High-School Communities in an Area of Declining Population

Abstract

T IS not too much to assume that schools constitute one of the important services in any community. The quality of a school program depends, among other things, on the size of the area and the number of people served, together with the taxing power which the area and the people possess. We can have too few schools, but in most parts of America there are too many-both elementary and secondary schools. With the hope of making some suggestions on how high-school centers might be determined, the writers undertook a study of Pike County, Illinois, designed to show relations between high-school districts and community boundaries. Pike County, located on the western side of Illinois between the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers, has a land area of 786 square miles. About 90o per cent of its land is in farms, with corn, oats, hay, wheat, cattle, and hogs as the staple products. Being a river county with no industrialized centers of population and including a substantial acreage of agricultural land of marginal productivity, Pike County is a portion of that large area of Illinois which has lost population steadily during the past seventy years. The decline in population is shown in Table i, which indicates that the population of the county in 1930 was 79 per cent of the population in I870. There are fifteen high schools in the county. Every village that has attained a population of more than two hundred, irrespective of its location or proximity to a large town, has a high school. Table 2 shows the villages of Pike County which have high schools, together with their populations, by decades, from 1910 to 1930. Table i indicates the trends of population in Pike County as a