Events and evidence concerning education can be found here in the Scenario Framework Navigation Tool.

Our institutions of higher education are important to the economic development strategy.  They themselves are major employers in the region so their growth is to be encouraged.  They are also an important source of diversity in our communities, both from faculty and students.  Their graduates are an important source of employees and entrepreneurs for the region.  All the area’s colleges have programs to engage students with the Adirondacks and its communities.

In this vision, our communities make their smaller schools work.  The demographic changes nationwide in rural communities mean that we will never have schools with the scale of major urban areas.  We need to figure out the ways that we make these smaller schools work academically, socially and financially.

The way the State organizes K-12 education is BOCES regions (Boards of Cooperative Educational Services). These regions do not map to any other NYS agency regions (DEC, DoT, APA, etc) so it makes doing ‘Park-wide’ anything difficult.  However, there is a need for some kind of education summit meeting to have open discussions about common issues of enrollments, budgets, and so on.  There are people interested in working these issues but there is no leader at this time.  These are not problems that are unique to the Adirondacks.  We need to find out what innovative approaches are being tried elsewhere in the county.  There are various organizations working on the general issues of rural schools, but we are not aware of any general review of education in the Park, or its BOCES regions.

• Convene education summit on making small rural schools work
• Research other rural school solutions

A small group of 6 or 7 school is going to try and use the content and structured materials from the ADK Futures project (notably the endstate and events) as instructional materials tied to basic skills like math and writing.  These are the informal consortium of central ADK schools called True North.

• Integrate the vision and strategy for the Adirondacks into area school curricula, making it an integrated unit of instruction that captures real-world problem solving and data analysis