Rural school districts across the country are facing a critical moment. Disruptions to federal education funding by the Trump administration, rising costs from inflation, and the threat of school closures due to declining enrollments are putting many in a difficult spot.
But in states like Maine and New York, they are taking steps to address those challenges.
“We are very cognizant of the cost to run the building and educate the students,” said Camille Harrelson, the superintendent of Long Lake Central School District in New York. When a group of 3rd and 4th graders wrote a petition asking for a swing set on the playground, Harrelson knew the district couldn’t afford it. “There’s definitely stuff our kids do without.”
What makes matters more difficult for rural schools is that due to the smaller numbers of students they serve, they often face even more pronounced financial challenges when there are student enrollment drops—a loss of just 10 students has significant financial implications, for example.
“Across New York state in the past 20 years or so, we’ve seen greater than a 10% enrollment drop in rural districts,” said Kelly Zimmerman, superintendent of the Dansville Central school district and a member of the board of directors for the Rural Schools Association of New York, an advocacy organization that partners with rural districts across the state. “We’ve had to become pretty creative in how we continue to give our students the very best.”
How have districts in Maine and New York tackled these challenges, and how do they plan to continue doing so in the years ahead?
To begin with, rural schools in both states are continuing to employ a variety of approaches that they have used for years. They are sharing services with neighboring districts, collaborating with community partners, and approving formal mergers.
Building a structure that allows rural districts to help each other
In Maine, maintaining enrollment in rural schools has been a challenge despite district consolidation efforts that began in the 1950s and 1960s, said Scott Porter, who recently retired as superintendent for the Machias Bay Area School System, which provides superintendent leadership and other services for 11 different local districts and school boards in Maine.
The structure allows each town to maintain a local, elected school committee while sharing one superintendent. Some towns no longer have their own schools, but their committees still make budgeting and transportation decisions for the students who live in their towns.
“People here like local control,” said Porter. “They don’t want to think they’re in a big district where they might be paying—and they would be—some part of somebody else’s bill.”
The superintendent facilitates collaboration among all the local committees and the regional structure places a lot of responsibility in the hands of the central office. It ends up managing a lot of paperwork from all the committees and the districts they oversee, hosting meetings, and navigating conflicts between all 11 towns.
Creative solutions have helped the organization guide the committees to address significant challenges. Nicole Case, the new superintendent of the Machias Bay Area School System, said that transportation makes up a large portion of the budget. Students travel as far as 45 miles to and from school, and they often have to hop on multiple buses during those trips. So Porter worked with the towns to merge bussing routes. This consolidation saved the towns money by cutting out portions of routes that overlapped with others, but had previously been served by individual towns.
Porter credits Case, a former principal and teacher, with attracting new families to the district’s high school. Since the late 1800s, Maine has offered a town tuitioning program to students living in towns that do not operate schools. Those students can receive a voucher to attend public schools in other towns or private schools. Several towns in and around the Machias regional district qualify for this program.
Having a “principal who is active in the community, is trusted, has been there,” leads families to trust the district, Porter said. The organization promotes the idea that in the schools in its system, “every student is known by name,” he said.
Sharing services such as transportation is a key strategy to save money
While some districts agree to merge with others , Scott Bischoping emphasized that mergers don’t work for everyone. Bischoping, director of development and member services for the Rural Schools Association of New York, noted that mergers require both districts to vote to dissolve.
“Those communities often identify with the school district as their community center. Many times, the citizens of that community graduated from their school district,” he said.
Rural schools sometimes serve as health centers—opening their gymnasiums to senior citizens and other residents—or they house early childhood education services, said Heather Zellers, director of information and advocacy for the Rural Schools Association of New York.
Logistically, merged services can also prove challenging. “If you tried to merge two 200-square-mile districts, you’re talking about a pretty large space—one that would be pretty difficult to transport kids in a reasonable way,” Bischoping noted.
Instead, “the vast majority of rural districts are leaning more into this concept of regionalization,” said Zimmerman. “We’re moving in the direction of shared services.”
For many rural districts, sharing services allows them to maintain their independence and identity while providing more opportunities for students.
For instance, in Long Lake Central school district, which is classified as “remote rural,” shared services with neighboring districts have become critical.
The district has one central administrator—Harrelson, who serves as both superintendent and K-12 principal—supported by a central office composed of a treasurer, secretary, and deputy clerk. Elementary teachers preside over multi-grade classrooms. One teacher instructs all English classes for grades 7 through 12. The district had 55 students in the 2023-24 school year.
But the district still offers college-level courses through a partnership with a local community college. It shares career and technical education services, professional development, transportation and maintenance, and regional testing with other districts. For the 2025-26 school year, it will share a speech and language therapist with another district. Some districts even share sports teams.
After merging several sports teams with a neighboring district, Long Lake was “able to offer boys’ and girls’ soccer and girls’ and boys’ basketball, and then girls’ and boys’ softball and baseball,” Harrelson noted.
Some states have formal mechanisms to support districts that are looking to share services. In New York, the longstanding Boards of Cooperative Educational Services structure allows students in smaller districts to access coursework not offered in their regular school buildings. This often includes career and technical education, special education, and English as a Second Language programs.
Reflecting the state’s growing reliance on shared services is an update to the BOCES funding formula. For the 2025-26 year, the formula has been updated to open room for more state aid and has increased salary and per pupil expenditure caps. Those changes will provide direct financial benefits to rural school districts.
Other collaborations are facilitated through partnerships with local nonprofits or by working directly with neighboring superintendents.
Recruitment of staff members is also a challenge rural school districts are trying to tackle as they stare down federal education cuts and rising costs.
In the Dansville district in New York, Zimmerman conducts exit interviews to figure out why staff choose to leave. She encourages recruitment “by making people feel supported and connected and focusing on the quality of experience that they may not get in a more suburban or urban environment.”
Pitching what makes a community special can help draw people in, Zellers added. “It’s not the middle of nowhere, it’s the heart of everywhere you want to be.”
