Rural schools turn to charters to save themselves

PAISLEY, Ore. — The send-off was worthy of a football team seeking a state title, or a small-town soldier heading to war.

Just about all 80 students in this speck of a town gathered to cheer their superintendent as he headed to the state capital to try and save their school from extinction after $286,000 in budget cuts.

Mark Jeffery went to Salem that day looking for a last-ditch miracle — and now, two years later, with his school richer by $350,000 in federal funding, he believes he's found one.

Paisley saved its school by turning it into a charter school, bringing in federal money earmarked to get these new institutions off the ground. It's an increasingly common option among the small, rural schools in the West as they struggle to survive budget cuts, declining enrollment and forced consolidation with other schools.

Paisley — and schools like it in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah — were not what charter supporters expected when the concept surfaced in Minnesota about 15 years ago.

The original idea was to create independent schools, still funded with public money but unbound by many of the regulations that apply to traditional public schools.

But in Paisley and communities like it, charter startup money buys the chance to breathe life into an existing school.

"Most charters are started by angry parents or innovative outsiders," Jeffery said. "But for us, there was no other help out there. It was either this, or send our kids on some horrific bus ride, and take the heart out of our community."

Paisley, a town of about 250 people in south-central Oregon where the big event in summer is the Mosquito Festival, has been fighting for its school ever since a local lumber mill closed in the early 1990s. Residents even built a dormitory for foreign students to boost enrollment, and for a while there were Albanians and Koreans in town.

But by 2002, Jeffery had to close the school's cafeteria and library, cut out languages and the business program, and fire the janitor. Even that wasn't enough, and families began considering the possibility they would have to bus their kids to another school, 50 miles away on a bumpy two-lane road that ices over from November to March.

Without a school, the two other pillars of the local economy — the local Forest Service office and cattle ranches — also might collapse, said Bill Aney, the district ranger for the Forest Service, a school board member and the high school's volunteer track coach.

"Our family would never have moved here if there wasn't a school," Aney said.

A community meeting about the charter idea drew about 150 people, Jeffery said, the largest town gathering he can remember outside of Friday night basketball and kindergarten graduations.

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