The "Rural 800" Districts
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.”
| State | #/Districts | #/Title I Students | School Age Population | Poverty Rate (Title I) |
| Texas | 130 | 41,034 | 118,723 | 34.6% |
| Kentucky | 38 | 30,309 | 91,515 | 33.1% |
| Mississippi | 44 | 28,873 | 85,162 | 33.9% |
| Louisiana | 15 | 24,135 | 78,513 | 30.7% |
| Arizona | 53 | 23,468 | 58,585 | 40.1% |
| Georgia | 32 | 20,498 | 68,547 | 29.9% |
| New Mexico | 27 | 19,095 | 49,779 | 38.4% |
| California | 70 | 18,293 | 54,319 | 33.7% |
| West Virginia | 13 | 12,772 | 38,275 | 33.4% |
| Arkansas | 45 | 12,029 | 37,888 | 31.7% |
| South Carolina | 11 | 11,255 | 37,195 | 30.3% |
| North Carolina | 5 | 10,602 | 36,893 | 28.7% |
| Alabama | 12 | 10,039 | 28,981 | 34.6% |
| Oklahoma | 81 | 8,672 | 27,542 | 31.5% |
| Missouri | 44 | 7,119 | 22,684 | 31.4% |
| Tennessee | 7 | 6,219 | 21,770 | 28.6% |
You’ll hear more about them from the Rural School and Community Trust. Check our website at www.ruraledu.org.