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Governance and School Boards Who Decides? When I was a child there were 200,000 school boards -- over a million citizens -- one in 100, saw themselves as governors of their schools. Most people, in short, knew somebody who knew somebody who ran our schools. Furthermore a majority of citizens had school-age kids. And the schools they went to rarely were larger than a few hundred, and often only a few dozen pupils constituted a school. The school was a familiar place.  Today there are less than 20,000 school boards -- and twice as many citizens. Maybe one in 20,000 citizens serves on a school board. And the schools they oversee house well over a thousand students, and are often located far from their own hometowns. And most Americans no longer have school-age children at all. --Deborah Meier, Keynote Speech to the Rural Trust Symposium on Standards in Public Schools, January, 1999. Who has the authority to determine where rural children go to school, what they learn, and how their schools are run? Who speaks for community in the process of schooling? How can public schools be encouraged and supported in their efforts to meet the challenge of innovation, restructuring, and improvement? The Rural Trust has worked to assess the role of school boards in a rapidly changing system of governance. In many states, school boards find themselves on the one hand ever more accountable for academic acheivement while on the other hand ever more limited in the range of decisions they are authorized to make. How can participation in rural school boards be strengthened if they are blamed for everything and empowered to do nothing? 
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