Across rural America, schools are more than places where students learn. They are community anchors—connecting families to services, activities and one another. What happens when those institutions face mounting pressure?

As rural schools face declining enrollment, shifting learning models and growing demands on limited resources, the consequences extend far beyond the classroom. A new collaboration, “Common Ground: What Rural Schools Mean to Communities,” combines on-the-ground reporting from newsrooms in INN’s Rural News Network (RNN) with data analysis from Big Local News at Stanford University to examine what rural schools provide their communities, who is most affected when those supports erode and what their future means for community sustainability.

Over the next year, six nonprofit newsrooms spanning Northern California, Greater Minnesota, Alaska, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas will each produce four data-driven stories examining the distinct roles rural schools play in their communities and what is at stake as those roles evolve.

“RNN journalists are uniquely positioned to tell the story of what a rural school means to its community because they see those connections up close,” said Alana Rocha, INN’s director of collaborations and rural initiatives. “For many people, the school is common ground — a place to access services, play sports or gather with neighbors, whether they have a child enrolled there or not. By pairing that on-the-ground reporting with data analysis from Big Local News, we can put those local stories into a broader context and better understand what happens when that common ground begins to shift or disappear.”

“Data can help us see trends and understand the scale of what’s happening in schools, especially in rural areas, but data alone can’t always tell the whole story,” said Cherry Salazar, data journalist at Big Local News, noting that especially in small, rural districts, data may be suppressed, unreported or outdated.

Read the full article about what rural schools mean to communities at Institute for Nonprofit News.