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Commentary: Rural School Closures – Punishment for Crimes Never Committed [1]
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Date: 2025-03-25
Our public schools are closing, and these closures hurt rural children and rural communities.
As a rural education researcher, I study school closures—the permanent kind—and, right now, I am flooded with requests for help.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of children are displaced when their schools are permanently shuttered. After a brief slowing during the pandemic, closure numbers are again on the rise. Right now, school boards across the country—from cities as large as Atlanta to towns as small as Autaugaville, Alabama—are debating closing schools. A number of state governments, including Vermont and Indiana, are also considering or adopting policies that could force widespread closures.
Often, the rationale for closing schools is budgetary: in an effort to maximize efficiency, school boards vote to close school sites and bus students to other facilities. Current financial pressures are substantial, especially for low-income districts.
Inflation is increasing the costs of goods, while tariffs may further accelerate that, and many states have passed unfunded curricular or staffing mandates. The possibility of cuts to federal funding looms large. We are in the midst of a national teacher shortage, and districts are struggling to hire and retain bus drivers and other critical staff. Covid-era relief funds have ended, but Covid-era challenges have not: scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress just hit an all-time low, and students’ psychological and behavioral needs remain. Underfunded rural districts are particularly strapped by these demands, and many are failing to pass budgets.
In response, they’re closing schools.
Dropping enrollments also lead to closures. Depopulating rural places—places where factories have closed and small farms have collapsed—may be especially affected. The pandemic has also played a role, as public school enrollment hasn’t rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. The recent expansion of charter schools and voucher programs has drained many districts of students as well, leaving public schools with fewer and fewer students to fill their seats.
A variety of education policies–some Republican-led, others enacted by Democrats–are also responsible for school closures. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states were required to adopt accountability policies that closed schools for poor academic performance; many continue these sanctions today.
Some predominantly rural states, including Alaska, Maine, and Arkansas, have policies that encourage or mandate the consolidation of school districts, which also leads to school closures, as the newly consolidated school board shutters facilities.
A few assumptions lie beneath these rationales and policies: that closures save money, that closures inspire better academic performance, and that closures expand educational opportunities.
Unfortunately, very little research supports these assumptions, and, in many cases, they’re flat-out wrong. Frequently, cost savings are limited, often well below what’s been promised; this is because closure typically does not reduce personnel—a district’s largest budget item—and it can inflate transportation costs and require building expansions or updates to receiving schools.
The academic rationale may also be flawed. Students in underperforming schools are rarely sent to a stronger school, and recent research shows that students who experienced a closure see negative long-term impacts on college attainment, employment, and earnings.
Socially, closure is also consequential. When schools close, children’s relationships with peers and teachers are disrupted, and behavioral issues increase.
In rural districts, closure often forces students to spend significantly longer periods of time on the bus traveling to and from their new school—sometimes, upwards of four hours a day. This distance keeps families from attending parent-teacher conferences; athletes can’t make practice. Bus rides might be especially dangerous: through narrow mountain passes, over rivers that routinely flood, or on poorly maintained roads.
And the impacts on rural communities can be profound. With closure, a town may lose its largest source of employment, and other businesses—the garage that repairs the buses or the diner that fills with Friday night football crowds—often shut. The important services co-located in schools, like medical clinics and food pantries, may also end. Without a school, there’s nowhere to gather, no reason to come together. Families leave, moving closer to their children’s new school. “Closing the school killed the town,” rural residents tell me.
School closure is usually undemocratic and often harmful. For many rural communities, it’s punishment for a crime they didn’t commit, like a state’s underfunding of public education. Policies that force closure are a form of gaslighting: they create the appearance of reform, without any actual investment in public schools.
Right now, efforts to resist closure are localized: parents pleading at school board meetings, alumni sending donations, and elementary schoolers holding picket signs. Closure is a highly personal kind of heartbreak. But it is also a national threat.
Our attention may be captured by Trump and his executive actions. But districts and states are making closure decisions now. If we wait to act on this, the schools serving many of our rural students and communities will have already disappeared.
Closure is not an answer to budget shortfalls, academic underperformance, or educational inequality. There is no cheaper alternative; we cannot punish our way to excellence. So we need to question the “logic” of closures, stop the closure mandates and hasty closure decisions, and, instead, actually invest in our schools.
Mara Casey Tieken is an associate professor of education at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She is the author of Educated out: How rural students navigate elite colleges–and what it costs them and Why rural schools matter. She also maintains a website for rural communities facing the forced closure of their schools.
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