REAP Reauthorization

Last September, Senator Kent Conrad introduced a bill to reauthorize the Rural Education Achievement Program. A key element of that legislation involves a change in how rural is defined. What effect, if any, will this change have on districts?

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, some districts change classifications under the new classification systems. In Colorado, the following districts go from rural to nonrural:

Archuleta County 50 Jt

Aspen 1

Buena Vista R-31

Garfield 16

Lone Star 101

Pueblo County Rural

Districts moving from non-rural to rural are:

Eagle County Re-50

Falcon 49

Lewis Palmer 38

Sargent Re-33J

The change from what are known as the Metro-centric Locale Codes to the Urban-centric Locale Codes will have almost no effect on SRSA participation among Colorado district. Lone Star 101 is the only district that would have been eligible for the Small Rural Schools Achievement program of REAP that could lose eligibility because of it's change in locale. States can request waivers to included districts as rural if a state agency classifies them as rural. Can we all agree Lone Star is rural? I thought so.

Sargent is the one district that becomes eligible for the SRSA program that wasn't eligible before. All the other districts have more than 600 students making them ineligible for the SRSA program. They could be eligible for the Rural Low-Income Schools program if they meet poverty thresholds.

The next question is what effect, if any, will there be on eligibility for the Rural Low Income Schools program? Another question is whether all of the districts participating in RLIS program are really rural. That'll be fun to figure out.