Abstract
Historically, community-school partnerships were the center of life in rural America and the schools often acted as the hub of civic and social life (Biddle & Azano, 2016; Tyack, 1972). However, as the United States shifted economic power away from rural agriculture and resource extraction in the 20th century, prominent education reformers began to refer to the academic achievement gap between urban and rural schools as the “rural school problem” (Cubberly, 1914). For over one hundred years, rural schools have generally been viewed through a deficit lens and rural school principals, who wear “many hats” in their communities, often struggle to balance the duties of the daily job with the leveraging of community assets through intentional relationship building (Sutherland et al., 2023). At W Middle School in rural Oregon, the current principal is facing just this. Between all of the administrative duties, lunch duty, behavior support, bus duty, maintenance, and meetings, she is unable to find the time to build and sustain relationships with the community that she knows are advantageous for students, families, and the community. How do other leaders of small, rural schools approach building and sustaining community-school partnerships? What criteria do they use to select potential partnerships? What are the challenges of school-community partnerships in small, rural communities? These questions, in addition to a review of the literature on school-community partnerships, frame a qualitative exploratory study that uses semi-structured interviews to gather data about the experiences of the leaders of small, rural schools in building and sustaining school-community partnerships.
