Flu shots, exercise classes and local government meetings. While many Americans participate in these activities by bouncing around a city, between the nearest hospital and a highrise or two, rural Americans have only one place to go: school.
Rural communities face health disparities, extreme poverty and food insecurity. Limited state and federal support forces schools to play hospital, daycare and foodbank, among other roles. The idea that schools provide more than their share of community services is nothing new. Across the United States, teachers, counselors, administrators — even secretaries, janitors and cafeteria staff — double as mentors, role models, community leaders and surrogate parents. But rural schools must do even more.
Rural schools often become the largest local employer as well as a community’s cultural hub. Residents’ entire lives depend on their schools. But with these added burdens, rural school districts face constant funding problems. Failing to recognize the role of rural schools, many states have consistently approached these districts with expedient treatments rather than a careful cure. Too often, this means consolidation.
When two or more school districts consolidate, they merge rather than continue independently. This often means some towns’ schools close in favor of busing students from across the district to one central location. While consolidation can bring the hope of a higher-quality education, communities lose a critical social center.
COVID-19 has more than exposed the vulnerabilities of consolidated districts; it has targeted them. And as state and federal governments scramble to respond to the pandemic, we must remember that further consolidation is not always the answer. Some communities may decide consolidation is right for them, but governments should not simply endorse consolidation and walk away.
Failing to address the systemic abandonment of rural America’s schools will only deepen inequity. Instead, legislators and educational leaders should embrace this opportunity to reimagine how a comprehensive approach to rural communities could reduce the burden on small schools while improving communities’ social welfare.
Pre-Existing Conditions of Consolidated Districts
Dr. John Sipple, professor of Global Development at Cornell University, has researched the crisis facing rural school districts. “Detroit is a city built for 2 million people, and there’s 700,000 people living there now,” he told the HPR. “Seven hundred thousand people try to pay the taxes to maintain infrastructure in Detroit, and it just doesn’t work. So, the city went bankrupt. On a much, much smaller scale, that’s what you have in thousands of these little communities across the country.”
For years, rural communities have been forced to deal with the economic consequences of depopulation. With the same infrastructure, fewer people, and inadequate adjustments in state aid, taxes tend to increase. Looking to save money wherever they can, some communities look to consolidate their school districts with neighboring districts. But according to Sipple, even if consolidation offers more specialized teachers and cocurricular activities, it yields “no financial windfall.”
Even so, because many states see consolidation as a way to effectively cut education spending, state governments try to encourage consolidation. Often, this support lacks long-term followthrough. Massachusetts, for example, failed to provide regional districts with $17 million that they should have received — a discovery that led Massachusetts’ State Auditor to call the funding process “antiquated.” Other states use aggressive incentive programs that practically force districts to consolidate. Arkansas required all districts with fewer than 350 students to merge, with measurable negative impacts from school closures.
Communities often resist consolidation because they know it has the potential to hurt them more than it helps balance the budget. Sipple told the HPR how, for rural Americans, schools are particularly correlated with “community vitality” — measured by household income, per capita income and house prices — because “in rural communities you don’t have these other social, political, technical institutions.” At the same time, schools serve as the major job provider. In rural America, destroying a school risks dismantling a community.
Despite the centrality of schools to rural life, their future has been uncertain for decades. In an interview with the HPR, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, Jane Kleeb, described the constant pressure on rural districts: “Rural schools, when it comes to school funding, are always waiting for the last minute on if their schools are going to be able to be reopened, or if they’re going to be consolidated and our kids are going to have to go on buses for 30 minutes in order to get to school.”
In Massachusetts, 58 districts are consolidated as partial or full K–12 regional school districts, with an additional 29 vocational and agricultural districts. In Western Massachusetts, Peter Dillon pulls double duty, leading two consolidated districts as the superintendent of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District and the superintendent of the Shaker Mountain School Union. Each year, in a uniquely New England ritual, he brings a budget proposal directly to the people in each community, now during socially distanced town meetings. Each town must approve the budget for the district to move forward. This year, of course, posed a new challenge.
Complications From COVID-19
In Superintendent Dillon’s districts, when the school committee approved the budget in March, the “nationwide economic picture was pretty rosy.” The district’s constituent communities then held their town meetings to approve the budget in June and July, after the pandemic’s economic fallout had begun to register. Luckily, Dillon told the HPR, “Our communities value the work we’re doing and really overwhelmingly approved our budgets. But that wasn’t a given going into it.”
Unfortunately, no matter how much locals support their schools and educators, school budgets need state support. In Massachusetts, the state determines how much municipalities must spend on education as well as the amount of grant money the state gives to each school district. In short, school districts depend on state aid. And, as tax revenues plummet by margins as great as 50%, the federal government’s support for struggling states and municipalities has become essential.
Superintendents have already raised the alarm over funding the next academic year, and districts across the state have laid off thousands of educators. Pre-pandemic promises of $1.5 billion for economically disadvantaged districts “evaporated,” according to Dillon. The pre-existing pressures on consolidated districts’ budgets have only grown stronger as the pandemic has set in.
In February, the U.S. Department of Education cut funding to over 800 rural and low-income schools. Then, when the CARES Act passed in March, giving many districts a desperately needed cash injection, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos told public schools they must share CARES Act money with private and parochial schools. Dillon called the decision “frustrating” since “schools that run on a profit or that are extraordinarily endowed tap into that money from places that aren’t endowed.” States, cities and the NAACP are suing DeVos.
Dillon’s district will receive $160,000 from the CARES Act. An “okay first step,” his district plans to buy masks and shore up counseling services. Given the looming threat of the virus to a vulnerable rural America, particularly when many rural school districts provide health care through school-based health centers, the CARES Act is just that — a first step. Dillon even describes Massachusetts’ response to the pandemic as “remarkable,” compared to this “lack of leadership at the federal level.”
Now, consolidated districts are trying to climb a cliff barehanded. Not only do they have to provide educational services like every other school district, they must provide their typical swath of additional services and the additional technological, food and health resources added by the pandemic. Depending on how schools return in the fall, rural districts may also need extra buses to maintain social distancing as children travel to and from the classroom, training and access to online learning management systems, or infrastructure to connect students to the Internet. Without support, rural schools will have to fend for themselves. Dillon says he is looking for a multi-year commitment, without which the “full range of emerging costs” will not be covered.
These emerging costs include expanding community support services, like when Dillon’s district worked on “getting food out and checking in on people and building relationships.” From his work in New York state, Sipple described how “folks from Europe [were] shocked at how fragile our communities were when they saw school buses driving around to homes, dropping off food. It was just beyond their comprehension that this could happen in the United States of America. … I think the pandemic has really exposed the reliance of communities on their schools, for food distribution, for social welfare, well-being, anti-domestic violence efforts — all of these things that got exposed as kids are home.”
With limits to their resources and their legal jurisdiction, rural school districts can’t solve problems like this on their own. Take the obvious and pressing barrier of internet access. “In good times,” Kleeb said, “we don’t have proper Internet access for our rural communities. … Just like [the government] electrified our rural communities back in the ’20s, ’30s and ’50s, they should be the ones who are connecting rural America right now with the internet with a massive jobs program.” Dillon adds, “There are outlying towns that we get kids from, and you can’t have Wi-Fi there because it doesn’t exist. … In some of those communities, the cell towers are few and far between, or the geography is such that [a hotspot] doesn’t work [either].”
Kleeb spoke to the experience of her own school district in rural Nebraska. “Our superintendent essentially feels abandoned. He has no real information on what he’s supposed to be doing, so he’s trying to reach out to local resources … but obviously that should not be the solution, right?”
She is right. That cannot be the solution.
Seeking a Cure
When he spoke with the HPR, Sipple advised that “we have to ask real questions of whether schools are the appropriate institution to be providing all these services to families. And is it appropriate for schools to be the main employer in a community or not?” He quickly pointed out the tallest hurdle: “In the rural communities, there are no other agencies.”
Before a structural reexamination of rural America can take place, rural communities need a lifeline. Districts need the money to keep students connected to schools. Food and healthcare and other community resources need to continue. With the support of the largest teacher’s union in Massachusetts, state Senator Jo Comerford — who represents many rural communities — called for a four-year moratorium on the state’s standardized testing. Testing, as some have argued, cannot be a priority when we barely understand how (or if) children will be receiving an education.
As we deal with the pandemic’s economic impact, states must not race to discard rural districts through the consolidation process. We know rural districts have become more vulnerable, but that’s all the more reason to keep their schools open. Offering some teacher specialization and a fieldable football team in exchange for increased transportation costs and the destruction of community centers, consolidation is not a cure-all. While for some communities it may work, for others, it’s merely snake oil.
In the long-term, to reverse the systemic inequities facing rural districts, far more must be done. What Dillon described as “the double whammy of the virus and then an economic downturn” risks dealing the killing blow to rural communities that already face devastating population decline and economic stagnation.
Fortunately, reimagining government support for rural America is smart politics. Kleeb, who wrote the book on the modern political stakes of rural policy, believes a rural response to COVID-19 “can be a large bipartisan proposal, and I hope that it is. But, with the polarization that has happened in America, this is an opportunity for Democrats to really prove to rural communities that they stand with us.” With unprecedented challenges facing rural school districts, “this is where the federal government should be stepping in and proving that government has a role in our daily lives.”
Politicians often decry how we underfund schools, and the burden to compensate is quickly thrust upon our educators. Even during a pandemic, the educator’s grit is unwavering: “As educators are often asked,” Dillon summed up, “we’re going to do more with fewer resources. Which we’ll do, but it’s just challenging.” But today, the burden is on our elected officials.
Now is not the time for small or simple solutions. Structural reinvention and investment could provide a boost rural America hasn’t seen since Roosevelt’s New Deal. If we sit still, rural America might not recover — and certainly will not forget.
Image Credit: “Rural Classroom” by Jeffrey Hamilton is licensed under the Unsplash license.