CU study finds rural communities with small schools benefit greatly

By Susan S. Lang

The old news is that students in small schools do better and have brighter outcomes than students in larger schools. The latest news, however, is that when small schools close in rural communities to consolidate with large schools, the local community is a big loser.

Thomas Lyson poses inside Freeville Elementary School in front of a wall mural created by village students in 1948. Lyson, a development sociology professor at Cornell, was Freeville's mayor in 2000-04 and helped keep the elementary school open during a district effort to consolidate. Kevin Stearns/University Photography

A Cornell study shows that on almost every indicator of economic and social well-being, rural communities with their own schools fare significantly better than rural communities that no longer have schools.

The study finds that small rural communities with a school have significantly higher housing values, more new housing, smaller income variability, fewer households receiving public assistance, lower poverty and child poverty rates, more workers in professional and managerial jobs and more workers employed within the community. These areas also are more likely to have municipal water and sewer systems and more likely to grow in population than communities without schools. In addition, they have proportionately more college graduates than communities without schools.

"When a school goes in a rural community, it's the death knell. This study shows consistently that for the smallest rural communities, the presence of a school is linked to many social and economic benefits," said sociologist Thomas A. Lyson, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell, who conducted the study. Its findings were recently summarized in a special report issued by the Southern Rural Development Center in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research and the Rural School and Community Trust. The full study was published in the Journal of Research in Rural Education (17:131-137, 2002).

"The money that might be saved through consolidation could be lost in lost taxes, declining property values and lost businesses," Lyson said. "Even in the smallest rural villages in New York, schools serve as important markers of social and economic variability and vitality, the research indicates."

Lyson first looked into the importance of schools in small towns while serving from 2000 to 2004 as mayor of the village of Freeville, a small rural community near Ithaca, when officials wanted to close the local elementary school. To determine the effects of a school closing, Lyson analyzed data from the 1990 U.S. Census and from the New York State Department of Education on all 352 incorporated villages and towns with populations of under 2,500 in New York state. He considered the 71 communities with 500 or fewer people as the smaller rural community group and the 281 villages with more than 500 people as the larger rural community group. About half (52 percent) of the smaller group had a school (although nearly all of the towns and villages had a school at one time), and almost three-fourths (74 percent) of the larger group had a school.

Lyson found that the differences between larger rural communities with schools and those without were similar to what he found in smaller communities, though they were not as extreme.

He pointed out that in addition to spurring social and economic vitality, schools also serve as recreational hubs and cultural centers for sports, theater, music and other civic activities in rural communities.

"It is a place where generations come together and where community identity is forged," Lyson said. "Yet, school consolidation has been the bane of rural communities for at least the past 50 years." He pointed out that the 130,000 school districts in the United States in 1930 had been consolidated into fewer than 15,000 by 2000.

"School consolidation is likely to be a threat to many rural communities in the coming decades," concluded Lyson, whose efforts in Freeville helped keep the school open. The research was supported by Cornell and the National Science Foundation.