In the first year of the Rural Education Initiative (1987-88), several rural school districts in the Northwest began distance education projects that promise to be successful and applicable in other districts. Each project meets an educational need or rationale identified by the district; technology-based programs satisfy recognized criteria for…

Although there is controversy as to whether middle-level education should be more comparable to high school or to elementary school, this paper argues that the school within a school (SWAS) concept effectively makes large schools seem small so that they have more in common with a typical K-5 school than with a grade-10-through-12 high school. The…

Ten rural school improvement clusters involving 63 districts, 7 colleges and universities, and 6 state departments of education have been developed in Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and North Dakota through the work of the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory's Rural Education Project. Four essential steps appear necessary for…

Taking advantage of legislation permitting modified school calendars, the four-day work week has been implemented by 23 small, rural Colorado school districts representing 5,200 children. Thirteen districts implemented the four-day program in the 1980-81 school year. Ten additional districts applied as first year pilot programs in the 1981-82…

The booklet addresses a real need often expressed by teachers throughout Queensland for a concise yet comprehensive guide for those teaching in small schools (the paucity of material concerning small schools in the literature is rather surprising considering the very significant numbers of teachers and children who are or have had experience in…

Compiled in this document are forms, charts, letters, and instructions used in "Turnstile," a management system for individually designed classroom curriculum extension, small group training, and/or independent study programs offered to approximately 400 gifted and talented students in 32 rural Shasta County, California, schools.…

A merit pay plan can be successful if it contains unified and agreed upon objectives, integration and expansion of present key tasks, and endorsement and involvement of the entire educational staff. The responsibility of developing appropriate goals rests with the board of education, while the responsibility of documenting voluntary participation…

Since communication is the working link between the school district and the community it serves, public school administrators serving small towns or rural areas are developing a planned program of two-way communication based on a clear policy statement adopted by the board of trustees which basically upholds the public's right to know. In order to…

The purpose of this guide is to furnish school districts with process guidelines for community participation in the planning of educational programs and school facilities. The information to be developed includes: (1) a prioritized set of the community's educational goals--individualized for each community; (2) the resources, both physical and…

Developed by the Small Schools Career Education Development Project, the guide, divided into 6 units, provides 279 activities for math and language instruction in grades 1-6. Units are titled: Bank, Grocery Store, Hardware Store, Pandora's Box, Restaurant, and Streets, Bikes, and Highways. Both math and language activities are provided for each…

To identify promising practices, issues, and problems concerning education for the gifted in Maine, 239 classroom teachers and 14 administrators from 11 school districts geographically distributed throughout the state responded to questionnaires which profiled teacher personal characteristics and styles, described the educational setting and…

Designed by Washington curriculum specialists and secondary teachers to assist teachers in small schools with the improvement of curriculum and instruction and to aid smaller districts lacking curriculum personnel to comply with Washington's Student Learning Objectives Law, this handbook contains learning objectives in the areas of language arts,…

Designed to assist teachers in small schools with the improvement of curriculum and instruction and to help smaller districts without curriculum personnel to comply with Washington's Student Learning Objectives (SLO) Law, this guide contains spelling curriculum materials for grades K-3. The spelling section is part of the total language arts…

The English curriculum for grades 10-12 at Kansas High School, a small rural school in Eastern Illinois, consists of mini-courses with an enrollment of 7-20 students. Students must pass the ninth grade English course before they are permitted to register for mini-courses; they are required to take English as sophomores and juniors. During this…

During 1976-77, 42% of U.S. schools operated with fewer than 600 pupils and 27% operated with fewer than 300 pupils; Iowa had 181 K-12 public school systems with fewer than 300 pupils in 1977-78. All of Iowa's smaller school systems were located in the more sparsely populated rural areas of the state, had higher than average per pupil assessed…