Most people take vacations to get away from work. They need to escape from the daily stresses and headaches and allow their minds to drift away from the endless troubles at the office. For Kathleen Farrell, however, a vacation yielded not an escape but a potential solution to one of her more vexing challenges.
“About 10 years ago, we became aware of an increasing Hispanic population at our school,” says the superintendent of the Mount Morris School District in Mount Morris, N.Y. “We wanted to find a way to reach out to the Hispanic girls in our district and do something to keep them from leaving school at an early age.” Doing that, however, meant Farrell needed to reach not just the students but their parents as well. Ironically, the solution came while she was visiting her own parents in McAllen, Tex. “I noticed the large number of stories in the local paper about teenage girls celebrating their quinceañeras,” says Farrell.
The coming-of-age party marks a Hispanic girl's 15th birthday and commemorates her arrival into adulthood. “That gave me an idea,” she said.
Farrell's brainchild was to reach out to Hispanic parents to help them prepare for their daughters' quinceañeras. By bonding with them this way, she hoped to enlist their support and get to know them and their families better. “Many of the mothers in our district are from families that could not afford quinceañeras when they were growing up,” Farrell points out. “When I mentioned we would be having a speaker come to the school to talk about how to sew formal dresses for their daughters' quinceañeras, their faces lit up.”
Her story highlights one of the greatest challenges facing rural and smaller school districts. At a time when many are undergoing significant population changes—sometimes in just a few years—they find themselves scrambling to adjust to new demands from different ethnic groups. Additional language instructors, testing challenges, and numerous other issues put strains on already-limited budgets. Nevertheless, principals and teachers in rural schools say that they remain confident of being able to manage the shifts in their student populations if they can continue promoting inclusive cultures. “We're a very small school district,” says Farrell. “But as I tell my students, your school is your community.”
Changing Times
Farrell's experiences are not unique. According to census data, the past decade has seen explosive growth in the minority populations of many rural and smaller school districts. “From 1993 to 2003, regions in the South and Midwest experienced the largest absolute growth in minority student populations,” says Jerry Johnson, state policy studies manager in Ashland, Ky. In the southeastern United States, he says, Hispanic K–12 enrollment increased 136 percent, while other ethnicities, such as Asian and Pacific Islander, increased 60 percent. For individual states in the region, the growth was even more substantial: Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee all reported increases of 400 percent or more in their Hispanic populations during this same time frame.
Such rapid demographic changes put many rural schools in difficult positions. Already burdened by having fewer resources than schools in larger districts, they find themselves struggling to educate an expanding student population with vastly different needs—and without the commensurately increasing resources that would normally be required to meet the higher demands. “The problems that some [rural] school districts are facing can only be considered overwhelming,” says Marty Strange, Rural School and Community Trust policy director and former head of the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyon, Neb. “In some towns, the population might go from being 100 percent Caucasian to majority Hispanic or Asian in just a few years, and the expectations of No Child Left Behind are not remotely rational with respect to this kind of situation.”
As an example, Strange cites the story of Wakefield, Neb. According to the Rural School and Community Trust's data, only 2 percent of Wakefield's students in 1993–94 were Hispanic. By 2003–04, however, the Hispanic enrollment had swelled to 26 percent of the population. Many of the newly relocated minority students did not speak English as their primary language. Consequently, they had to learn it at the same time that they were first beginning to attend school. As the Hispanic population continued to expand, the town found its resources could not keep up, and the school's test scores soon began to fall. “Accountability systems don't recognize the speed and nature of these kinds of changes,” Strange says. “When you go from a school that has no English language learners to one that's 25 percent English-as-a-second-language, it's going to be difficult not to show a drop in test scores.”
Large demographic shifts are not the only reason rural schools' scores can fall. In particularly remote districts, poor showings by even one or two struggling students can have an equally dramatic effect on a school's adequate yearly progress rating. “One hundred percent of our score in a particular grade can depend on one student,” says Debbie Macek, an elementary teacher at Marble Charter School in Marble, Colo., which has about 20 students. “I have two 6th grade students, one 7th grade student, and one 8th grade student at my school.” If any one student for a particular grade level fails to do well on the state exam, the entire school's rating can drop, she says.
Turning the Tide
Given such challenges, one might expect educators to be intimidated. However, many have found innovative ways to address and overcome the barriers they face.
For example, Wendy Boland, director of the Marble Charter School, says that her school has moved into satellite technology because it lacks the landlines for digital cable hookups. This kind of technology can “help us purchase the kinds of opportunities that other students have,” she says.
Since rural districts often lack the resources of their larger counterparts, many have begun networking to share resources and knowledge that can make their instruction more effective.
The results can be tremendous, rural educators say. For example, Boland says that her school is hoping to acquire additional satellite equipment and other resources to facilitate a more developed distance-learning program. “It's out of our league right now,” she admits. “But we're trying to expand our distance learning through [networking].”
Expanding networking contacts carries benefits for more than just students, however. “We work with our 22 districts to make sure that there are appropriate professional development activities throughout the region,” says Anne Willkens Leach, assistant district superintendent for instruction and school improvement at Genesee Valley Board of Cooperative Educational Services in LeRoy, N.Y. “We have a migrant population in some of our rural areas. In rural districts, one teacher may be the entire department, so we want to get the teachers from different districts to work together and share ideas.”
Other officials point out that while rural districts may be limited in their resources, their ability to provide individual and specialized instruction can compensate for what they lack in materials. “We've had students in the 6th grade who come in and can't read,” says Boland. “They leave literate in two years because we have the advantage that we can focus on one child at a time.”
Providing that attention sometimes requires heroic efforts, however. Macek and Boland, for instance, point out that for school districts like Marble—a town with fewer than 100 citizens—it's not always easy to find and hire teachers capable of providing the attention required by students with special needs. “Let's say you have one student who needs three hours of special attention every week,” Macek says. “You have to find someone willing to come up three times a week for one hour each time.” If the trip involves several hours of driving one way, finding the qualified instructor willing to make the trek becomes all the more problematic. “It's difficult,” says Macek. “We're trying to hire a speech therapist right now, in fact.”
Spreading the word to find such people requires increased visibility, experts say. That requires making sure that the needs of students and teachers are heard by policymakers and budget planners. Getting the attention of such officials, however, is often a challenge for many rural schools. “Rural schools just don't carry much weight in terms of political capital,” says Frank Betts, facilitator of ASCD's Rural Schools Network. “We encourage schools to increase their visibility by inviting their legislators to school events, e-mailing them, asking for their advice, or inviting them to speak at awards banquets and other events,” he adds. “Influence campaigns are most effective when you limit them to things that really matter to your school.”
Benefits Beyond the Burdens
Although rural educators' voices may sometimes be drowned at higher political levels, many teachers say that their influence can still resonate in the school and classroom. Reaching out to minority students and creating a culture that embraces their customs and languages is a critical first step in creating benefits not only for targeted students but for the entire school as well.
In Farrell's case, she has noted with some dismay that many of the young girls she tries to reach still do not graduate. However, she also sees some encouraging signs that make the effort worthwhile even if its dividends are not immediately evident. “When we first began working on the quinceañera dresses, I knew nothing” about the celebration, Farrell admits. “In time, I learned about the traditions associated with them.” Each girl, for instance, is usually escorted by a number of boys who wear bright cummerbunds, white shirts, and dark slacks. In the past, Farrell says, girls always had Hispanic attendants. However, as the school continued expanding its inclusive environment, things began to change. “At our last few quinceañeras, I began to notice that the girls' escorts now sometimes include students with Irish and Italian names,” she says proudly. “To me, that's progress.”
