Ford Grant Funds Equity Collaborative - Rural Roots, Volume 2, Number 3 (June 2001)

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This article appeared in

Volume 2, No. 3
June 2001

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Arts Flourish on California's San Juan Ridge

Ford Grant Funds Equity Collaborative

Rural Datebook

What Lies Ahead for Rural Trust Network Sites in the Southwest

Art Blooms in the Desert

New England Students Challenged to "Take The Plunge -- Make A Difference!"

Rural Trust Students Selected as Annenberg Scholars

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About Rural Roots

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Ford Grant Funds Equity Collaborative

The Rural School and Community Trust (Rural Trust) -- in cooperation with the New Mexico Organizing Strategy, School at the Center (Nebraska), Challenge West Virginia, Southern Echo (Mississippi), Vermont Children's Forum and the North Carolina Justice Center -- received a $50,000 planning grant in April from the Ford Foundation. The group, called the Rural Equity Collaborative (REC), will together prepare a plan to improve the equity and adequacy of school finance systems for rural communities in high poverty regions of the country.

This grant will begin the process of building a unique partnership between the Rural Trust's Rural Education Finance Center (REFC) and the six rural organizations of the REC, that are all based in communities prototypical of distinct rural regions of the country. All of the REC organizations have been successful in building constituencies of support for rural school improvement using research, communication and organizing strategies of their own. However, the REC was assembled with the understanding that working together on the vexing problems of school finance in rural places will bring a greater opportunity to effect change.

Working with the REFC, members of the REC share the common goals of:

Achieving a policy setting in each of the six states in which all children have equal access to educational opportunity independent of where they live in the state, their color, language or level of wealth;
Ending state school aid formulas that deny equal educational opportunity to children because they live in poor, remote places; and
Generating schools that are well-maintained and located close enough to a child's home that travel time is limited according to principles of physical and mental health, readiness to learn, and geography.

The partners will develop individual, comprehensive state action plans that will: address grassroots public engagement of rural people in equity finance issues; assess the state school finance system; link an organized rural constituency to urban groups committed to equity; communicate rural issues to the media; and assess the state's school finance legal setting. Along with the individual state plans, the final proposal will include broad common objectives that will give national cohesion to the effort.

"We think of this as a challenge to organize effective campaigns for school finance equity in some states where an informed rural constituency can make a difference for all the kids -- urban and rural -- in the state," said Jack Murrah, Rural Trust Board Chairman.