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Jewish World Review July 25, 2011 / 23 Tamuz, 5771 Recruiting children to save a dying town By Dale McFeatters
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Conservative educators believe that schools will improve if they have to compete for students. Maybe that concept might apply to small rural towns struggling to survive.
The Associated Press reports that when the Arkansas town of Arkadelphia, pop. 11,000. announced a program to help its students pay for colleges, nearby Sparkman, pop. 400, announced a scholarship program of its own, fearful of losing its brightest students to other town.
If Sparkman's school, the town's remaining source of social and communal glue, closed, the town pretty much would too. If Sparkman's past was prologue, the future was bleak. It has lost more than half its population since 1950 as the area's biggest industry, timber, began to consolidate.
With commendable spirit and optimism, that hopefully is not misplaced, Sparkman's parents and teachers launched a college scholarship program with several goals: giving their own kids a crack at higher education and a better life; drawing students from other town attracted by the program; and persuading families looking for a place to live that Sparkman might be an attractive space to settle.
As the practice has spread, the AP reports "communities practically competing with for each other's children and the state revenue that comes with them."
AP says the Sparkman program has collected $53,000, which would maybe buy a year at Harvard but in-state tuition and fees at Arkansas' most expensive state schools are just over $7,000 per year. And the graduation class last year at Sparkman H.S. had just 13 students, with only eight of them going on to college.
The parents hope their children go off to college and go on to do well and then maybe one day come back. One mother dreams that her daughters will become doctors, lawyers or politicians before coming back to Sparkman, a town, the AP notes, "without a hospital, courthouse or statehouse."
You never know. Maybe one day.
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