Is the Carthage School District Rural?
The Carthage School District isn’t rural. Right?
Surely not. After all, it’s big, the 42nd-largest district in a state with 516 of them. It’s located in, well, a city. And it’s reasonably well-resourced. Students take advanced classes and enrichments like Spanish. A dual-language program at Fairview Elementary School is on the cutting edge of language education in the state, and it’s growing. Carthage teachers are paid slightly better on average than their counterparts in surrounding districts.
Meanwhile, rural schools in the U.S. are defined not only by their number of students but by a lack of resources, a problem I’ve seen firsthand while reporting on schools around Southwest Missouri.