The impact of a school's closure on rural community residents' lives

Abstract

In this dissertation, I use a single qualitative case study methodology, participant observation, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews to explore how a rural school’s closure influenced the lives of residents in one rural farming community: Limerick, Saskatchewan, Canada. Three “stand alone” papers comprise this dissertation. In the first paper, I investigate the impacts of the school’s closure on rural families. In the second paper, I explore the ways Limerick School’s closure affected adults without school-aged children. In the final paper, I assess school closure’s impact on gendered volunteer roles. Using social ecological theory and socialist feminist theory, I argue that the school’s closure had far-reaching implications for community members and that these implications varied depending on stage of life, gender, and roles within the family and community contexts. Together, these papers not only make a contribution to filling the gap in existing literature pertaining to rural school closures, but they also strengthen our scholarly understanding of the school-community relationship in the rural context.