Trouble in paradise

Rural schools struggle for survival

The one-room school house with its quaint peaked roof, bell tower and bucolic country setting is a classic American icon, harkening back to the early days of this country’s revolutionary campaign to provide free schooling for all children.

But for a significant number of students and educators from remote communities, there’s nothing nostalgic about the image: Small and rural is still a way of life and learning—albeit an increasingly endangered one.

More than 300,000 students live and go to school in rural California—in Sierra Nevada mountain towns, Death Valley and Mojave Desert communities, coastal hamlets and Central Valley farming villages. There are even a few one-room schoolhouses still operating in the Golden State—a place better known for movie stars and high-tech innovations than for its rural culture.

Although their students represent just over 5 percent of the state’s public school enrollment, nearly half of California’s 973 school districts are rural—meaning they are in remote locations and sparsely populated. More than 400 local education agencies qualify for special federal funding earmarked for districts and county offices of education with maximum enrollments of 600 students.

Rural schools and districts often enjoy unique advantages—not the least of which is their location in some of the country’s wildest and most unspoiled places.

Striving to survive

But there’s trouble in paradise. Many rural districts and schools in California and throughout the country are waging an increasingly desperate struggle to stay afloat. It’s expensive to operate schools in rugged and remote locations where campuses are located great distances from each other, weather can be extreme and students and staff have to travel a long way to get to school.

Student transportation costs can eat up big chunks of rural district budgets. These districts also find it difficult to attract and retain teachers who are willing to work at multiple sites (a requirement in many rural communities) and who meet federal standards for teaching more than one subject. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 requires teachers to hold a degree in every subject they teach.

“This is a function of our geography, and we’ll be dealing with these issues forever,” says Michael Michelon, superintendent of schools in four Siskiyou County school districts. “The time it takes to travel long distances between schools or to sites that offer professional development or training is a huge part of the problem. We do face unique problems because of where we live.”

Michelon has personal experience to back up his assertions. To earn their administrative credentials, he and co-workers drove more than 140 miles two nights a week for more than two years.

“We carpooled, and it was great to have that time with colleagues,” Michelon says. “But it was hard for us and required big sacrifices from our families.”

Some problems are universal

Rural districts also face many problems that aren’t uniquely rural: things like declining enrollment, unfunded state and federal mandates, widespread regulation, rising special education encroachments and meager discretionary funds. Like their peers in suburban and urban districts, rural educators worry about proposed changes in federal Medicaid claiming regulations that would make it difficult for schools to get reimbursement for health screenings and other medical services provided to students. Because most rural districts are also small, the impacts of losing just a few students or managing a heavy schedule of standardized testing are magnified.

“We have the same concerns that everyone else has,” says Stephen Rosenthal, superintendent of the Shoreline Unified School District in Marin County, a 425-square-mile district where buses travel a thousand miles a day. “But in some cases we have fewer resources to deal with them.”

Rosenthal was among five rural superintendents who participated in a congressional briefing hosted by the National Rural Education Advocacy Coalition in Washington, D.C., June 18. The daylong event, which attracted more than 60 House and Senate staffers, was billed by organizers as the first “dedicated meeting” to ever discuss the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (known since its 2002 reauthorization as NCLB) from a rural perspective.

Much of California’s education news and policy focus is generated by and directed at the biggest players in the state’s immense and incredibly diverse public school system. It makes sense to concentrate attention and resources on urban districts like Los Angeles, San Diego, Fresno and Long Beach, which collectively educate more than 1 million California students. But rural school advocates say that policies and programs designed to help larger districts too often have unintended consequences that wind up penalizing small and rural schools.

“We’re constantly fighting the one-size-fits-all Washington fix,” says Mary Kusler, assistant director of governmental relations for the American Association of School Administrators and an advocate with the National Rural Education Advocacy Coalition. “Rural school advocates need to get involved. They don’t have to come to Washington. They just need to pick up the phone and call their local representatives. They need to make sure their voices are heard.”

Ignoring rural needs

Problems arise, rural advocates say, when state and federal officials fail to consider the unique circumstances of rural districts and schools when allocating categorical funds and establishing testing programs at the state level or reauthorizing NCLB in Congress.

When federal officials changed Title I formulas with enactment of NCLB to funnel resources to areas with high concentrations of poor students, rural districts and county offices with high poverty rates but comparatively small enrollments lost out. A recent study by the Congressional Research Service concluded that changes in NCLB Title I formulas benefit about 950 large districts nationwide to the tune of an additional $245 million every year. But the windfall for these larger districts came at the expense of more than 10,000 smaller—often poorer—districts.

According to research by the National Trust for Rural Schools and Communities, a foundation-funded, nonprofit rural advocacy group, a student in urban Houston (with an enrollment of 71,000), for example, is “worth” 79 percent more than a Title I student in Texas’ rural Jim Hogg County (with 310 eligible students), even though both districts have nearly identical poverty rates (of 29 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Last year, the trust reported, Houston received $338 for each of its Title I students, while Jim Hogg got $188.

“One of the problems is that there is such diversity among rural districts,” says Rural Trust President Rachel Tompkins. “On a national level, people don’t realize that some of the poorest kids in America are in rural areas. Rural poverty tends to get obscured in the national conversation about federal education policy.”

When the trust was studying the impact of Title I formula changes, researchers identified 400 rural districts with the highest concentrations of students eligible for Title I funding. Forty of these “rural 400” districts were located in California, with a collective enrollment of 38,218 students.

The trust is working to establish or support rural advocacy organizations in eight states that have high percentages of rural students. Although the trust is not working in California at this time, Tompkins hopes that will change as national rural advocacy networks expand. It’s essential, she says, that rural citizens get involved.

“Rural school administrators are taking an active role fighting for rural schools, but we have to build organizations of rural citizens,” she says. “In most states there are no such groups to advocate for rural schools.”

Fighting for forest subsidies

One area where California districts have been especially active and effective is in the debate over federal subsidies to counties and schools located near national forests. The funds have kept rural schools open and supported critical educational programs.

The Bush administration has tried for years to cut subsidies authorized by the Secure Rural Schools and Counties Self Determination Act of 2000, with the aim of eventually eliminating the program altogether. The result of a century-old agreement between forest counties and the federal government, the program provides $400 million a year to compensate rural communities for timber revenues they lost when the federal government took huge swaths of forest land off the tax rolls and placed them in national preserves. California, which received more than $66 million last year, is the second largest recipient of these federal funds. Rural officials say the money helps scores of rural schools to survive.

Their advocacy effort is paying off: At press time, both the House and Senate were considering bills to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools Act for at least four years. The House Natural Resources Committee unanimously approved House Resolution 3058, legislation that would extend the Secure Rural Schools Act for four years and increase so-called “Payments in Lieu of Taxes” for public land. The legislation is similar to a bill passed in May by the Senate. Rural school lobbyists are urging Congress to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill and attach a reauthorization bill to a larger legislative package that’s headed to the president’s desk.

“Prompt action by Congress will restore fiscal and economic stability to more than 780 rural counties and 4,400 rural school districts in 39 states,” says Bob Douglas, president of the Tehama County-based National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition. For nearly a decade now, the coalition has been at the forefront of a national campaign to save these critical forest subsidies. Preserving these funds is also a top priority for the California School Boards Association. In annual meetings with federal education and forestry officials in the nation’s capital, members of CSBA’s Federal Issues Council have argued strongly in recent years for reauthorizing the secure rural schools act.

“Members of Congress must be urged to not walk away from their longstanding obligation to protect the U.S. National Forest counties from this economic devastation,” says Erika Hoffman, CSBA principal legislative advocate.

Tompkins agrees. “Yes, $400 million is a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not much,” she says. “The government took this land—period. These funds are payment in lieu of taxes lost when the national forests were established, and the government should continue to pay them in perpetuity. It’s life and death for a number of counties and schools.”

Counties such as Alpine and Sierra have already sustained significant cuts in federal forest revenue and would be devastated without the program. Rural advocates won a one-year reprieve this year, but it was too late to save some communities and schools. Many California counties are still recovering from earlier losses in federal forest land subsidies, which, until the act was reauthorized six years ago, had been based on declining timber harvest revenue.

“Oregon and Washington were hit harder than we were,” says Lou Bosetti, who served more than three decades as Tehama County superintendent. “Declining enrollment and lack of forest funds really puts the double whammy on districts,” Bosetti says. “Communities that were once thriving have become ghost towns.”

A matter of survival

Jim Parsons, superintendent of Alpine Unified School District and Alpine County Office of Education, wears a lot of hats. He serves as principal at each of the district’s six schools, and supervises adult education and the K-12 alternative school (which currently serves just two students). Alpine USD, he says, never fully recovered from a round of federal cuts in logging subsidies in 2002. “In two years we went from $525,000 to just over $100,000 [in federal national forest subsidies],” he says. “It was a devastating cut to a $1.6 million budget. We still don’t have an athletic program, and we’re contracting out for a nurse.”

The district is scheduled to receive $425,000 in Secure Rural Schools subsidies when payments go out in December. Without that money, Parsons says Alpine would lose half its buses and all instructional aides and would be forced to cut library staff and close its two small high schools.

Although he readily admits it’s had a negative impact on his day job, Parsons has devoted hundreds of hours to advocacy as part of the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, including regular trips to Washington.

“It’s a matter of survival, quite frankly,” he says. “Without these funds, we couldn’t offer the programs we offer now. My job suffers somewhat because of these trips to D.C., but this is the lifeblood for my county. It’s like running a marathon. If you suddenly start hemorrhaging, do you keep running or stop and try to control the bleeding?”

Hopeful developments

Not all the rural school news is gloomy. More than 400 rural districts in California receive supplemental funding through the Rural Education Achievement Program, established as part of NCLB, which provides money for grants of up to $60,000 per district for services to low-income students and other specialized programs.

Dave Walrath, lobbyist for the Sacramento-based Small School Districts Association, says state lawmakers have also responded to a number of concerns raised by advocates for small schools (a category that is made up mostly of rural schools), by establishing limits on district transportation expenditures, allocating supplemental funds to small rural districts to help with costs of replacing buses, setting aside some grant money specifically for small districts and establishing minimum categorical grants—which are often based on enrollment numbers.

However, Walrath says advocates for small and rural schools are forced to renegotiate many of these accommodations on a regular basis. “We had two or three bills that got us close to resolving some of these issues, but they were one-time shots,” he says. “Things would get better for a while and then backslide. We’re still working for more permanent solutions.”

Creative strategies

Rural and small districts have streamlined, consolidated, collaborated and merged in order to survive. Throughout the state, rural districts, county offices and individual schools are doing what they can to get by—sharing resources; combining classroom instruction with home-schooling, distance learning and online course offerings; partnering with cities and counties to provide services to children and finding innovative ways to cut transportation costs.

By extending the school day for kindergartners, the Black Oak Mine Unified School District in El Dorado County eliminated one of three afternoon bus runs.

“We did it for educational reasons,” says Black Oak Mine Superintendent Rob Schamberg. “We serve 1,846 students in seven schools in a 412-square-mile district. That’s a lot of ground to cover. This was a creative idea that saved money and benefited students.”

In Siskiyou County, local schools routinely share teachers and equipment. Michelon is one of three superintendents in the county responsible for more than one district. Students from all four of Michelon’s districts have access to an interactive online algebra class taught by a single teacher. Michelon hopes to expand virtual offerings to include more classes and professional development for teachers and administrators.

“It won’t work for everything, because sometimes there’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction,” he says. “We try to spread our training across schools and share resources to the greatest extent possible. We try to use common sense. Sometimes we can pull it off and sometimes we can’t.”

“I hate to say we need more money,” he adds, “because that’s what everyone says. But funding continues to be a huge problem. We do face unique challenges that others don’t face because of where we live, but our kids deserve the same level of services as children in any other district.”

Carol Brydolf (cbrydolf@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.