As area rural school districts shrink and costs rise, new state report explores solutions

By Scott O’Connell
Telegram & Gazette Staff

Posted Mar 3, 2018 at 8:18 PM

 

A new report from the state’s education department calls the problems facing rural school districts “unique challenges.” Some officials in those small, shrinking systems, meanwhile, see it more as a struggle for survival.

Here in Central Massachusetts, rural districts are struggling with declining enrollments and rising operating costs. If things don’t improve, some school officials said further staff and programming cuts, increased class sizes and even school closures are possible consequences.

Despite those troubles, Tari Thomas, superintendent of the Ralph C. Mahar regional schools, said she is “feeling very optimistic” about the state recognizing and responding to rural schools’ plight. Two years ago, rural district leaders formed a coalition to advocate for their shared needs, and the recent release of the “Fiscal Conditions in Rural School Districts” report, which recommends relief measures such as increased funding for rural schools, will focus even more attention on their issues, they hope.

“We have reviewed the report and are pleased to see that the Department of Education recognizes and thoroughly understands the trends and issues in the rural communities of the commonwealth,” said Deborah Boyd, associate superintendent at the Tantasqua schools, one of four Central Massachusetts systems featured in the report along with Ralph C. Mahar, Quabbin and Berlin-Boylston.

According to the report, rural districts are those with fewer than 21 students per square mile. 

Fifty-four school systems in Massachusetts fit that description, but their combined student enrollment is just 2.9 percent of the state total.

In the region, however, there are districts not classified as “rural” in the report that are still struggling with the same issues. Quaboag Regional, for instance, which comprises West Brookfield and Warren, has been dealing with declining enrollments, rising operating costs and other factors outlined in the state’s study, to the point that closing West Brookfield’s elementary school has become a possibility.

“We cut every single year,” said the system’s superintendent, Brett Kustigian. “We’re at the point where, when you cut so many positions, there’s nothing left to cut.”

Rural school officials placed some of the blame on the state’s outdated school funding formula, which is now more than two decades old and they say no longer reflects the true cost of educating students today. The formula’s inadequacies are particularly hard on rural districts, which are on the whole losing students and thus receiving comparatively smaller foundation budgets in the state’s funding calculations, which are based on annual student enrollment trends.

According to the state’s report, the combined enrollments at rural schools declined 14 percent between 2008 and 2017, while the rest of the state’s enrollments fell just 2.7 percent. In the region, Quabbin in particular has seen its student population decline by 29 percent since 2008.

Yet rural school officials are dealing with the same overwhelming health care and special education cost increases their colleagues in nonrural districts are seeing, and on top of that trying to keep up with rising transportation costs that are unique to their spread-out systems.

“Because we’re rural, kids that need very specific kinds of programming we can’t offer have to go a significant distance” to get it in another district, Ms. Thomas said, adding the cost of that long-distance transportation “is increasing at a rate I can’t keep up with.”

Maureen Marshall, Quabbin’s superintendent, said the state has undercompensated rural systems for that cost burden.

“Reconsidering a higher and consistent rate of reimbursement for the total cost of student transportation for regional schools would go a very long way in addressing some of the financial concerns identified” in the state’s report, she said, noting State Auditor Suzanne Bump came to a similar conclusion in her department’s study of regional school systems last fall.

The state’s latest report, too, poses a change to the transportation reimbursement formula as a possible solution to rural schools’ financial problems. It also suggests overhauling the state’s school funding formula, as recommended by the state’s Foundation Budget Review Commission in 2015, and creating a new funding category called “sparsity aid” to further supplement rural districts with declining student enrollments.

That last idea is something other states have done, Ms. Thomas pointed out, in recognition of the inherent limitations of schools in rural, low-income areas. “You just can’t create the same economies of scale” in those small districts, she said, which consequently need extra funding from the state to maintain an equitable balance with larger and/or wealthier systems.

The latest report also presents further consolidation of services – either through full or partial regionalization, superintendency unions or education collaboratives – as a way for rural schools to scale up their resources. Some school officials said it’s not always such an easy call to put slightly better financial security over local identity, however.

In many sparsely populated, rural areas, “your school is the community center for the town,” Ms. Thomas said. “It’s where you get to know your neighbor, where you make friends – you don’t want to lose that (to regionalization).”

“Urging the expansion of regions may indeed create more cost-effective management models,” Ms. Marshall said. “However, political resistance and the lack of state incentives for such efforts are often serious deterrents to the realization of such efforts.”

The state’s report suggests some ways to make regionalization more enticing, however, by building on the state’s existing competitive grant program for regionalizing government entities; revamping the state’s bonus aid to newly formed regional districts; and providing more data tools to guide districts looking for regionalization or collaborative opportunities.

Another program the report touches on and that several local rural systems are benefiting from is school choice, which allows students to attend a district outside of their hometown. School systems have the option to accept students through school choice but not to prevent them from leaving, and can either receive or lose state funding depending on whether a school choice student is coming or going.

“The lifeline has been school choice,” said Mr. Kustigian, who reported his district brings in $1 million annually through the program. “It’s really kept our enrollment up – it’s helped tremendously.”

Yet there is also criticism of the program for the way it pits needy districts against each other.

“I’m robbing from my neighbors, and that’s never a good thing,” Ms. Thomas said of school choice, which has brought in more than half of the students attending Petersham, the highest percentage for any rural district in the state. Without the program, however, Petersham wouldn’t have enough students to support individual grades anymore, she said – “they’ve have to go to combination classrooms.”

Rural school officials, consequently, are hoping for more comprehensive changes at the state level to address their systems’ problems.

“It is certainly understandable that at the state level many issues are vying for a piece of the same pot of money,” Ms. Boyd said, although she hoped for at least more reliable regional transportation and special education reimbursements. “For the foreseeable future, rural districts will likely have to prioritize their requests and continue to work with our neighbors to find areas to collaborate and share resources.”

State Rep. Todd M. Smola, a Republican from Warren who also represents Brimfield, Holland, Palmer, Sturbridge, Wales and Ware, admitted “everybody’s looking for money” on Beacon Hill.

“The question becomes, how do you get additional funding to the communities that are struggling?” he said. “There’s only so much pie.”

The recommendations in the state’s new rural schools report almost all would require more funding to be set aside for rural districts, yet urban and suburban communities are pushing the Legislature for more funding for their schools as well.

But Mr. Smola said the state’s rural caucus is training its focus on the school funding issue and is exploring possible proposals like a “rural funding assistance” program, potentially in next year’s budget.

“How that would be broken down is obviously going to be the challenge,” he said, explaining the state’s rural areas contain a variety of different public school programs with varying degrees of need. “I’d like to think we could give it a shot.”

The rural schools report doesn’t seem destined to fade away any time, either. On March 12, acting state education commissioner Jeffrey Wulfson will join state lawmakers and school officials in Shelburne Falls for a public forum on the issue of rural districts’ fiscal challenges.

Scott O’Connell can be reached at Scott.O’Connell@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottOConnellTG