More than 1 of every 10 charter schools in the country operate in rural areas, and their numbers could rise. Two states—Montana and North Dakota—recently passed laws to authorize charters and the two have the second- and fourth-highest percentages of rural schools in the country, respectively.
“I think it’s just so important that our rural kids get to have choice as well,” said Jennifer Ketring, the executive director of the Pacific Community Charter School in rural Point Arena, Calif.
With increased federal funding for charter schools under the Trump administration, new state charter school laws, and growing parent support for school choice, the conditions are ripe for charter expansion, advocates suggest.
But opening and sustaining a rural charter school is not easy. With smaller populations of students in rural communities, maintaining enrollment is often very difficult, said Margaret Roush-Meier, a charter advocate who has opened several schools and served as the executive director of the Arizona Charter Schools Association.
It’s also hard to get sufficient community buy-in to start a rural charter, Roush-Meier said.
Plus, critics of charters—which are publicly funded schools—say they drain resources away from regular public schools, and have questionable academic standards and accountability measures.
Even so, some charters continue to run in rural communities and new ones are starting up. As it is, 47 states now allow the creation of charter schools. Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont are the only ones that don’t.
Rural charters see benefits of focusing on a specific type of education
For Ketring, the secret is in creating a unique school experience. The Pacific Community Charter School is “a little more out of the box” with a “focus on real-world experiences,” she said.
Ketring’s two children both graduated from the school. It requires families to volunteer for a minimum of 40 hours per year—which can include working in the classroom, serving on the board, overseeing special projects, or supporting field studies.
Ketring’s “family farmstead” at her home serves as an outdoor classroom. They often learn outside the four school walls—venturing onto public trails, visiting national monuments, and taking weeklong field trips.
The school’s 66 students learn in mixed-grade classes, which “really gives a lot of opportunity for peer-to-peer learning,” Ketring said. “It really gives a chance as well to kind of deepen those relationships from teacher to student.”
Our families are our biggest ambassadors.
The smaller size also means “it’s easier to see ‘oh, here’s some of our gaps, here’s places where we can step up and do better,’” Ketring said. The school participates in statewide standardized tests but supplements that data with its own assessments of students’ skills, she added.
Boosting enrollment can be a challenge, especially since “one of our biggest misconceptions in a rural setting is people not knowing we’re a free public school,” said Ketring.
The school’s family network often aids in outreach. “Our families are our biggest ambassadors,” said Ketring. “Living in a small community, it’s word of mouth.”
The traditional public K-8 and high school do “a great job,” said Ketring, but it’s “definitely a more traditional setting.” Parents who choose Pacific Community Charter tend to want more involvement with their children’s education, experiential learning opportunities, and less traditional teaching styles, Ketring said.
Alaska charter works to preserve a native language
At the Hooper Bay Charter School in Hooper Bay, Alaska, founding teacher Renee Green wants to bring back the Yupik language. Native Alaskan languages have been disappearing over the past few centuries, a process fueled years ago by English-only policies in schools across the state.
In addition to typical subjects like English and math, Green’s students also learn about egg gathering, salmon fishing, and clam digging. They engage in community service—picking up trash, gathering plants, and presenting to the community about how to protect the environment.
Green, who is Indigenous, said that the community felt the traditional public school didn’t reflect the Yupik culture. The textbooks were from Texas or California, she said. They talked about Christopher Columbus and “topics that are so far away from the small community that we come from,” she added.
Green was working at a traditional public school when she was asked to join the charter. “I thought it was going to be a really good opportunity for me to apply my cultural knowledge,” she said.
“We learn things first that are in our environment, in our subsistence, in our culture, and in our language,” Green said. “When we connect that to the outside world, the Western society, they’re able to better understand.”
Try and reach out to other people, like-minded people, and find a way for it to work for the kids in your community.
But managing the school hasn’t been free of challenges. To get from Anchorage, Alaska to Hooper Bay requires two plane rides. The population is less than 1,500. As a result, teacher recruitment has posed enormous difficulties.
The school has four certified teachers, two of whom are from the Philippines on J-2 visas, Green said. They rely heavily on teacher aides and other support staff. “We consider them teachers, too,” she said.
Hooper Bay Charter School serves grades K-8. A lot of its students return to a traditional public school or attend boarding schools for high school, but some “won’t continue going to school after that,” said Green. She hopes the school continues to expand so older students can access their culturally specific curriculum throughout their high school years.
Will charter schools continue to expand in rural areas?
While the potential for charters in states like Montana and North Dakota could open the door for rural charter expansion, rural communities may be resistant, experts point out.
“These are tiny states. These are states that love their rural public schools, that depend upon their rural public schools,” said Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group focused on supporting and improving traditional public schools.
Rural communities often depend on their schools to serve as community hubs, major sources of employment, and providers of wraparound services—like early childhood education or health care.
Even Roush-Meier, who has spent her career advocating for charter schools, is skeptical that charters are poised for a major expansion.
“Chartering is not the wave of the future,” Roush-Meier said. Since more states are establishing and expanding private school choice programs, and a federal tax-credit scholarship program could introduce private school choice in states that have so far resisted it, Roush-Meier believes “charters will start waning.”
Still, Roush-Meier said there may be some exceptions. Some rural districts chose to convert their schools to charter schools to avoid consolidation, Roush-Meier said. If families believe their schools are becoming too politically polarized, they may band together with other like-minded parents to form alternatives, she added.
Online charter schools may prove especially popular in rural areas, where transportation can pose a major challenge for in-person learning, Roush-Meier noted. And the advent of “microschools” could become popular for small groups of rural parents.
For rural communities that are interested in pursuing charter options, Roush-Meier said “they need to have a very solid plan and they have to have a need [for school choice] in their community.”
“If you feel in your heart that it’s not working and you feel like you know a better way for this to work, then by all means, try and reach out to other people—like-minded people—and find a way for it to work for the kids in your community,” said Green.
