Fiscal Trends and Enrollment Change in Rural School Districts

Abstract

Until recently, the dominant demographic trend in the United States had been an increasing flow of people from rural to urban areas and a concentration of population in the nation's cities. Early in the 1970s, however, it became clear that this historically dominant trend had been reversed. People were leaving the cities for the countryside, and nonmetropolitan areas were experiencing higher population growth rates than metropolitan areas. The now familiar “turnaround” along with the socioeconomic characteristics of metro to nonmetro migrants and their reasons for moving has been well documented in the literature (Beale, 1975; Zuiches and Brown; Fugitt and Voss). Most evidence indicates that this trend emerges from a decline in metropolitan growth rates and an increase in nonmetropolitan growth rates originating twenty to thirty years ago, and is likely to be with us for some time into the future (Fugitt and Voss, pp. 10 and 37).