While the musical standby asks that country roads take folks home, lately young people in rural upstate and central New York are heading in the opposite direction, and rural schools are acutely feeling the drain.

“Families are moving where the jobs are,” said Thomas Turck, superintendent in the Southern Cayuga Central School District, which expects to lose 36 students between now and the next school year.

Rural school districts in the Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES have seen their numbers slowly deflate over the last five years. Like Turck, schools chiefs tend to attribute drops to job availability and the housing landscape. In Southern Cayuga, Turck connected enrollment declines to industrial shifts toward factory farms.

Further north and east, a number of mobile home parks signal revolving doors for families with unstable job situations. Marilyn Dominick, who heads Jordan-Elbridge schools, estimated roughly 13 percent of students in her district reside in areas like Kenyon Landings in Weedsport.

Whatever the causes, falling student populations are changing the face of education in rural areas. Though student numbers are down, costs continue to rise, which presents a major challenge for districts with a disintegrating tax base. In addition, fewer students translates into less state aid to help keep tax levies in check.

“You don't necessarily have fewer buildings just because you have less students,” said state Sen. Michael F. Nozzolio, whose district is filled with rural school localities.

On top of building expenses, escalating fuel costs, health insurance premiums and staff salary increases have put tremendous pressure on school budgets. As a result, local school districts come up with contingency plans each budget season, with expectations that things could get worse.

Lawrence Kiley wasn't at all surprised to know about the problems facing Southern Cayuga, which lays further out from large cities, like Syracuse or Rochester. Kiley is the executive director of the Rural Schools Association of New York State, based at Cornell University. The group advocates for rural school districts and taxpayers.

He said the drop in school enrollments is a trend seen all across upstate New York west of Hudson River.

“Declines are hitting rural districts first,” he said, adding the issue becomes more noticeable in small communities because “the populations are small to begin with.”

It's been easy for Myles Mangan to notice the decline. The Southern Cayuga High School senior graduated June 24 with, in her estimate, 60 fewer people than entered kindergarten with her 12 years ago. Her kindergarten class started with roughly 119 other young learners, she said. By contrast, the 2005-06 school year saw 62 children enter Kindergarten at Emily Howland Elementary School.

“Some dropped out, some got held back,” she said.

Some may have also moved.

Mangan, named for her grandfather, lives with her family in Venice Center, about three miles from Poplar Ridge. Fields of corn and hay stretching hundreds of acres surround her family's home - vast expanses of land she said her grandfather once owned.

“My family farmed it all,” she said.

Most of that land has since been sold, because there's no one left in the family to care for it. Mangan's aunts and uncles now live in suburbs near Albany, Rochester and Rome (New York, not Italy).

Bound for Tompkins Cortland Community College in Dryden this September, Mangan feels she'd ultimately like to set roots down in her hometown, but can't see doing so in the immediate future.

“You can't find jobs out here, unless you want to farm,” she said, adding that commutes to Elmira or Ithaca are not in the cards.

“It's a long drive,” she said.

Long drives are common in rural communities like Southern Cayuga. The 162 square mile school district encompasses villages like Aurora and hamlets like King Ferry, Scipio Center, Genoa, Sherwood and Ledyard. For children, the distances between friends are not exactly conducive to neighborhood games of Kick the Can; children can't exactly run next door to see if their friends can come out and play.

All this makes schools like Emily Howland Elementary - a K-4 building that sits along Route 34B - overt social hubs as much as educational centers in the community.

“These kids'll be back here in a year missing their friends,” said Cheryl Jackson, an instructional support teacher at Emily Howland.

Jackson said she put 315,000 miles on one van in seven years - mostly from commutes around the region.

“Here, your friend might live 10 miles away,” she said. “That's the reality of living in the country.”

Finding answers

A number of researchers, as well as school officials, are taking fresh looks at the reality of country life for rural schools.

Two Cornell University programs are overseeing the Rural Vision Project, which saw volunteers survey people living and working in rural New York.

“Listening sessions” back in February sought to gather information about government, economic and education issues people are facing. Those sessions will culminate in a symposium in Ithaca July 19-21, during which experts and policy makers can start developing strategies to address those emerging issues.

State Sen. George Winner, R-Elmira, is collaborating with the initiative. Winner is the Senate Chairman to Albany's Legislative Commission on the Development of Rural Resources.

“Particularly for rural areas, it's important to have an emphasis on issues that can create employment opportunities for kids after they get out of school,” he said.

His colleagues, couldn't agree more.

Earlier this school year, Nozzolio partnered with Port Byron schools on a career day designed to gear future high school graduates toward putting down roots in New York central New York, ideally.

“We're trying to ensure that those who are educated in our high schools and colleges have jobs - opportunities,” Nozzolio said.

Building on strengths

To tackle this challenge, Southern Cayuga officials are set to build on the school district's existing strengths, in hopes of offering students programs they just won't find elsewhere, and using their existing facilities to the utmost.

Case in point: Emily Howland Elementary.

Until the early 1980s, Emily Howland - formerly Sherwood Elementary - ran with two other elementary schools in the district, as a K-6 building. Genoa Elementary School closed in 1981; King Ferry Elementary had shuttered prior to that. The school - renamed for Howland, a social activist - became so crowded with children school staff felt like the collective Old Woman in a Shoe.

“They were practically teaching in closets,” said school secretary Kathy Maine, a 15-year employee.

For the sake of space, Emily Howland's fifth and sixth grades moved to the main school building - about a quarter of a mile up the road - which till then had schooled grades seven through 12 for more than 20 years. The elementary school principal floated between the two buildings for a short time, until the middle school was formed in 1990 to incorporate fifth- through eighth-grade.

Uncertainty for Emily Howland's future emerged at a June school board meeting, as officials considered an energy plan for its buildings designed to last 18 years. Whatever the board's thoughts on the financial viability of Atlantic Energy's plan, audible hedging took place around Emily Howland's staying power over the next 18 years.

Part of that uncertainty stems from state policies.

While state legislators negotiate from one budget season to the next for “hold harmless” policies that guarantee a percentage of the previous year's state aid, practices intended to ease the funding consequences for districts with declining enrollment, the state uses grants to encourage consolidation in local districts.

“There are major incentives for school districts to merge, and they'll continue to be encouraged,” Senator Winner said.

Consolidation is something Aimee Howlee sees as a pervasive problem for rural schools. Howlee is a professor of educational studies at Ohio University who has researched rural education.

She said that historically rural schools closed with a view to improvement and later to improve efficiency. Yet, she said, little research shows closing a school produces more efficiency.

Much of the Cayuga County's school consolidations took place during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. A 1936 editorial in The Cato Citizen praised the “brave little woman, who undertakes management of a one-teacher school,” as it rallied for consolidation, “which will give to all students ... a better, more efficient school, as far as the physical plant goes.”

Two years later, taxpayers voted 488-86 for centralization.

Cato-Meridian's school complex is known - as are most rural school districts - as “the heart and center” of communities that embrace an array of villages, hamlets and towns. They are frequently communities that have no other center; schools offer opportunities for social interaction and recreation for parents and young people alike.

For many, the attachment to rural areas runs deep and those who leave - those like Doug Karlik, who encompass the demographic of young people fleeing rural New York - feel a tug as they pack their bags.

Karlik is a recent graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology. He grew up in a section of Baldwinsville that's “about as rural as you can get.” His mother drives buses for Baldwinsville schools and his father is an appliance repairman.

Central New York is all the 23-year-old has ever known.

“I had no care to leave at all,” he said.

But the jobs he wanted weren't forthcoming.

Karlik is “packing ship,” as he put it, and heading to Virginia to join his girlfriend, also an RIT graduate. She found work in Richmond last fall; Karklik is awaiting a job offer in Manassas. He had looked forward to staying in the Syracuse area.

Then there are young people like Sarah Rejman, the daughter of Southern Cayuga's school board president, Ted Rejman.

Rejman said his 26-year-old daughter, like him, came up through Southern Cayuga's schools. Upon her college graduation, she came home, and in October started temp work at Welch Allyn, a pharmaceutical supply company headquartered in Skaneateles.

You could hear fatherly pride in Rejman's voice as he talked about his daughter's success - “jumping through hoops” until she landed a permanent job with the company.

“For someone who wants a real job - for a person willing to work as much as she needs to - the jobs are there,” he said.

If Sarah Rejman's efforts to put roots down in her hometown have paid off, it's one indication that - in context of Doug Karlik's and Myles Mangan imminent departures - that the country road still runs both ways.