Rural Decline and the Future of Vermont Public Schools
How do the stresses created by Vermont’s shrinking rural population affect the future planning as well as governance and politics regarding local public schools? What happens when districts move to consolidate and close small rural schools which towns view as critical to their identity and culture? In this project-based learning course students will conduct critical inquiry to better understand the increasing pressures on local school districts regarding such issues as enrollment declines, inequitable access to and distribution of resources, and increasing student needs (particularly since COVID), and weigh those challenges amidst stakeholder concerns around community engagement and local control, state and local property taxes, and school governance and finance. By the end of the course, we will have conducted projects that weighed competing stakeholder interests, collated and compared a wide range of relevant data, and considered some solutions. This interdisciplinary course provides students the opportunity to experience how the broader sociological, political, economic, and philosophical conflicts in our educational system are played out at the local level at a critical time in its history.