742 per pupil, according to district data. That is more than five times as much as the $7,000 per-pupil average for the district, which serves about 300,000 students in mostly overcrowded urban schools where classes of over 30 children are common.

“I can understand the community pride, but when you get down to the harsh realities, it is very expensive per pupil here,” said the Goodsprings principal, Mark Jones, who also oversees Sandy Valley Elementary, Middle and High Schools, about 12 miles away.

“When you get into survival mode, when you get into severe budget cuts,” Mr. Jones said, “sentimentality, while it’s understandable, shouldn’t be the deciding factor.”

The sentimentality in Goodsprings, though, is formidable. Perhaps because it is so close to Las Vegas, where old structures are famously imploded and replaced rather than preserved, the county’s oldest operating school represents an unusually durable tie to regional history.

The town itself, an 1829 stop along the original Old Spanish Trail, boomed in the early 20th century as miners extracted zinc and lead from the hills. When the school was built in 1913, the population of Goodsprings was about 800. (Fewer than 2,000 people lived in Las Vegas.)

A post-World War II mining bust led many residents to leave; today the town has only 200 people and two businesses — a saloon and a general store — so most residents work in Las Vegas.

But the school, put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, remains central to local life. Gone are its potbellied stove, water pump and wooden outhouses, and a 1996 renovation brought computers and new flooring, but the bell Briana rang is the original and students still perform a Christmas pageant every year.

Julie Newberry, who taught at the school from 1982 until she retired in 1999 and who has become a de facto school historian, said the nine decades of old report cards and class lists she has collected could double as genealogy charts for the town. Briana’s father and grandmother are graduates, as will be her brother Eddie Lloyd, a fourth grader.

“The students develop a real sense of pride in the school, a real sense of family because, in many cases, they are family,” Mrs. Newberry said.

Should the district close the school, several residents said, it will represent a devastating blow to the town’s viability. The county already closed a full-time post office and eliminated the voting precinct, requiring residents to vote by mail.

“But the biggest loss would be the school,” said Elizabeth Warren, a founder of the Goodsprings Historical Society, “because the school has always been here.”

Ms. Warren, whose children attended Goodsprings Elementary, said she doubted the accuracy of the district’s per-pupil calculations.

“Other people who don’t live here, who aren’t a part of this community, are dismantling this community,” she said. “It will be reduced to being a subdivision. They take away the heart and soul of the community if you take away the school.”

A school board trustee, Carolyn Edwards, who represents the region, led the effort to delay the vote on the closing to give residents a chance to make a case for saving the school. Still, she said, “when you get down to one or two students, you can tell it’s ridiculous. I don’t think you keep a school open solely because it’s an historic building.”

Dana Rhoades, whose daughter Megan is a fifth grader, insisted that she was fighting to preserve not just a school building but the individual attention it affords the students. Rather than close Goodsprings Elementary and force Briana and perhaps other students to attend larger classes in Sandy Valley, Mrs. Rhoades said, the district should send Sandy Valley Elementary students needing more attention to Goodsprings.

Such an arrangement, Mr. Jones argued, is not cost-effective. He said high test scores at Sandy Valley show that students there receive an education comparable to that in Goodsprings. Classes average 15 students, still well below the districtwide average, he said, and keeping Goodsprings open also comes at a price to students in larger urban schools.

“The people who would like to keep this open, I would like to have them go and talk to the other parents and say, ‘By the way, we’re going to be able to keep our one-teacher schoolhouse open, but maybe you’re not going to have a band program or freshman sports or a debate team or a drama club or whatever,’ ” Mr. Jones said.

Mr. Jones and other school and county officials said they were unsure what would become of the building if the school were to close. The town has no taxing authority to raise the money needed to maintain it, and the library district and the county have declined offers to use it. Ms. Edwards said she hoped to come up with some way to preserve it.

Briana is unconcerned at the prospect of being Goodsprings Elementary’s only student starting in September 2010.