New Rural Equity Collaborative Will Strive to Improve Educational Adequacy and Equity

The Rural School and Community Trust recently launched the Rural Equity Collaborative, a partnership with five state-level grassroots organizations. Each of the five inaugural groups-the Collaborative hopes to grow and add more-represents a major rural region: Challenge West Virginia (Appalachia); the Nebraska Coalition for Educational Equity and Advocacy (the Great Plains), the North Carolina Justice and Community Development Center (Southeast), [Mississippi] Southern Echo (the Delta), and the Vermont Children's Forum (Northern New England). The Collaborative plans to focus on three policy areas: educational adequacy; equity in place (providing students with friendly schools close to home); and fiscal efficiency and accountability. In order to achieve its goals, the Collaborative aims both to build a national rural constituency for school finance reform by demonstrating rural organizing skills to diverse rural states and to communicate rural school finance issues to urban education advocates.

Prepared August 29, 2002