At a gathering of rural-school experts in Washington, the right issues were raised (mostly), but where were the electricity, the characters, and the relish sandwiches? 

The other day I received a fund-raising letter from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm still on the school's mailing list even though I never graduated from the place. Anyway, the letter came from a student at the school, Gabby Salazar, class of '09. Her job was to raise money and she had a story — which was that Brown saved her from a life in a "small town" and going to a school in North Carolina. Her pitch essentially was that Brown saved her from a life in the rural South.

"I grew up in a small town in North Carolina, and, for the most of middle school and high school, I confined my dreams to colleges in my home state," wrote Gabby Salazar. She met a representative from Brown (who braved the journey to the hinterlands) and "suddenly, Brown became a possibility." The rest is then all good — learning, friendship, success. All of that is true — and she was saved from backwaters like UNC, Duke and Appalachian State.

What isn't true is the "small town" part. Gabby hailed from Greensboro, a metro area of 1.5 million people. (See skyline above.) Gabby went from a city with 259,000 to Providence, which has 172,000 (and a metro area the same size as Greensboro). Poor-mouthing rural is a great way to raise money, I guess. But couldn't Brown have found a student who came from a real small town — maybe some tiny, secluded, out of the way metro area with fewer than a million people?

Bill Bishop

Research in the U.S. finds no advantage in consolidated schools. Reports from Europe come to the same conclusion.

Only 20 of the nearly 300 native languages originally spoken in America are spoken today by Native youth.
According to Ryan Wilson, Oglala Lakota, President of the National Alliance to Save Native Languages, indigenous languages are sacred and vital to the cultural survival of Native peoples.

Leaders in then Native language revitalization movement are convening in Washington D. C. this week at the National Museum of the American Indian. Participants also plan to meet for a briefing session on Capital Hill at the Senate Indian Affairs Committee Hearing Room. The session will be followed by visits to their congressional delegations to share information about supporting Native language systems through the Ester Martinez Native Languages Preservation Act.

In a statement to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Wilson reported that Indian students who attend language immersion schools routinely out perform their counterparts attending English-only schools.  Students also display lower drop out rates, disciplinary problems, substance abuse and lower rates of truancy.  These problems are epidemic for Native youth, especially those living on reservations.