If students don't feel safe at home or in their communities, they are likely to in a small school, Howley says. People know each other and call on each other for help. The Annenberg Rural Challenge in Granby, Colorado, part of a national nonprofit organization that works to tie together rural schools and their communities, has found Howley's study so insightful that the organization is supporting its expansion into Ohio, Georgia, Texas, and Montana. Howley and research partner Robert Bickel, a senior faculty member at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, now are crunching numbers to see how the small school theory fares in these states. Already, Howley is finding similar results in Ohio, where small schools are located mainly in rural areas.
Teachers know parents' first names.
They know who's missing from class without taking roll. In a bigger school, a kid might fall through the cracks. In a small classroom, you can spot problems as they surface, and you can always find something good in every child. With 38 students in grades one through six, Center is among the smallest schools in the nation. In Ohio, only 10 of 2,836 schools grades eight and below have 60 or fewer students.