The great majority of America's population now resides in urban/suburban locales and consequently most Americans do not struggle with the question of whether their community can, or should, maintain its own school. Nevertheless, this question continues to confront many rural dwellers in all states. What follows is an action research project…

In December 1980, the world's largest beef processing plant opened 10 miles west of Garden City, KS. Three years later another beef plant opened on Garden City's eastern edge. Full employment in the surrounding region meant that most of the 4000 workers needed to run these plants had to come from elsewhere--and they did. Garden City grew by…

Storytelling is a performance medium which is enhanced by the qualities indigenous to small towns: collective memory and common history. A type of narrative peculiar to small towns, the community-wide anecdote, is one example of storytelling. The transmittal of such tales is termed "endemic performance" because the retelling of the tales…