by Tom Driscoll
More orange and yellow explodes overnight on the high bluffs. Cedars have begun to shed color. Soon, frost will soon burn the grass prairie-gold and red and beneath the grass, soil will freeze, slowly driving ice crystals down, heat moving ever toward the cold, frost expanding deeper and deeper.
Consider then JFK’s often quoted economic analogy, that a rising tide lifts all boats, and re-imagine the odd inverse, an imperceptible upheaval, hard as concrete, powerful as a drifting continent, of frozen soil. Not a warm tide of economic prosperity, but winter.Rural Minnesota schools seem sometimes to be stuck in a long winter. And as cold persists, the frost creeps deeper, eventually prying-up the very foundations of an education system designed long ago to resist the destructive force of inaction.
Small farms give way to ever-larger operations. Small town manufacturing evaporates only to rain down in some far-away country where plentiful labor is dirt cheap. In Fillmore County, where I live, 89-percent of workers commute to other towns. While back on Main Street, small businesses struggle, and often fail, to compete with big-boxes in those same distant cities. In many rural centers, the school district is the largest employer.
Critics of rural school districts complain the perennial demand for more funding, more taxpayer-funded levies, levy-overrides, especially in view of small town demographics: smaller families, fewer students, a large number of taxpayers on fixed retirement incomes with no children in school. They cite unequal state funding formulas that fail to adjust for the fact that the per-pupil cost of educating students in small schools is higher than educating them in large schools. Data maps offered by the Minnesota Rural Education Association show that, largely due to insufficient tax capacity of business and agriculture in rural areas, property-owners in southeastern Minnesota, like property-owners in counties throughout the state, pay 3-to-4 times the minimum rate to provide $100 for one pupil, a situation they claim could be “equalized” across all districts with increased state aid.
According to a 2002 report, Small Schools Under Siege, prepared by the Mankato-based Center for Rural Policy and Development, a clear link also exists between school district size and quality of district infrastructure: “As the enrollment of the school district decreased, so did the conditions of its facilities,” the report states.CRPD points to the autumn referendum-process as proof of education-funding inequality between rural and non-rural areas of the state. Property-owners in small districts with low enrollment provide significantly more funding in support of their schools through referendum than any other size district, which are classified much like state sport divisions, one-A-through five-A. Taxpayers in the smallest 20-percent of districts pay through referendum 63.7-percent more than the state average.
Frost runs deep. The problem of adequately funding rural schools is a reflection of the overall economic health of rural areas faced with a withering tax base and rising costs. For small districts considering going to the voters in November, the experts recommend tackling the community-health issue head-on by collecting economic data and developing a snapshot of the relationship between the school and the area it serves. Involvement of local business and individual citizens through public meetings and focus groups is considered critical in both assessing real needs and developing broad support before taking action./p>
This Outpost is adapted from the 2006 essay, Rural Schools and the Local Economy.
Minnesota writer Tom Driscoll reports on politics, economic development and life in rural America at The Small of America. He can be reached at [email protected]. >
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