Growing up in a small town means that you have a small school district and an even smaller high-school. When you tell someone you went there, you’ll either get reactions like “where?” or “Hey, I went there, too!” and there’s nothing in between. No matter how people perceive small town high schools, they do have some good perks about them. Nonetheless, here are 11 tell-tale signs you went to a small-town high school.

1. Your high school graduating class had fewer than 200 people.

My graduating class had 64 people, and there were just a little over 200 people in the entire high school.

2. Your history teacher also doubles as the basketball coach.

We had a few teachers at my high school that doubled as sports coaches. The business teacher doubled as the girl’s soccer coach, the history teacher coached basketball and the English teacher coached boy’s soccer. The list goes on, but it was common for teachers to also coach sports after school.

3. Your parents and grandparents also went to the same high school.

It was VERY common for my classmates to say “my mom/dad graduated in ____,” and it was also very likely that everyone’s parents were all friends with each other. This also seems true when your parents out shopping around town and they see someone they went to school with.

4. You grew up with your graduating class.

Most of my graduating class was together since kindergarten, and we even added a few new people along the way. It almost is heartbreaking when you graduate high school because everyone is growing up and going their separate ways; you were like a family, and the hardest part of being a family is having to say goodbye.

5. News spreads like wildfire.

Because you all grew up together and everybody seems to know everything about everyone, it’s hard to keep any type of news a secret. If something big happened to you over the weekend, then the chances are the whole school knew about it by Monday.

6. You don’t have a football team, so your homecoming is in February.

This was true for my high school at least. We were too small of a school to have a football team, so our homecoming was in February during basketball season.

7. You can name almost everyone in the high school.

Even if you didn’t know them personally, you had a general idea of who they were based on people who were friends with them, and you could give their name, which is a little creepy, but everybody knows everybody when there are less than 300 people in your school.

8. Every group of people had their designated lunch table.

Since freshman year, each group of friends has sat at the same table every day all the way up until graduation day. You could draw a map of who sat at what table.

9. Your teachers may know your siblings.

At my school, some of the high school teachers taught electives to the middle school kids, and because of this, many of them knew my brother before he even got to high school. This may be true for your parents if your teacher is old enough, too!

10. Your graduation was less than two hours long.

Even after attendance awards, A Plus scholarship announcements and the awarding of the diplomas, my graduation only took approximately an hour and a half, but I’ve known some graduations to take almost 3 hours.

11. Deep down, you knew you were going to miss it.

Even though we all talked about how badly we wanted out of there, we all knew that we were going to miss it and all the people you encountered, because at the end of the day, you were a family that watched each other grow and helped build each other up into amazing people, and no matter where you go in life, you’ll never forget where you came from.

Even though I graduated almost three years ago, I still go there sometimes to watch my brother’s basketball games and I still am in touch with a few people I graduated with. Every time I go there, a teacher always asks me how I’m doing and what I’ve been up to these days. No matter where I go in life, it’ll always be considered home and I’ll never forget where I came from!