Various approaches have been developed to help schools gain greater parent involvement. These approaches, however, were not developed with rural communities in mind. Parent involvement programs for rural communities work best when they respond to particular features of the communities they serve. Despite variability among communities, research does point to characteristics that are more common in rural areas than elsewhere and affect educators' efforts to involve parents. It is not clear, however, that rural communities are any more or less likely than urban or suburban ones to involve parents in the educational process.
Research provides conflicting findings.
Even if parent involvement turns out to be more prevalent in rural than in urban and suburban schools, rural educators may still face special challenges often associated with rural life. Among these challenges are isolation, poverty, and lack of job opportunities. Furthermore, the poverty of many rural communities limits parents' ability to provide for their children and to augment their children's education with resources in the home. These circumstances lead some educators to conclude that rural families place a low value on the education of their children. This conclusion gains support from the finding that rural parents have lower educational attainment than their urban and suburban counterparts.