Charter funding saves rural school

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

Almost all of the roughly 80 students in this speck of a town gathered to cheer their superintendent as he headed to the state capital to try to 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 thinks that he has 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 small, rural schools in the West as they struggle to survive budget cuts, declining enrollment and 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.

“Most charters are started by angry parents or innovative outsiders,” Mr. 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 the 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, Mr. Jeffery had to close the school’s cafeteria and library, cut out the languages and business programs, and fire the janitor. Even that wasn’t enough, and families began considering the possibility that they would have to bus their children 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,” Mr. Aney said.

One concern voiced was that a charter school would collapse when the federal startup money runs out and it had to return to reliance on shaky state funding. Paisley’s federal grant stops flowing in May 2005.

But consider the alternative, said Linda Banister, who teaches social studies and English.

“If it is postponing the inevitable, well, then we are going out in an exceptional way,” she said. “If we are going to cease as a school, we will cease on our own terms, doing the best we can.”