The Southeast Minnesota Educational Cooperative Service Unit (SMECSU) is an organization of public and nonpublic school districts that voluntarily joined together to provide educational programs and services which could best be done cooperatively. Of 54 school districts in the 11-county region, 23 public schools joined SMECSU the first year, along…

With the goal of improving citizenship and character education in the elementary school child through learning by doing in the form of a school-based club, the Young Citizens League (YCL) appeared in rural South Dakota early in the twentieth century, introduced by Michael M. Guhin and developed by E.C. Giffen. By 1930, at its peak, it had an…

Change in rural schools is difficult to achieve because the diversity of these schools does not allow for one set implementation program. Small rural schools are an integral part of the rural community, and as such are as different as the part of the country where they are located. Change in rural areas is unsuccessful due to: the amount of…

In 1958, as a result of a preliminary report on educational needs, the education committee of the Kansas Legislative Council: (1) appropriated funds for a comprehensive survey of the State's educational system; (2) selected a 35 member citizens state advisory committee; and (3) directed each county to organize a county survey group which was to…

Data collected by the New Mexico State Department of Education in the spring 1973 are used in tables to compare the 1972 Laguna Acoma High School (LAHS) graduating class and other 1972 New Mexico high school graduating classes. The percentage of 1972 LAHS graduates who at the time of the study were involved in post-secondary academic education or…

How large should a school district be? The answer is similar to President Lincoln's answer to how long a man's legs should be: long enough to reach the ground. A school should be large enough to do the job, to provide the educational programs that meet the needs of its students. School size means different things to different people. A small…

During the past two decades federal, state, and local school leaders have attempted to institute major changes in educational programs and organizational arrangements. Recent assessment studies reveal that the great majority of change efforts did not meet intended objectives. As a result, policy formulators have developed serious reservations…

Increased Department of Education (ED) interest in rural education has been part of the awakening of federal concern for rural American issues. In response to a 1979 Presidential mandate to define and address the needs of rural America, the ED has identified basic problems of rural education that lend themselves to solution by the federal…

Volume II of a 3-volume report demonstrates the use of Design Determinants and Options (presented in Volume I) in the planning and design of small rural Alaskan secondary schools. Section I, a checklist for gathering site-specific information to be used as a data base for facility design, is organized in the same format as Volume I, which can be…

Four different assumptions about the nature of rural education govern major strategies to reform its deficiencies: rural education is a problem because it is not urban; some small isolated schools are "necessarily existent"; small schools are desirable because of flexibility and responsiveness; and educational problems are independent of…

Data from six questionnaire studies are reported. "Reasons Why Harcum Is Recommended," gives the percentage of Harcum students and faculty, and of high school counselors who recommend Harcum for each of ten reasons on the questionnaire. In "The Students View Harcum," student responses to ten possible reasons for attending, to…

Apache students comprised approximately 85 percent of the total enrollment of the Fort Thomas, Arizona, school system. The goals of the 1965-68 Diverse Capacity Project conducted in the school system were (1) to understand cultural differences between Indians and Anglos, (2) to identify the problems of Indians in an Anglo-oriented school, (3) to…

The study examined the educational efforts of five resource frontier communities (Thompson, Flin Flon, Lynn Lake, and Pinawa in Manitoba and Red Lake in Ontario) and compared their educational efforts with that of the Province of Manitoba. The measures of educational effort used were then evaluated to determine whether they might be usefully…

Designed as an abridged reference tool for small rural school teachers and administrators, this report on the final Oregon Small Schools Program (OSSP) summer institute (a Title III Elementary Secondary Education Act project in operation 1966-1974) is divided into two sections. Three major presentations constitute Part 1. These include: (1) a…

Specific indicators of quality and possible trends relative to small rural high schools in the 19 member states of the North Central Association (NCA) were examined. Data were derived from "North Central Quarterly" reports. Examination of rural high school demographic setting and enrollment size included 1969 and 1974 comparisons of: (1)…