Town founder John E. Colton drove the establishment of a school district and three of a series of four public schools that served local children for 87 years. An educator, the town's namesake, and a strong advocate of public education for all area children, he served for many years on the township school board and for two terms as Minnehaha County Superintendent of Schools, while several members of his extended family taught in Colton schools. After arriving in 1878, he helped organize Taopi Township School District No. 62 and was elected chairman of its school board the following year. In 1880 the district acquired a sod house for a rural school, where his sister-in-law Ellen Colton became the first teacher, placing students by prior scholastic background and teaching grades 1 through 8. Because the sod school had no stove, classes met only in summer, and older boys fetched drinking water each day from a nearby well. Four years later a wooden frame schoolhouse was built on Main Street, two blocks west and one block north of this site, and as many as 65 students a year attended classes in the small building. It was the only one of the four town schools not located in the school block. In 1904, when John Colton was a director of the Colton Land and Investment Company, the company donated the school block to School District No. 62, and that same year a third school opened there as a two-story wooden frame building with a bell tower. It taught grades 1 through 8, and although a two-year high school curriculum was attempted, it was discontinued because few pupils attended. The district soon assigned three teachers to begin a four-year high school, and in 1917 seven senior girls formed Colton High School's first graduating class. On Armistice Day 1924, students carried their textbooks and personal belongings next door into a fourth school, a modern brick building. A special election in 1966 created Tri-Valley Independent School District No. 153, and the last Colton High School senior class graduated the next year, ending the town's 87-year era of public schools. The 1924 brick school was demolished in 2008.