“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, 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.”
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