The Rural Solution: How Community Schools Can Reinvigorate Rural Education


Last Updated: February 01, 2011
 

Doris Terry Williams, executive director of the Rural School and Community Trust and director of the Trust's Capacity Building Program, explains the value of full-service community schools in rural areas in this report from the Center for American Progress.

The Rural Solution: How Community Schools Can Reinvigorate Rural Education combines data from the literature and other public sources, interviews, site visits, and the organizational experience of The Rural School and Community Trust in an examination of community schools from a rural perspective. It provides a context for rural community schools and discusses the need for clarification of the language used to describe the concept of community school. Three examples of successful rural community schools provide a framework for discussing the benefits, characteristics, and policy implications of rural community schools.

The paper also discusses the challenges that rural areas confront in attempting to implement a community school strategy and offers recommendations for overcoming them.

Click here to download a PDF version of this report.