Shrinking schools, strong communities 

Adirondack educators are finding new ways to serve students—and do more with less

By Brenne Sheehan

In 1997, Julie Bisselle landed her first full-time teaching position at Westport Central School. At that time, scoring a teaching job was cutthroat—more than 40 applicants applied. 

A native of Watertown, she had never heard of the tiny Champlain Valley town, which at the time had 279 students K–12. While she never particularly imagined herself working in such a rural area, she decided to give the interview a shot. 

“I called my father, who did shift work, and asked him what day he could drive me down to this town,” she said.” I knew it was kind of near Vermont, and they knew Vermont, so my entire family drove me to my job interview,” Bisselle said, who added she planned to change into interview clothes as a nearby gas station, only to discover there weren’t any to be found.

Since that time almost 30 years ago, Bisselle has set her roots in Westport, meeting her husband and having four children of her own. During her tenure, she has switched from teaching third, fourth and fifth grades to kindergarten for 20 years and fourth grade for the past three years. 

Bisselle also faced an experience common among Adirondack educators: adjusting to a shrinking number of students. In her first few years, Westport Central School experimented with mixed-grade classrooms—at one point, she taught a combined fourth and fifth grade class. And in 2019, her school merged with Elizabethtown Central to form Boquet Valley Central School District.

Public school enrollment in the Adirondack Park’s 52 school districts has dropped an average of 41% since 1980, according to New York Department of Education data.

Boquet Valley has had a nearly 50% decline in students from its communities of Elizabethtown, Lewis and Westport since 1980.

Adirondack schools that have been hit the hardest during the past 45 years include Newcomb Central School, which went from 183 students to 49 (a 74% drop), and Clifton-Fine Central School District, which lost 570 students, going from 815 to 260, a 70% decline. Since 1980, three school districts in the Adirondack Park have dissolved: Inlet, Piseco and Raquette Lake. All three are in Hamilton County, which had a total of 380 students county-wide in K–12 in 2024.

If trends of the past 19 years continue, the Adirondack Park could lose 6,660 more students by 2034. 

A combination of factors

Dave Little, the executive director of the Rural Schools Association of New York, said drops in enrollment are not the fault of Adirondack schools. Instead, it is a combination of external factors: a lack of affordable housing, an aging population and a greater outward migration of people out of Upstate New York. 

“If you’re from a rural area and you’ve gone out of state to go to college, you’re probably not coming back because you’re going to pay off student loans and your pay is going to be lower working up here,” Little said. “We lost what we lost in rural New York during the Great Recession, all of those local businesses that people could come home to.” 

Shrinking schools like Minerva, which has lost almost 55% of its enrollment since 1980, now rely on just one teacher per core subject—math, science, English and social studies—for grades 7–12. At relatively larger schools like Lake George, where enrollment has dropped almost 50% since 1980, staff often take on new certifications to meet shifting student needs and avoid staffing cuts. 

Issues of enrollment, retention and inequitable funding will continue to amplify as enrollment shrinks, said Little—leading to fewer teachers, fewer students and, in a worse-case-scenario, fewer schools. 

And schools are not just losing students, they are losing educators, too. As affordable housing becomes less available, teachers hired at Boquet Valley have had to step out of their position because they are not able to find a place to live, according to Superintendent Josh Meyer. 

Making do with less

Rural schools are underfunded, Little said, in part because New York relies more on local property taxes than most states—leaving rural Adirondack districts heavily dependent on state Foundation Aid, which is tied to factors like enrollment rather than the school district’s needs.

Board of Regents member Roger Catania argued funding formulas often overlook a basic reality: every district has a minimum cost to operate, no matter how small. This gap comes in a state that spends more on education than any other in the country. 

“There are people who just don’t see funding for rural schools as being worth it,” Catania said. “We don’t always calculate that in our rural school districts. This needs to be a part of more conversations about Foundation Aid, and the way our state funds public schools.” 

But for Catania, who joined the Board of Regents in 2022 after advocating for the needs of rural schools in the North Country as a former Lake Placid superintendent, the future of Adirondack schools is optimistic. While enrollment goes down, community efforts to combat stemming issues of housing and affordability are proliferating. And schools are doing everything they can to stay open and provide quality education to students.

Catania added that even by the numbers, rural schools in the park are performing well. 

NYSED’s Core High School Weighted Performance Index is a 250-point formula that scales the performance of students in combined subjects of English language arts, math, science and social studies grades 7–12. And, in 2024, school districts within the blue line scored an average of 121.3—about 30 points higher than the state average. The average high school graduation rate for Adirondack schools is 89.4%, which is 3% higher than the state average. 

“A lot of our school districts in this region in particular are doing well with low-income students,” Catania said. “I think that has a lot to do with the community-like nature of small schools.” 

The quality of Adirondack education does not just speak in numbers and assessments—superintendents, teachers and community members across the park are proud of their local rural schools. But despite making the most of what they have, Adirondack schools feel they are too often overlooked at the state level. Rural educators feel they should play a bigger role in state-level decision-making, especially when it comes to the 2022 state electric school bus mandate (see page 5 for more), foundation aid and other sweeping regulations. 

“Just because we’re in an area that doesn’t have a lot of people doesn’t mean that those students don’t deserve a good education too,” said Robert Kirker, the only 7–12 English teacher at Minerva. “I’m really proud of the work that we do, because I think we graduate a lot of students that would get lost in a larger school. They would just be numbers, but here they get personal attention and get that diploma, where they might not be successful otherwise.”

Seeing smallness as an asset

When a student at Minerva needs money to attend one of the school’s senior class trips to Ireland or Iceland, the community comes together and sets up a GoFundMe. When a student at Long Lake is having a hard time, their classmates show up with what Long Lake Superintendent and Principal Camille Harrelson calls a “culture of kindness.” Students at Lake George are almost always involved in one of the school’s large sports programs consisting of 37 sports, and students at Boquet Valley have the chance to compete in the district’s traveling robotics team. 

When it comes to serving students, small schools are able to provide more for their students with intimate, one-on-one education, according to educators. 

For Bisselle, teaching at a rural school allows her more flexibility than larger public schools—she can make snacks for students, develop her own curriculum and plan unique field trips such as cross-country skiing and archaeological site visits for her fourth graders. 

For Kirker, even though he is not able to provide a wide variety of electives for his students because of his stretch across six grade levels, he is able to modify his curriculum to the needs of his students. So while he teaches required material for supplement state-mandated Regents testing, he is able to develop flash fiction units and special readings. 

“I really like both the kind of relationships I can have with students at a small school, but also the freedom that I have to control what I do in my classroom. And that’s not something you always have depending on where you work.” 

Teachers in these rural schools are willing to put in the work—wearing many different hats to meet additional needs. For Kirker, that means serving in several different positions in Minerva’s teacher’s union and advising the culture club, Quizbowl team and literature magazine. For teachers at Lake George and Minerva, it could mean acquiring additional certifications to teach a new subject or a special needs class to avoid the expenditure of a new employee position.

Building strength through shared services

A response many districts are taking to address declining enrollment is “regionalization.”

The term conjures images of multi-merged districts, long bus routes and a lost sense of central community. But for many Adirondack districts, regionalization is about sharing resources while keeping their individual schools. 

For Turina Parker, the superintendent of the Warren-Hamilton-Washington-Saratoga-Essex BOCES, which consists of 31 school districts in and around the park, regionalization often manifests within her organization’s training programs and professional development. 

“One of the answers to declining enrollment is constantly looking for ways to optimize our service to students,” Parker said. “It’s one of the things that we continue to take a look at for all of our districts: How do we capitalize on the opportunities that are available and in front of us, and how do we continue to work together to provide opportunities for all of our students? I think it’s a question that we continue to ask and answer with innovation.” 

For many Adirondack schools, this means sharing sports teams, clubs and special education programs with neighboring districts. Lake George combines its football team with Bolton and Warrensburg. Long Lake and Indian Lake central school districts share all sports, as does Minerva and Johnsburg. 

Putnam Central School District, the smallest district in the Adirondack Park and serving only K–6 grades, sends its upper-level students to Ticonderoga Central School District by paying for their tuition. For professional development, staff in Indian Lake, Johnsburg, Long Lake, Minerva, Newcomb, North Warren, Schroon Lake and Warrensburg team up to share costs of training events and other resources. 

“Sharing services and staff, shared field trips, that’s what I think of when I think of regionalization,” said Harrelson, of Long Lake. “I think people are afraid that it means that they’re going to merge all of us into one big conglomerate school district. And that’s just not the discussion that was had at the tables that I was at.” 

Regionalization distinguishes itself from a district merger, which Boquet Valley did in 2019 between the Elizabethtown-Lewis and Westport districts. Despite some community opposition, Meyer, the district’s superintendent, remains a proponent of the merger. Operating as a combined high school has allowed them to offer a wider array of courses to students in grades 7–12 and lower their cost-per-pupil spending. 

“This was not a unanimous decision. There were plenty of negative voices that the districts potentially could be better off on their own,” Meyer said. “I think that both districts would have really struggled anyway without merging, both financially and in terms of enrollment.” 

Sometimes, communities reject mergers. This was the case for Minerva, whose school board unanimously voted against a merger with neighboring Johnsburg. Minerva Superintendent Candice Husson said many in her community feared the merger would erase their local identity, because Minerva students would likely have to attend school in Johnsburg’s building.

“Ultimately our board voted not to move forward, because they just are very worried about losing this central piece of our community,” Husson said. “And then, if the school goes away, what happens to the community if we don’t have the school? We just have something special here, and they weren’t ready to sacrifice what we’re able to offer our students just to have more students in one building.”

At top: Photo illustration by Kelly Hofschneider