The plight of rural schools, attended by nearly one in five public school students, is well documented: They are often resource-poor, making do with dilapidated buildings, spotty internet connections, and little access to the kinds of social service agencies, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic funding that tend to be available in urban and suburban neighborhoods. Further, not only are many rural districts forced to scrape by on meager tax revenues, but they also tend to receive less than adequate funding from their state governments.
Given these challenges, it’s no surprise that rural communities would turn to the courts for help. Indeed, rural communities and schools have occasionally been represented — along with plaintiffs from poor urban districts — in lawsuits that aim to force states to distribute school funding more equitably (though it has been relatively uncommon for such lawsuits to focus specifically on the interests of rural students). A review of long-standing litigation in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania reveals the unique obstacles faced by schools located farthest from the nation’s bright lights and big cities.
Trickling tax revenue in Tennessee
By the 1980s, Tennessee’s poor and rural public schools had seen their budgets fall far behind those of the state’s urban and wealthy districts. As a result, they couldn’t offer competitive salaries to teachers or fund important administrative positions. Students lacked access to current textbooks, working computers, and laboratory equipment. They couldn’t offer music and art classes, physical education, extracurricular sports, foreign languages, or Advanced Placement courses. Their facilities were in terrible shape, too: One rural school in Hancock County (total county population: 6,620) described its library (or broom closet?) as “one bookcase nestled in a room containing empty boxes, surplus furniture, a desktop copier, kitchen supplies, a bottle of mouthwash, and a popcorn machine.”
In 1988, a group of rural school districts sued the state, claiming that its education funding system violated the state’s constitution, which requires that the General Assembly “provide for the maintenance, support and eligibility standards of a system of free public schools” and afford substantially equal educational opportunities to all Tennessee children. In Tennessee Small Sch. Sys. v. McWherter (Tenn., 1993), the state’s supreme court agreed, concluding that the “disparities in educational opportunities available to public school students throughout the state [are] constitutionally impermissible” and were “caused principally by [the state’s education] funding scheme.”
Rural communities and schools have occasionally been represented — along with plaintiffs from poor urban districts — in lawsuits that aim to force states to distribute school funding more equitably.
Among the noteworthy aspects of McWherter is its discussion of how the distribution of sales and property taxes were becoming more concentrated in urban counties with larger regional retail centers. As a result of these economic shifts away from rural communities, the court found that non-urban districts were “unable to raise sufficient revenues from local sources to provide even the average amount of total funds for education per pupil state-wide” — and that these shortfalls were the result of inadequate local fiscal “capacity,” not “effort.” In other words, there was nothing rural communities could do to alleviate their school funding woes without outside aid.
The McWherter case returned to the state’s highest court two more times, in 1995 and 2002, to resolve a conflict over the inclusion of teacher salaries in the state’s revised funding formula. And the fight for Tennessee’s rural schools is still not over: Last year, a group of 84 small and rural districts joined a six-year-old lawsuit brought by Shelby County and Metro Nashville schools challenging the adequacy of the state’s school funding system. The case is scheduled to go to trial in early 2022.
Spiraling transportation costs in South Carolina
In the 2005 documentary Corridor of Shame: Neglect of South Carolina’s Rural Schools, educators stuff rags into the cracks in classroom walls to keep out rainwater, students track raw sewage through the hallways; school roof tiles crash through the ceiling during storms; and school library books still refer to astronauts landing on the moon as a future possibility.
These deficits were the focus of Abbeville Cty. Sch. Dist. v. South Carolina (S.C., 2014), brought by a number of small rural school districts, some of which served entire counties. The state supreme court aptly noted that rural districts — some of which consisted of only three or four schools — bear “administrative costs which are disproportionate to the number of students served by that district, and which divert precious funding and resources from the classroom.” But perhaps the most arresting feature of the Abbeville case was its focus on just one of these costs: transportation.
It is incredibly expensive to transport students to and from rural schools. This burden, the court observed, is both a factor in and a reflection of how rural districts are organized. That is, rural districts are often consolidated, ostensibly to save on transportation and other administrative costs. But consolidating small rural schools into larger schools often increases the length of bus routes, the number of students transported, fuel costs, and bus maintenance costs. The greatest cost, though, is borne by students, who “spend far too much time riding to and from school, time that is largely wasted, since it cannot be devoted to any useful endeavor.” Students in one rural district cited in the case “routinely arrived as much as an hour late for school each morning due to an inadequate bussing system,” and their superintendent testified that some students spent as much as four hours per day on a school bus. Another superintendent said that a typical five-year-old student in the rural district might “leave at six in the morning and get back at six in the evening.” Bus schedules and long commute times prevented some students from taking advantage of after-school homework centers or academic assistance programs. The court concluded that the inability of rural students to take full advantage of academic opportunities due to their long commutes “surely contribute[d] to a constitutional violation.”
Plaintiffs prevailed in the 2014 Abbeville case, but their lawsuit came to an end in 2017 when the state supreme court decided that legislators had done enough to close the opportunity gap between the state’s rural/poorer and urban/wealthier districts.
Lagging proficiency in Pennsylvania
Just as the South Carolina courts were leaving the school funding arena, Pennsylvania’s courts were reentering the fray after an extended absence.
In 2014, a group of plaintiffs — including the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools (PARSS) — responded to deep cuts to school funding by suing the state, alleging that education is a fundamental right and that the state had violated its constitutional duty to “provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education” by grossly and arbitrarily underfunding that system.
Their lawsuit was remarkable because, 15 years earlier, in Marrero v. Commonwealth (Penn., 1999) (Marrero II), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had held that the question of adequate funding of education was “exclusively within the purview of the [Pennsylvania] General Assembly’s powers” — essentially taking school finance disputes off the table in the state as far as its state courts were concerned.
But plaintiffs correctly intuited that precedent was not necessarily prologue: In William Penn Sch. Dist. v. Penn. Dept. of Educ. (Pa., 2017), the state supreme court found “irreconcilable deficiencies” in Marrero II and sent the case back to the lower courts. As of this writing, that case was set to go to trial in November.
What’s distinctive about plaintiffs’ (including rural districts’) allegations in the William Penn case is the direct line they draw between school funding levels and the state’s ambitious expectations for student proficiency. The plaintiffs allege that they are unable, specifically, to prepare students to meet the state’s proficiency standards with the resources allocated to them. Rural and small school districts represented in the lawsuit point out that they have been forced to cut educational programs that are “vitally necessary in order to meet state standards.”
In recent decades, much attention has been paid to the challenges facing urban schools. Litigation in Tennessee, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and other states illuminate the equally challenging plight of rural schools.
Their argument makes sense: The state had commissioned a school finance study in 2007 focused entirely on determining the cost of meeting the state’s student proficiency goals. The authors of the study concluded that a whopping 25% increase in overall school spending was needed to meet the state’s student proficiency goals; and yet, despite brief adherence to a new, progressive funding formula created in 2008, the state went in the opposite direction, drastically slashing education funding.
In the years that followed, statewide testing data showed that 72% of Pennsylvania districts had at least one school that did not meet the targeted student proficiency levels in reading or math on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams. In the Shenandoah Valley School District — one of the most rural districts in the state — 40% of students failed to score “proficient” in math and reading. Equally abysmal were student outcomes in the Keystone Exams, which assess performance in high school math, science, and English. The state required all students to achieve a score of “proficient” or higher on the Keystone Exams by the year 2017. Yet, according to plaintiffs, as of 2014, more than 50% of students in the state were unable to pass them. In the Shenandoah district, no more than 36% of students were projected to pass the exams in the year 2017. (Unsurprisingly, the state has since backed away from emphasizing the exams themselves, and it will no longer require that students pass them to graduate from high school.)
An uncertain future for rural schools
In recent decades, much attention has been paid to the challenges facing urban schools. Litigation in Tennessee, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and other states illuminate the equally challenging plight of rural schools. They must assemble students (and attract personnel) from great distances and at great cost and educate them to a high standard with ever-dwindling local tax revenue at their disposal. And there are signs that the COVID-19 pandemic has made things even tougher: The disturbing image of school buses transporting not children, but Wi-Fi routers; test scores trending downward; small businesses, the lifeline of rural economies, experiencing an “economic vise grip.” Perhaps students in rural America will finally begin to receive the attention they deserve, not only in governors’ mansions and state legislatures, but in the courts as well.
This article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 4, pp. 64-65.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Kim
Robert Kim is the executive director of the Education Law Center, based in Newark, NJ. His most recent book is Education and the Law, 6th ed.
