School closures can hit rural communities hard
- Written by Mara Casey Tieken, Associate Professor of Education, Bates College
An abandoned Arkansas high schoolMara Casey Tieken, CC BY-SA
The school bus begins picking up children before 6 a.m. in Elaine, Arkansas, a small, mostly African American town on the Mississippi River floodplains about 120 miles east of Little Rock. It crawls past long stretches of oxbow lakes, acres of soybean and cotton fields, and two closed...