Report points to community engagement as key to turning around rural schools

Rural schools face a unique set of challenges compared to their urban counterparts, and a new report from a rural education advocacy group says the community-school model may be the solution to those challenges. In citing "community school" definitions from both the U.S. Department of Education and Coalition for Community Schools, Doris Terry Williams of The Rural School and Community Trust concludes, "Engagement in community schools occurs when parents, students, school staff, and neighbors invest in the school, co-creating and owning it. There is a conscious effort to ensure that services are not merely co-located but integrated in a way that increases the social capital that goes into overcoming or removing the barriers to student, family, and community success and citizenship."

In the report, "The Rural Solution," Williams argues, "Full-service community schools have the potential to mitigate the negative influence of poverty and other ills on children’s ability to succeed in school and in their adult roles later in life," and those schools "might be the most economically feasible way to accomplish that goal in low-resource, rural areas." The report examines three examples of thriving rural community schools in Booneville, Ky.; Bennington, Vt.; and North Berwick, Maine. At the Owsley County School District in Kentucky, "School and district leaders have leveraged scarce resources to provide a number of innovative programs, including a Save the Children literacy project, an artist-in-residence, gifted and talented services, Reading First, and Everyday Mathematics," Williams writes.

"Folks realized that in order to facilitate education and address the physical, emotional, and social needs of students, you had to work with the entire community," Owsley County High School Principal Stephen Gebbard told Williams. "In order to better the children, you have to better society." The report acknowledges implementing the community-school model isn't easy for rural schools. To facilitate the change, Williams suggests that states and rural districts develop a rural-teacher recruitment strategy that emphasizes the benefits of teaching in a community school; rural districts should remove barriers to substantive parental and community engagement in schools; new school planning should incorporate multiple related community needs; states should help to reduce financial risk to community school partners when they undertake new construction projects, and Congress should invest in and encourage community schools. (Read more)