Nevada’s rural schools faring well

Friday, Sept. 1, 2000 | 9:37 a.m.

Nevada is a land of wide-open spaces, but there are relatively few school students out in the state's rural areas.

That is one conclusion of a study released this week by the Rural School and Community Trust, a national nonprofit group that rated conditions at rural schools, kindergarten through 12th grade, in states across the country.

Only three states have a smaller percentage of school students in rural areas, said Kathy Westra, the trust's communications director.

Most students are concentrated in the urban areas of Las Vegas, Henderson, Reno and other communities with populations over 25,000.

The report found that those students who do live in rural areas are attending schools that "are really in fairly good shape, particularly when you look at some of the problems facing other areas," Westra said.

Nevada scored the best in the country for salaries for teachers in rural areas, according to the trust report. Nevada on average pays those teachers $897 more than their counterparts in urban and suburban areas. Nationally, rural teachers make on average $6,100 less than their urban colleagues. And the report said that none the state's rural communities scored below average on the trust's "Education Climate Index," a rating of the overall community's social and economic status.

Nationally, nearly 22 percent of rural communities scored below average on the trust index.

Walt Rulffes, Clark County School District chief financial officer, said Clark County works to provide as many educational opportunities to students in the rural areas as students have in the urban areas of the county.

That always isn't possible, he said. A school in an urban area might have a sufficient pool of interested students to offer a class in, say, Japanese; that probably wouldn't be possible in a rural school.

But the school district actually has a "richer" teacher-to-student ratio in rural areas for advanced classes, Rulffes said, to ensure that classes in subjects such as calculus are offered throughout the system.

He said salaries are equal for teachers systemwide.

The trust report also indicated some problem areas for Nevada. One-third of the state's schools in rural areas have no access to the Internet, a resource that is particularly important for students in isolated areas.

"There are a lot of rural schools in Nevada that don't have Internet connections," Westra said. "It's important because distant, smaller schools don't have the ability to offer as wide a range of instructional stuff that urban or suburban schools have."

The Internet can enrich education because it offers opportunities for learning about subjects that might not be offered at a smaller school, she said.

Lori Harris, a Clark County School District spokeswoman, said Internet access is not as big an issue for Southern Nevada. Every Clark County school has an Internet connection, and roughly 70 percent have the Internet in every classroom, she said.

Westra said three geographic areas of the country have the biggest problems: Appalachia, the Deep South and the Great Plains states of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.

A combination of relatively high poverty rates and low spending on education "make the situation pretty urgent" in those states and in rural pockets nationwide, she said.

The issue is particularly important because conditions at rural schools often are ignored, Westra said. The election-year debates of rival candidates often focus on the issues facing urban schools, she said.

That overlooks issues facing the more than 12 million students nationally who attend rural schools, Westra said.

But issues such as teacher pay and recruitment, access to technology, long transportation demands and poverty among students affect the quality of education in those areas, she said.

The study used data from the 1997-1998 school year and is based on information from the U.S. Department of Education and federal Census Bureau, she said.