Help Start a National Clearinghouse on Rural School Finance -- Rural Policy Matters, Volume 1, Number 9 (November 1999)

The Rural School and Community Trust is asking rural people for help in developing a national information clearinghouse on school finance issues as they affect rural communities. We hope to launch a full-service clearinghouse next year, with both print and electronic services to lay people and professionals grappling with the complicated issues in school finance.

Rural concerns about inequities in state finance systems have become increasingly prominent litigation in the state courts. According to University of Georgia professor John Dayton, sixteen state Supreme Court decisions have discussed inequities toward rural areas, and eleven of these cases have been decided since 1993. In some instances, the rural/urban disparity has been a prominent feature in the litigation.

Court decisions usually must be implemented by legislative action, and rural areas have often fared badly in that arena.

And it is likely that rural concern over school finance will increase while the cost structure of American education continues to place more pressure on small schools, through increasingly specialized curriculum, centralized standards, and unfunded mandates in special and gifted education. Meanwhile the need for new investment in facilities intensifies and the local property tax base in rural economies fails to keep up with cost growth.

To meet this challenge, rural people need to become more effectively engaged in the policy making process than they have been. In part, they will need more accurate and timely information about the merits of this issue, the legal and political developments that are shaping it, and the experiences of rural people who are addressing concerns similar to their own.

A national clearinghouse would provide easy access to up-to-date, reliable, information about school finance issues for rural education activists and educators, attorneys, scholars, and journalists. It would also provide an interactive forum for opinions and perspectives from the field, and give rural people access to one-another and to technical experts.

Interested? We need to hear from you. Can you use this service? What kind of information or resources would be most helpful? Would you want to contribute information or analysis? Let us know what you think. Send us an email on the subject "Finance Clearinghouse" or contact us by phone, fax, mail, or through the web (see the back page for contact information).