Bella Romero Academy, with its red-and-yellow brick walls and bilingual signs, teaches several hundred students in grades four to eight. The buffer zone between the school and the incoming oil project is the students’ soccer field and a drainage ditch.

The school is surrounded by homes. Longhorn cattle, llamas and goats live at its perimeter.

The fight over the project is complicated by the fact that the largely conservative county has benefited enormously from oil and gas, which has flooded the region with money and jobs and is embraced by much of the community.

While farming counties to the east are barely holding on, Weld is building roads, doling out scholarships and planning for a future beyond the fossil fuel rush. It has no debt and no sales tax and was recently deemed the nation’s “Taxpayer Friendliest Community” by the American City County Exchange.

Don Warden, the county’s finance director, called the shale below him “the gift that keeps on giving.”

Today, County Road 49 is so crowded with oil derricks and tanks that some residents call it the Frack Freeway. And while new wells may raise alarm elsewhere, they’ve become the norm in Weld, where fracking operations are tucked into neighborhoods and already border several schools.

“You’re talking to a person who lives within about 200 feet of a drilling operation,” said Barbara Kirkmeyer, a county commissioner. “If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t move in next to it.”

The project near Bella Romero, however, has exposed fissures, with even a few industry supporters saying that the combination of the operation’s size and proximity to students takes development too far.