Rural Matters

We wanted to know more about the rural school districts that serve high poverty communities so first we statistically rounded up the 7604 districts nationwide that have over half their students in a school that is physically located in a rural community. Then we identified the 800 – about 10 percent -- that have the highest rate of eligibility for the federal Title I program. That is the program providing funds for disadvantaged students. We’ll call these 800 high-poverty rural districts the "rural 800."

Continue reading to find out more about these districts and to see a chart of the 16 states where most Rural 800 districts are located.

Rural 800 districts serve about 942,000 students. That’s about 11 percent of the school aged population in all rural districts. On average, each Rural 800 district serves about 1,175 students, but they range in size from fewer than 10 students to over 26,000.

Nearly 312,000, or one-third, of these kids are disadvantaged. And that’s 23 percent of all Title I students in all rural districts. Between one-in-four and three-in-four of the kids in these rural districts qualify for Title I funding.
Don’t confuse these figures with the eligibility rate for federally subsidized school lunches. Title I funds are available only for kids in families below the official federal poverty income level. The meals are available for kids whose families make up to 185 percent of that income level.

So if you are thinking that an overall poverty rate of 33 percent is not that high compared to some of our most troubled urban districts, think again. Detroit has a poverty rate of 32%. Los Angeles is 31.4%, Chicago 29.3%, and Philadelphia 28.2%.

Those are all below the average for these Rural 800 districts. Nearly nine in 10 Rural 800 districts has a poverty rate higher than Philadelphia.

There are Rural 800 districts in 39 states. However, more than three fourths of them -- and more than 90 percent of the Rural 800 Title I students -- are in just sixteen contiguous states. They are in Central Appalachia, the Southeast, the Southwest Border States, and California. See the table below.

Texas, near the geographic middle of this group of states, is the epicenter of the Rural 800. It has 130 Rural 800 districts (16% of the total) serving over 41,000 Title I students (13%).

These schools and students are largely invisible to policy makers because they are geographically dispersed, often isolated, demographically and culturally diverse, and politically impotent. They are “out there.”

You’ll hear more about them from the Rural School and Community Trust. Check our website at www.ruraledu.org.

Posted by Marty Strange at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever wonder what makes a place rural?

Ever get in a "discussion" about it?

I once argued with a friend that her town—population somewhere around 1,800—wasn’t rural, couldn’t be, I said, because it was the county seat in a southern state. And the largest town for miles around, to boot.

My rationale was that towns—even those with fewer than 2,500 people, the census definition of rural—which control the economic and political resources of a county should not be considered rural. I beefed up my argument by pointing out that these towns often pull in more resources from surrounding rural areas than they return to those areas. And, I added, towns generally have some taxing authority and, therefore, more avenues through which to generate revenue than unincorporated areas usually do.

Maybe I’m a purist on this matter—most people don’t argue with the census definition.

But a lot of people don’t know it either.

Ever heard a tv or radio journalist describe a town you know has 17,000 people as “tiny,” or, worse in my book, a small city as “this rural" community?

I have. And it bugs me. Not out of any sense of cultural righteousness. I hate to see an opening for driving any of the tiny portion of public resources our country reserves for rural places toward influential regional “towns” instead of the surrounding areas that often need the resources (and/or a fairer return for their contributions)--and really are rural.

Which brings us back to the original question: what is rural?

There are a variety of technical definitions of rural. (We’ll take up cultural descriptions in a later post.) These efinitions matter because they determine how resources get directed to "rural" places, including schools. And, they influence which places get "rural" resources.

A new paper spells out the six most commonly used official definitions of “rural.”

The brief is: “How the government defines rural has implications for education policies and practices.” It was produced by REL Southwest and the Institute of Education Sciences. It’s helpful and easy to read.

Most technical definitions of “rural” that are used in American public policy start with the census definition: open country and settlements (not necessarily incorporated towns) of 2,500 or fewer people. Then they layer on additional dimensions.

These definitions are residual. That is, they define rural as what’s left over when everything else is accounted for. The more layered definitions usually add some measure of proximity of a rural place to an urban one. The result is that some places are rural in one definition and not in another.

Interesting examples are the “locale codes” used by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for schools and districts.

One of them, the “metro-centric” locale code, originally developed in the 1980s, assigns schools and districts to one of eight locations, two of which are rural. A newer “urban-centric” local code, developed last year, identifies 12 locales, three of which are rural and vary by how close the rural place is to more urbanized areas of different sizes.

Some schools and districts changed “locales” with the newer system.

The school district in the town in which I live changed locale codes. It is a Locale Code 7 in the metro-centric code; that’s “rural, outside a core-based statistical area.” In other words, the town is less than 2,500 people and outside a metropolitan area of 10,000 or more people. In the newer urban-centric code, we’re a “32--town, distant.” Our locale code did not change because our area is growing. We're actually shrinking, like many other small towns and rural communities. No, the change is all in the definition.

Our county has some other strange examples of how the definition affects whether a school is “rural” in the NCES locale codes. For example, in the urban-centric code, the high school in one small town, population 2,300, is a 32 and the elementary school is a 41--rural fringe. Both schools are situated inside the town limits. In another community, population 1,100, the situation is reversed; the high school is a 41 and the elementary is a 32. Again both schools are in the town limits.

It must have something to with how the crow flies…

to a city.

All four of these schools are Locale Code 7 in the metro-centric system. And—just for the record—neither of the two communities is the county seat.

You can look up the metro-centric Locale Code for your school or your district through NCES’s Common Core of Data.

Getting your code in the newer urban-central code is tougher and requires downloading a big data set. But you can see a map with color codes for districts that changed locales. Scroll to the bottom and click on your state name.

And, if you really want to know your locale code in the urban-centric code, email Rural Matters and we’ll look it up for you.

Check back for more discussion of "What’s Rural?"

Posted by Robin Lambert at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The oldest African American school known to still be standing in Virginia is being restored thanks to Frank Agnew, resident of Fieldale in Henry County.

Rock Run School was built in the 1880s by local African American residents; it educated students until the mid-1950s.

Agnew owns the building and plans to make it available to community residents for local functions. He spends about 20-25 hours each week on the preservation effort and has raised more than $30,000 in donated labor and materials from the community in addition to a $10,000 grant from the Henry County Preservation Fund.

Agnew’s work, and especially the care he has taken to restore the building’s beauty, has been praised by local residents and public officials alike. Many local residents are also thrilled that this important community landmark will again be a functional gathering place.

The building serves as an important landmark beyond the community as well. Thousands of similar schools were built by African Americans after the Civil War. (It’s a myth that most such schools were established by white missionaries or philanthropists; in truth, missionaries generally arrived to find that African American residents had already established schools in their communities, and philanthropists usually supplemented community-based efforts.)

Many of these schools were left to crumble in the 1950s and 1960s when most Southern counties built new, usually consolidated, schools for African Americans in an attempt to demonstrate that they provided equal educational opportunities in segregated schools. These efforts also tended to centralize authority and strip communities of much of their influence over schools.

Rock Run School is also recognized as an important architectural landmark. At several different times the community built additions to the original building in order to accommodate expanding functions and additional grades. Each addition has been recognized as example of best construction practices of its historical period.

You can see a photo and read more about Frank Agnew and the Rock Run School in the Martinsville Bulletin.

Posted by Robin Lambert at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)