PRESSURE BUILDING ON RURAL SCHOOLS

Rural school districts across Massachusetts are at particular risk amid rising costs, flat state aid and declining student enrollment — an environment that may force them to regionalize and share services to survive, according to a new report.

“Over the past 15 years, local taxpayers are picking up more and more of the school budget. It’s a real problem in small towns,” said Michael Buoniconti, superintendent of the Mohawk Trail Regional School District in Shelburne Falls. “If we don’t do something now rather than later, it’s going to become a real crisis.”

The problems facing schools in Hampshire, Berkshire, Franklin and Barnstable counties are detailed in a new report called “Fiscal Conditions in Rural School Districts,” which was released by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The superintendents who make up the newly formed Massachusetts Rural Schools Coalition will gather for a “rural roundtable” March 12 at the Mohawk Trail Regional School to discuss the challenges facing their communities.

In the report, Acting Commissioner Jeff Wulfson wrote that “improving economic development, investing in infrastructure, and improving linkages between the eastern, southeastern, and western parts of the state can help stabilize population loss.”

Consolidating and sharing services between districts, increasing state aid, and regionalizing schools are all on the table when it comes to the state’s 54 rural districts.

Student enrollment declined by 14 percent, or 4,289 students, between 2008 and 2017, compared to a decline of 24,125 students, or 2.7 percent, in districts across the rest of the state, the report found. In communities like Erving, Lanesboro, Provincetown and Shutesbury, districts lost more than 25 percent of their enrollment.

The report also found that transportation is uniquely expensive in rural communities because fewer kids are transported over longer distances. Rural schools are spending close to 50 percent more per pupil to bus students than their urban and suburban counterparts. State aid has also flatlined, growing by only 4 percent between 2008 and 2017 for rural school budgets — compared to 22 percent statewide, according to the report.