Large, low-performing, urban school districts make national headlines with their struggles and successes. But rural school districts, less frequently noticed or mentioned, also face significant challenges in helping students access resources that can give them tremendous opportunities.
As a still-shaky economy continues to worry education stakeholders, many districts are cutting costs to compensate for revenue loss and are ramping up efforts to secure education grants from companies, foundations, and the government—creating more competition for rural districts that desperately need more funding to help their students succeed.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics [1] (NCES) [1] indicate that $86.7 million was awarded under the Small Rural School Achievement Program, which is a Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) initiative. REAP initiatives are designed to help rural districts that might lack the personnel and resources to compete effectively for federal competitive grants and that often receive education grant allocations in amounts that are too small to be effective in meeting their intended purposes.
NCES and the U.S. Census Bureau have defined three types of rural locales [2]:
Fringe: Rural territory less than or equal to 5 miles from an urbanized area, as well as rural territory that is less than or equal to 2.5 miles from an urban cluster.
Distant: Rural territory that is more than 5 miles but less than or equal to 25 miles from an urbanized area, as well as rural territory that is more than 2.5 miles but less than or equal to 10 miles from an urban cluster.
Remote: Rural territory that is more than 25 miles from an urbanized area and is also more than 10 miles from an urban cluster.
With those definitions in mind and according to NCES data [3], during the 2007-08 school year there were 7,757 rural districts in the U.S.
As districts of all sizes are discovering, winning education grants can make a tremendous difference in providing student access to mobile devices, much-needed teacher professional development, or overdue technology upgrades.
But when it comes to securing grant money, how can rural school districts—in which administrators often do the work of several people—compete with larger districts that usually can afford to pay professional grant writers?
“In my experience, one of the biggest obstacles for rural schools is that their administrative team is very small, and they’re already wearing many hats,” said Ginny Lays, a grant writer for The Write Group Inc., who has worked with rural schools since 1988.
Grant writing is a time-consuming experience, especially when federal grants are involved, and Lays said many rural school administrators don’t have the time to write grant proposals or the funds to pay for grant writers.
Rural school administrators might be lucky enough to find a teacher in the district who is passionate about a particular area and would be willing to assist in completing a grant application for funding in that area, although teachers in rural districts are as time- and resource-strapped as rural school administrators.
In its Request for Proposal (RFP) documents, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) estimates it will take applicants 100 hours to complete a federal education grant proposal. For a grant writer, that estimate could be more or less, depending on whether it is the grant writer’s first time preparing a proposal for a given grant.
“It’s very time-consuming, and there is lots of research that must be done,” Lays said. “Even if you’ve been in the funding stream before and you’re composing another [grant proposal], you have a framework, but you still have to update all the research.”
She added: “One of the things that gives me great joy is when I get a grant for a rural school district and a teacher says, ‘I don’t know how to spend all this money.’ These schools don’t have grant writers on staff; they don’t even know where to begin to access the resources.”
Rural school educators hunting for grants that specifically target rural schools will not find many, and they often must compete with much larger districts when it comes to federal grants.
“Rural people don’t have the power,” Lays said. She noted that while high-powered legislators often don’t represent truly rural jurisdictions, more people are becoming aware of rural districts’ needs—and various organizations are working to bring attention to rural schools.
Lays offered five key pieces of advice for those hoping to secure education grants for a rural school or district.
Know your own. “Understanding your community and your community need is really important, because most of the grants are based on need,” Lays said. “I think for a lot of rural people and rural schools, they’re used to their community. Many of them have grown up there, and they don’t realize, comparatively, how their school district’s needs are greater than, say, a suburban district. They’re used to making do with what they have—which isn’t much.”
Start small. “I always tell my schools that you need to start as close, physically and geographically, as possible to you in terms of funding,” she said. Lays recommended applying for a grant from a local foundation or Chamber of Commerce first, then spreading out to regional grants, state grants, and then federal grants. “You have more opportunity to win a grant if the organization is local,” she said, likening the system to the ripples a pebble produces when dropped into water.
Don’t go it alone. “You can’t do it alone,” Lays said. “A district of 1,500 kids can’t [always] be competitive on the federal level by itself.” When it comes to federal grants, forming a consortium with neighboring districts might give rural schools a better shot at funding.
Every bit helps. “Even small grant funding has a very large impact is a small, rural district. Impact is very important,” Lays said. “I have seen a small grant help to begin to change a school culture. And if you are able to support a great teacher with grant resources, it inspires other teachers to think they could get grant money to support project they have in mind. It builds excitement and inspires teachers to take programmatic risks.”
Decide before you apply. “Grant management is another obstacle—once you get a grant, there are all kinds of administrative things that come along with the funding, including reporting, fiscal management, purchasing, et cetera,” she said. “Again, small rural districts have very small business offices—sometimes it’s only one person—so it adds work to even get a grant, let alone a large federal grant.” Lays said school leaders must plan how they will manage a grant, if awarded, before the district decides to even enter the grant application process.
“This is a time-consuming thing that rural administrators don’t have time to do. That’s an obstacle, because a small district cannot be competitive on its own,” Lays said.
In fact, rural administrators and educators are often so busy wearing multiple hats that they may not even realize certain grant opportunities exist.
“Rural kids have real needs, too, and the spotlight is rarely on them,” Lays said.
Robert Mahaffey, director of communications and marketing for the Rural School and Community Trust [4], said there are three primary areas that make the competitive grant environment problematic for rural areas.
- Rural districts often lack the technical assistance and support to be able to actually apply for the grants. Most rural local educational agencies don’t have a dedicated grant writer, and even a district leader or educator who has applied for a grant before may not have the necessary skills to make the application stand out among larger districts with the money to employ grant writers. “Oftentimes they’re just not able to overcome the application process—not for lack of trying, but because having the assistance on hand to apply for the grants is overly burdensome,” Mahaffey said.
- Required private-sector matches are hard to come by in rural areas. Many competitive grants, including the Investing In Innovation (i3) grant, require a 50 percent funding match from the private sector. Sometimes those private-sector matches must be declared upfront, either by the applicant identifying its partner or by simply stating that it secured a private-sector match. “A lot of rural districts have a significant number of children who are Title I-eligible, and you don’t have a lot of private sector support in the community. If you don’t have two nickels to rub together, and applicants had to initially declare those private matches,” it becomes difficult, if not impossible, Mahaffey said.
- Some federal grant programs include details on levels of innovation and limitations on school turnaround models. “In rural places, you don’t have the same sort of options that you have in rural or suburban communities, where there are a wider range of choices on how to address these issues,” Mahaffey said. “If a K-12 school in the Ozarks is not meeting AYP, and you’re out of compliance with NCLB regulations, you can’t just fire the principal and teachers—where are you going to go? The concept of scale-up, which is required in a lot of these programs—scale to where? There’s nowhere to scale to.”
Rural educators should tap into online resources, such as ED’s websites and the websites of advocacy groups dedicated to helping rural districts, to stay up to date on current grant opportunities—though that raises another issue about rural access to information, Mahaffey noted, because rural communities often struggle to obtain high-speed broadband internet access.
Mahaffey recommended that rural school districts identify stakeholders in their communities, such as local elected officials, parent groups, or businesses, and keep those stakeholders informed about some of the grant opportunities that exist and ways in which they might assist the district in the application process.
“This is a natural—a principal knows that if the community is not supportive and if there isn’t engagement across these stakeholders, the school just won’t be successful,” Mahaffey said. “Oftentimes the school is the largest employers, is the place where people engage in civic activity, and tends to be the heartbeat of these communities.”