Massachusetts’ rural school districts are in a ‘death spiral.’ They have a plan to stop it

There’s a lot that Amelia Durbin loves about being a student in a rural school district.

For one, her school partners with local farmers, ensuring a steady supply of fresh fruit and vegetables at the cafeteria lunch table.

Durbin, a rising senior at Northampton High School, where enrollment tips out at 907 students, also loves living in a tightly knit community, and “that’s really wonderful.”

Mystic Glenn, a rising sophomore in the Pioneer Valley Regional School District in Northfield, feels much the same.

“We are really close and everyone’s very supportive and, like, ready to rally behind you,” she said. “And you know, everybody — like, you know, their grandparents, where they live, [and] everything about them. And yeah, the landscape is really beautiful and the hikes are really great.”

The district of 663 students, which draws from the communities of Bernardston, Leyden, Northfield and Warwick in Massachusetts, as well as nearby Vernon, Vermont, has two elementary schools as well as the larger Pioneer Valley Regional School.

Unlike Northampton High School, which runs the usual 9th-12th grade gauntlet, Pioneer Valley Regional serves students in the 7th through 12th grades.

Based on the data, the two schools, just a 36-minute drive from each other on Interstate 91, diverge in other ways.

Northampton High School, with its high test scores and a low 14-to-1 student/teacher ratio, nabbed an “A” from the ratings site Niche.

With fewer students, Pioneer Valley Regional, meanwhile, has a 10-to-1 student/teacher ratio, but it also has lower test scores, earning it a “C-Plus” from Niche.

And, according to two Western Massachusetts state lawmakers, they’re an argument in the affirmative for why policymakers need to act and act now to pass companion House and Senate bills that would boost state aid and provide critical assistance for such key services as transportation and regionalization.

“In our communities, the crisis is so acute, I would call it existential,” Sen. Joanne M. Comerford, D-Hampshire/Franklin/Worcester, who’s shepherding the legislation on her side of the State House, said this week.

The proposals got an airing during a briefing at the State House on Wednesday. It unfolded against the backdrop of this year’s budget debate, where legislative negotiators are carving out K-12 education funding for the new fiscal year that starts July 1.

The bills backed by Comerford and state Rep. Natalie Blais, D-1st Franklin, are based on a 2022 state report that offered three dozen recommendations aimed at helping rural districts deal with the twin challenges of rising costs and declining enrollment.

The House and Senate proposals take a five-pronged approach to tackling the specific challenges facing rural school systems.

The biggest, by far, however, is a plan to top up the state’s Rural School Aid Fund from the current $16 million to $60 million. And even the current balance is an improvement over the $1 million that initially seeded the account, Blais said.

“ So we’ve come a long way, and there’s much more to do,” she said.

Compounding the problem: Rural districts rely almost exclusively on local homeowners to pay for public education. Unlike Boston or larger communities, rural districts don’t have many or any industrial or commercial taxpayers on the rolls.

“Our towns love our school and love our students, and they want to support as much as possible, but only being able to raise the tax base two and a half percent, and having the district take up 70 to 80% of their budget has been increasingly difficult,” Kristen Smidy, the superintendent of the Gateway Regional School District in Huntington, said.

The district serves six towns in Western Massachusetts. And because it’s so small, school officials find themselves wearing multiple hats, providing both a hot meal and medical services, she said.

“ When I talked to students, when I entered as a superintendent four years ago, the things that they said that they were thankful for for our school were the two meals that they got a day that were free, or being able to see their friends because their friends live 45 minutes away,” she said.

Because of those great distances, the districts rack up big transportation costs.

The House and Senate bills would fix that by requiring the state to foot the full cost of taking rural students to and from school, to reimburse them for non-resident transportation, and for the state and federal government to split the transportation costs for students in foster care.

For Sarah Reynolds, the town administrator in Charlemont, which sits in a rural part of Franklin County, sandwiched between the Deerfield River and the Mohawk Trail, the extra help from the state would make a big difference during budget season.

The community of 1,185 is fully committed to paying for public education. But that means hard choices for the money that’s left over.

“We’re arguing over whether to fix a road or to buy a fire truck,” she said.

Martha Thurber, the chairperson of the Mohawk Trail Regional School Committee in Buckland, said her district is trying to stretch a buck as far as it can.

But because of “limited opportunities for economic growth … and very limited opportunities for economies of scale,” that’s still not enough.

Comerford said the bill would ensure those concerns get a guaranteed airing at the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education by creating dedicated seats for the western and north-central parts of the state. Right now, that’s not the case.

“Once you start to lose staff and lose programming, you lose students. Students who can afford to do so will choice to other districts,” Thurber said.

“Kids who can transport themselves, or their parents can transport them to a different district, will do that. And that leaves you with a shell of a school serving the poorest kids in your communities,” she continued. “That’s what we call the death spiral. And there are many rural school districts today who are either in or about to be in the death spiral.”

State House News Service reports are included in this analysis.

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