Building Community through Rural Education Award
This award honors a rural school or district that has demonstrated innovative practices enhancing students' educational experiences while actively engaging with their surrounding community.
Pennsylvania’s rural schools are characterized by their closeness to community.
People involved in rural education understand all too well that a strong relationship between rural communities and their schools is vital to ensuring both school effectiveness and community vitality. Schools, as key institutions in rural areas, have crucially important roles to play – not only in providing first rate education, but also in strengthening the social bonds that hold rural communities together and helping to make them viable, healthy and vibrant places to live. These roles have grown only more critical at a time when many rural schools and communities together face a series of challenges including changing labor markets, tightening school budgets and rural out-migration.
Because of this, the Center on Rural Education and Communities (CREC) based within the Pennsylvania State University’s College of Education, and the Pennsylvania Association for Rural and Small Schools (PARSS) announce the annual Building Community through Rural Education Award.
CREC and PARSS will select one award-winner and two honorable mentions, recognizing rural schools or districts that have distinguished themselves through innovative practices that contribute to the educational experiences for the students they serve, while reaching out to the broader community in which they are located. Note that qualifying schools or districts must be PARRS members to qualify.
This recognition will be presented jointly by CREC and PARSS at the PARSS Annual Meeting. The recipient school or district will receive a plaque and will be the subject of a PARSS and PSU press release. In addition, the district will be featured on the websites of both CREC and PARSS to highlight the innovative, community-building practices of Pennsylvania’s rural schools.
The winning entrant will receive a monetary award and an engraved plaque, and the two honorable mention finalists will each receive a monetary award plus an engraved plaque recognizing their work. Each of the schools recognized by the award will be asked to make a BRIEF presentation to the PARSS membership at the Annual Meeting in the spring.