Volume 4, Number 11 November 2002

INSIDE THIS ISSUE Tennessee Supreme Court Strikes Down Rural School Funding Plan Rural Perspective Featured at National School Funding Conference Leave the Money on the Table: Vermont Better Off Going It Alone Michigan Looks at Declining Enrollment in Rural Schools Arkansas Schools Needing Improvement Listed If You Resist, They Will Audit Public Likes Small Schools, Fair Funding, More Money for Low Performing Schools Declining Enrollment: Widespread, But Especially in the West About RPM RPM Archives

Michigan Looks at Declining Enrollment
in Rural Schools

Michigan, with the sixth largest rural population in the U.S., has a substantial number of rural school districts with declining enrollment, especially in the economically distressed Upper Peninsula and the northern regions of the Lower Peninsula. A year ago, the legislature adopted a provision allowing schools with fewer than 1,500 students in grades K-12 to average student enrollment over the past three years for the purpose of calculating state aid, but Governor John Engler vetoed the appropriation needed to support this policy, preferring to study the problem. His study committee found that most schools with declining enrollment have cut budgets, eaten into their cash reserves, worked together and used distance learning to cut costs. The committee arrived at numerous recommendations, among them:

• A rural schools electronic network to gain access to instructional and professional development services.


• Changes in the funding formula providing more support for sparsely populated districts.


• More use of inter-district cooperation to cut administrative costs.


• Financial incentives to consolidate.


• More use of multi-age and multi-grade classrooms.


• Revising the state aid formula's method of counting students which "gives an unfair advantage to large, growing school districts and fails to acknowledge the difficulties being experienced by the smaller, declining enrollment districts"