Some of the teachers who show preschoolers and kindergarteners how to line up during their first days in North Park School District are the same ones who years later watch them file across the graduation stage with diploma in hand.
The rural district in Walden, about 20 miles south of the Wyoming border, educates kids in every grade under one roof, with teachers and other staff who get to know the tiniest details about their students and who develop long-term relationships with kids and their families as they climb grades.
“I think that gives you a perspective that you are in it for the long haul and the impact you are making to students,” Superintendent Amy Ward said. “You see that over and over again year after year.”
But there are tradeoffs that come with educating kids in a remote part of the state — including fewer staff, most of whom juggle more than one job, as well as routine struggles to recruit teachers to isolated towns and greater funding uncertainties when school enrollment drops. A report released Wednesday by the nonprofit Keystone Policy Center takes a sweeping look at both the challenges and advantages that come with being a rural district.
More than 80% of Colorado districts are rural or “small rural” — those districts that serve fewer than 1,000 students. While the majority of districts in the state skew rural, they account for about 16% of kids statewide, according to the report.
“What emerges is a picture of schools that know their students deeply, anchor their communities, and produce results that meet or exceed statewide benchmarks in key areas,” according to the report, titled “The Heart of a Rural Community: How to better support Colorado’s Small Rural School Districts.” “It is also a picture of institutions operating inside systems that were not designed for them, at costs that policymakers do not fully recognize.”
Ward, who is in her fifth year as superintendent of North Park School District, sees that mixed picture play out on the ground every day in her district of under 130 students. Tightly woven relationships within the district are one of the motivating forces that keep students on track in rural districts, where teachers have more opportunity to learn about what makes their students come alive in the classroom and figure out how to tailor their education, she said. Schools also often double as the center of their community in rural Colorado, opening their doors to serve as a gathering place, sometimes for meetings and events, other times for funerals.
At the same time, Ward said she experiences the stress that stems from the disconnect between state rules and the needs of rural districts.
That underlying challenge is well documented in the 21-page report, exposing a gap that rural administrators and education advocates say often exists between well-intentioned policies designed by lawmakers and the tough realities they collide with in rural districts.
“I think that most policymaking is around suburban and urban school districts, and I think that the rural districts for the most part it’s sort of an afterthought,” Van Schoales, senior policy director of the Keystone Policy Center, told The Colorado Sun. “There’s a certain irony in a way that most school districts are small rural school districts and yet the policies are made for the other 30 or 20 school districts in the state.”
Ward said she is preparing for a 10% cut to her Title I funding going into next year — funding earmarked for districts with significant numbers of students living in poverty. That’s primarily because her district struggles to get parents whose children qualify for free and reduced-price lunch to fill out necessary forms, in part because of “a stigma” attached to qualifying for that kind of support, she said. So the count of kids from low-income families the district reports to the state ends up lower than the real number, resulting in reduced funding.
State data shows 46.5% of students in the district qualify for free and reduced-price lunch this school year. Because of the challenge trying to get parents to turn in forms, the district tends to underreport qualifying kids.
Another challenge shared among rural districts is the demand to keep up with state reporting requirements around data and funding that bogs district leaders down with administrative burden, said Denille LePlatt, executive director of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance.
“We just hear a lot from districts that there is duplication of effort,” LePlatt told The Sun, explaining that different reports often ask for the same kinds of information.
“The problem there is that every time there is legislation that is requiring this, it’s added on top of something that’s already required,” she said. “None of the other requirements are going away.”
In the report, LePlatt says the problem is more complicated than mounds of paperwork, pointing to flaws within the structures of different laws, such as the Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act. The state legislature adopted the READ Act in 2012 as a way to support schools in helping all students read on grade level by fourth grade.
Rural teachers usually understand which of their students are behind in reading, LePlatt said in the report, and they don’t need a standardized test to help them identify flailing readers when they have their own process in place.
Rural educators featured in the report say they know some lawmakers are showing up to their schools and trying to learn what education looks like in farther-flung parts of the state. LePlatt recalls a day last fall that state Sen. Chris Kolker, a Centennial Democrat, shadowed her for more than 12 hours as they roadtripped to schools throughout northeastern Colorado.
“I can say that they are making a concerted effort to understand schools, especially rural schools,” she told The Sun. “I think there are lots of variables that complicate the process, especially for rural school districts. The way that the systems are built in the state are a one-size-fits-all and we are not that. That doesn’t work.”
The state education department has also taken steps to ease some of the administrative load in rural districts, gathering feedback from districts that are part of a state advisory council on the best ways to collect mandatory data.
Sheldon Rosenkrance, chief district operations officer for the state department said he understands the time pressures administrators are under as they tackle the task of tracking and logging data in between other responsibilities. Much of that data, related to school accountability and staffing, gives the department the information it needs to help improve education across districts.
“It’s trying to get that right string of enough data so we understand and know what’s going on in our schools,” Rosenkrance said, “but not trying to overburden at the same time.”
The state education department is working to scale back the piles of paperwork and reporting rules that hamstring districts when applying for grants, making the process more efficient. The department has started experimenting with consolidating grants that address the same priorities, such as post-secondary education and workforce readiness. They have tried to identify districts that haven’t applied for these grants in the past and distribute funds through a formula rather than on a competitive basis, Rosenkrance said.
Ward said her district relies heavily on grants to support staffing, planning, professional development and instructional coaching, and yet most of the district’s grant writing falls on her. She sees lawmakers and the department trying to support rural districts and trying to listen to what they need.
She understands that Colorado’s larger populations along the Front Range will naturally draw more attention from lawmakers.
“And yet the majority of school districts in Colorado are rural, and I think that is something that lawmakers at the state level need to realize,” Ward said. “We are a rural state, whether we like it or not.”