Chapter 2: Alabama: Successful Rural School Context and Turnaround

This chapter is meant to provide a rural school backdrop to the Project Alabama Consortium for Turnaround (PACT) grant and to share some of the positive attributes and challenges of creating successful, high achieving rural schools. In looking at the rural nature of the United States, 57% of all U.S. schools are rural. This context includes approximately 7,810 school districts with 9,765,385 students or 21% of the United States student population (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). In the United States, 25.8% of rural students are minority students. The range among states is vast with Rhode Island having 3.2% and New Mexico having 82.6%. Rural minority students are becoming more concentrated in certain states. In New Mexico, Alaska, Arizona, and California White students are less than 50% of the rural population. Over 33% of rural minority students are concentrated in just nine states. Those states are: Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Delaware. Seven of these states are located in the South.