Rural school enrollment is on the decline in Oklahoma—and funding to rural communities is going down with it.
As The Tulsa World reports, small towns like the ones in Western Oklahoma receive a set amount of state funding per pupil. That means, when fewer students enroll, the schools and communities suffer.
For example, the western Oklahoman community of Anadarko was down by 50 students going into the 2015 school year. For a school system with only 2,000 students, that’s a big drop. Then, last year, the enrollment number dropped by almost another 100 students. And this year, the district is expected to lose another 50 or 75 enrollees.
That means Anadarko has lost over 10 percent of its student population in just the last three years, which amounts to a big funding cut for an already struggling district.
