Public school enrollment is on a slow but noticeable decline in many parts of the country—and rural schools are no exception.
Just shy of 10 million K-12 students attend public schools classified by the federal government as rural. The percentage of America’s public school students attending rural schools has ticked upward from 18.5 percent in 2012 to 20.3 percent in 2022, according to federal data.
Those large numbers, however, obscure deep challenges in rural school operations. For the last several decades, rural districts in many parts of the country have had to make significant cuts, merge operations with each other, and even shut down entirely, as downward trends in the broader population take a toll.
A surge of interest in rural areas at the start of the pandemic helped reverse this trend somewhat in some rural regions, but it wasn’t enough to keep many rural schools out of the dire straits they’ve been contending with for decades as economic—and population—growth has shifted to metropolitan areas.
Nationwide, adults are also having fewer children than in previous generations. Fewer children means fewer K-12 students and fewer per-pupil funds for schools.
That phenomenon can be particularly troubling for rural schools, which operate on more precarious economies of scale than their bigger and more densely populated counterparts.
When rural schools lose even a few students and the funding that comes with them, they often have to make difficult cuts of crucial staff and programs to stay afloat.
These aren’t new phenomena. In California, some rural districts that had more than 1,000 students in the early 2000s are now down to 400 students. Enrollment in rural Massachusetts schools declined by nearly 14 percent between 2012 and 2020.
In some cases, schools are grappling with existential consequences. The single-building Healy district in Kansas dropped from 40 students in the 2021-22 school year to just 21 during the most recent school year. High-school students now travel two days a week to a different school building with more academic offerings 40 miles away. And leaders are preparing a plan to dissolve the district.
Schools can’t change those statistics on their own. All they can do is try to operate within those constraints.
“We’re really just fighting the statistics of smaller family units,” said Chris Lagoni, executive director of the Indiana Rural Schools Association, which counts 170 of the state’s 290 districts among its members. “All the same statistics are the same in the urban areas. It’s just easier to see in a rural area.”
Here’s what’s happening with enrollment in rural schools—and what the future could look like.
There is no uniform rural school experience
The term “rural” encompasses a wide range of environments and experiences, from small towns buoyed by a thriving “Main Street” to sprawling areas with little but farmland, ranches, or forest for miles.
It’s also a fluid term, one that some places begin to shed as population grows and nearby characteristics evolve.
Even within the federal government, the definition differs greatly from one agency to the next, with more than a dozen distinct definitions in total.
The U.S. Census Bureau defines urbanized areas as places with more than 50,000 people. Urban clusters have between 2,500 and 50,000. Any place that falls outside those two categories is rural.
The National Center for Education Statistics breaks down rural schools into three sub-categories—"fringe,” “distant,” and “remote,” depending on their distance from an area the Census Bureau considers urbanized.
In Indiana, the rural schools association includes districts near small towns, districts close to the lake regions of the north, districts that lie 30 to 40 miles from any major town, and districts in suburban areas that have some rural areas within their boundaries.
“We don’t worry about definitions,” Lagoni said. “If you think you’re rural, you’re rural.”
The slippery nature of the term can make identifying uniform trends more difficult.
Bill Chapman has spent most of his career as a superintendent of rural school districts in Texas. But even though all of his districts were classified as rural, they didn’t all look the same.
First he led the Jarrell school district just north of Austin. Its student population more than doubled over the eight years he was there.
Then he led the Palacios school district, an hour outside downtown Austin. “We were 30 miles from the nearest H-E-B [supermarket], Walmart, or Whataburger,” he said.
That district is small, and getting smaller by 25 to 40 students a year. While he was there, he led an effort to consolidate its four school buildings (elementary, intermediate, junior high, and senior high) into two (elementary and secondary).
Now he’s superintendent of the London school district near Corpus Christi. The east side of the district could easily be classified as rural—“nothing but farm and ranch land,” he said. But on the west side, nearby towns are rapidly growing.
Districts like Palacios and London are experiencing opposite struggles of similar magnitude, Chapman said. Palacios is losing students, and thus has to do the same with fewer per-pupil dollars. London, meanwhile, is racing to keep up staffing to meet increasing demand.
Either way, Chapman says, budgeting for these significant changes is always a losing game. District leaders don’t find out their final enrollment counts until months after they’ve locked in their operating budgets for the school year. If a high school has more students than expected, “I can’t re-create the master schedule to add a teacher,” he said. “You’re not really living in real time.”
Remote school districts are suffering the steepest enrollment drops
For many students emerging from school in rural areas, job opportunities are limited if they want to stay close to home.
“If I’m a kid in Texas, and I’m not going into the family farm business, I’ve got a nuclear power plant on one side and a plastics plant on the other—if I’m not going into one of those, I’m going to find another place to live,” Chapman said.
Some families are selling off tracts of land to developers rather than continuing to use it for their own purposes. Developers convert the land to new housing or commercial real estate, and the rural nature of the area changes.
The perennial reality of the rural school district is that economic opportunities for graduating students will always be greater elsewhere, said John Sipple, a professor of global development at Cornell University who studies public schools and rural communities.
Even if someone wants to start their own business, the client base is likely to be larger in a suburban or urban environment.
“The message this sends to children in schools, unintentionally and intentionally, is that everything important in this world—economically, socially—is elsewhere,” Sipple said.
Rural areas gained ground early in the pandemic—but that hasn’t lasted
The overall rural population in America started growing in recent years after decades of decline. But those gains weren’t evenly distributed—more than half of counties classified as rural continued to lose population, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
Enrollment declines in many rural New York school districts can be traced back to the aftermath of the Great Recession, as many big businesses laid off workers and moved south, said Heather Zellers, director of information and advocacy for the Rural Schools Association of New York.
In the early months of the pandemic, when businesses were shut down and the virus was running rampant in cities, some families flocked to less-congested areas.
In New York, school enrollment in rural areas near the Finger Lakes and in the Adirondack Mountains ticked upward as parents took advantage of the increasing flexibility to work remotely.
“They loved the smaller classrooms. They loved the one-on-one attention,” Zellers said.
But a shortage of available housing has prevented that microtrend from becoming something more lasting, Zellers said.
Emerging policies that expand school choice are also contributing to rural enrollment dips in some places.
In Michigan, where families can enroll students in any district, one-quarter of students attend a school in a district other than the one closest to where they live, according to an analysis by the news website Bridge MI. A handful of districts now enroll only half of the students who live within their boundaries, according to the Bridge MI data. Many more have lost dozens of students to larger districts.
This month, Montana passed a similar open-enrollment law that has some smaller schools concerned about the possibility of needing to close or consolidate.
To lure more students, rural schools need community partners
Rural schools aren’t completely powerless to stem the tide of declining enrollment. Their leaders might need to adjust their thinking, though.
Years ago, Sipple attended a school board meeting where community leaders were wringing their hands over how to attract more families to the area, and by extension students to the schools. Some attendees threw out the idea of lowering educational expectations, like removing some academically rigorous graduation requirements. Sipple balked.
“Don’t build your wall around a community to keep your kids in,” Sipple said. “Build magnets that make them want to come back.”
More robust—and more affordable—child care options would be a big magnet for families, Sipple said.
Schools could also get more creative with staffing: sharing teachers with neighboring districts and taking advantage of digital learning opportunities.
“Maybe the elementary schools and junior high schools stay the same, but when it’s time for high school, rather than the school district merging with another district entirely, you essentially merge high schools,” Sipple said.
In Indiana, Lagoni’s association is working with municipal leaders to encourage building more housing for seniors, opening up more of the existing housing stock for families with school-age children.
“The seniors would like to stay in their communities where they have doctors and friends,” Lagoni said. “What can we do as policy advocates to provide them other resources?”
Major state investments in broadband expansion have also helped make rural communities more attractive for younger people, Lagoni said.
Ultimately, Sipple believes the burden of saving rural schools shouldn’t fall on school systems alone. Local businesses, community colleges, extension agencies, and health care systems all have a role to play.
“When you see that real synergy, those real partnerships, you start to see what can happen,” Sipple said.
