The Rural Schools Association of New York advocates for and supports smaller school districts across the state. Executive Director David Little is traveling to communities statewide hosting Rural Schools Issues Forums. During a recent visit to Plattsburgh, Little told WAMC North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley that the statewide forums are held every few years:
The idea of the forums is to gather information from across the entirety of the area. Not just schools that we represent. But we know that rural schools and their communities are intrinsically intertwined and those communities that host the school recognize that it's usually their largest employer. It's the cultural, not only the educational, but the sports center, the emergency center. They're all wrapped up together. So when a community has an idea about what it wants to become or what its challenges and issues are, it typically includes the school and goes beyond the school. And conversely, the school district only exists in the context of the children within the community, and so you want the two to be supporting each other, to understand each other's problems. So the Issues Forums are intended to hear from the school community, teachers, administrators, school board members, parents, students. We want them all to tell us about what's going on there. But we also want to hear from higher education that's in the area, from business leaders, from local officials or state representatives in the area. If there's a military presence in the area, in the Fort Drum area or down at West Point, certainly we've talked to the military folks at the same time. And so we take all that information and we put it together into a policy brief that will identify for state and federal leaders what the issues and challenges are and perhaps propose solutions to some of those things.
What sorts of things have you been hearing?
We've added a new component to these this year. We're using Thought Exchange, which is an artificial intelligence means of people going online, and they're able to not only post their ideas and concerns and issues there, so it broadens it out to people who can't make it to any particular forum. But they're also able to rate the ideas and issues and challenges of others. So if somebody goes on to Thought Exchange and they see that people have listed the cost of EV busses as a concern. Teacher recruitment, or staff recruitment in general, is a concern. They're worried about state funding in the wake of federal cuts. And so they'll see these things and they can rank them. And that also gives us an idea across a broad section of people. And the things that I've just listed are at the top of the list. I think if there's one in 1A it would be concern that the state government will have to pay for so many things that the federal government used to pay for, that there will be little left to try and run the schools in the manner that they should be run.
The state mandate for EV busses. Can rural districts actually comply? I've heard debate, you know, that some are moving forward with it. Others are saying no way, can't do it. I mean, what's the status for rural districts across New York?
Yeah, it's not good for a couple of reasons. One, financially, you know, the way that we've set up school funding in this state is that there's a 2% local tax cap. Well, many rural districts don't raise $100,000 to $150,000 under that tax cap because they have very little local tax base. So if you have a mandate to purchase a half million dollar bus, even one, you've just used three years of your funds under the tax cap and that's before you've paid any of your inflationary expenses. The state implemented this electric or EV bus mandate in an era where they thought the federal government was going to pay for it and now it's very clear that the federal government has no interest. And so I think that the state will have to reevaluate. Certainly rural schools can't afford this on their own. And one of the things that has been identified in previous Issues Forums is that the power folks, people from National Grid and others across the state have said we can't do it. We can't get you the power to power all of these busses overnight. We have to recharge the grid. I mean, you look down at say, Shenendehowa, down in the northern end of the Capital Region, they've got 100 busses. So that's not an insignificant amount of power. When Oliver Robinson, the superintendent of Shenendehowa, asked National Grid what it would take to bring them power, they said you're going to need a $50 million transfer station to get that much power into your busses to do it. That's before you ever put in the charging stations or buy a bus. So the state's going to have to readjust its reality. I think going forward, either the timeline or the number of busses that you might have to have. And certainly, we also hope that the market will change over time and that they will both become more affordable and it will become more practical to run them in cold weather over mountains.
It's not only state issues that rural schools are dealing with, it's the federal issues. We've been in a shutdown. How is that affecting or exacerbating some of the challenges that rural schools face?
Well, I think exacerbating is a good word. We had challenges before. Fortunately, the governor's got about $40 billion in a reserve fund that should help. But, you know, it's close to the top of our list, the anxiety that's being created by the upheaval at the federal level, because people simply don't know whether it's food stamps or rural hospitals that may be forced to close, or the special ed programs that they can't get anyplace else except their schools, or a grant program that might be providing the only way the rural school can get a school psychologist or social worker might be through federal funding. And as you eliminate those things and you recognize that you don't have the funds locally to pay for them, you're starting to change the lives of rural children for the worse. And so, you know, there's concern in rural communities about how this plays out.
We're waiting to see the impacts of premium hikes. How concerned are schools about how that's going to impact the health of the children that they're trying to teach and protect?
I think that if that continues, I think that it will be harder for innovative things that have been highly successful. Like school-based health clinics in the southern tier in central New York, the Bassett Healthcare system has a whole series of school based health clinics where they serve the entirety of the community and predominantly their students. I think the state of New York will have to get more innovative in what it allows. Right now, the school physician, the school pediatrician, that comes in largely to do tests and provide immunizations and that type of thing needs to be able to provide a broader array of services, because in many cases, that may be the only doctor in the community that's available to those kids. Even if some of the federal programs remain and are administered by other departments, they've completely eliminated the data gathering of the US Department of Education. Well, when you do that, you've eliminated the ability of school districts to prove a need for anything, because you don't have any numbers. You know, people are extremely concerned because in New York State, the NAEP numbers, the National Assessment numbers, went down, not dramatically, but they declined, right? Well, the only way to prove that we're getting better and the only way to figure out what works to make it better is to be able to assess that through the numbers. And if you don't have those tests and you don't have those numbers, you can't prove it one way or another. And if you can't prove it, then you know you can never say that the federal government should get in the business of funding those things again. So I think going forward, the state's going to take an increased responsibility, both financially and programmatically, for what it believes that we need. But I think it'll be increasingly difficult to put that back on the federal government. Even if you were to change administrations, you'd have to build that infrastructure up again from what's being deconstructed.
David Little, as I was googling items for the interview, I noticed a few articles from two years ago that said rural schools are at a critical moment. How bad is it now?
Yeah, well, I think the critical moment has been extrapolated. Our critical moments, I think, started during the great recession 15 years ago now. The state of New York experienced the second largest outward migration in United States history during the great recession. We never heard state leaders talk about it, which I can understand. What I can't forgive is they not only didn't say anything about it, they didn't do anything about it. You know, every one of the rural schools that I go to has fewer kids than it used to and people who stay not only have an increased financial burden to maintain the same things as it used to cost with more people there, but they have an increased civic responsibility to keep all of those programs, you know, the summer soccer league in the school, or the youth camp that they offer kids in the summer, or a summer food program. If you've got a third less people in your community you also have a third less people to try and do those things, so it's harder on everybody. And the state never did anything to try and prevent that outward migration. And so we started out there, and then immediately, as soon as that was over, we had the pandemic. You know, I mean, schools were out there delivering meals and they were trying to keep things going in the community. And so we faced that as soon as the recession was over. And now COVID is over, we started to stabilize, and now we have this tremendous upheaval at the federal level that's destabilized our state funding and all of the things that we hold dear within our rural communities.
David, where can people get information about future forums, where they are, when they are?
We're holding 14 in total, and we're going all the way across to Chautauqua County, all the way out on Long Island. And they can go on RSANY, just for Rural Schools Association of New York, even if you just Google that and on the website, it'll tell you where they all are. Our last one is December 3. Absolutely vital. With the exception of Kathy Hochul, in the entirety of my career, we've never had another state official north of the Tappan Zee Bridge that touched public education. And if you look even now, the chairs of both the Assembly and Senate Education committees are from the city or Yonkers, right outside the city, and so getting them the information and the perspective of how these state policies and formulas play out in a rural area, which encompasses literally a third of their children, they need to know that.
The next Rural Schools Issues forum is scheduled today, November 3 at the Wayne-Finger Lakes BOCES in Newark, NY.
