Worried about how a declining birth rate coupled with an increasing number of charter schools and voucher programs will affect rural public education, a team of researchers led by UConn’s Neag School of Education has suggested using existing laws from an unlikely place to maintain its survival.

Preston Green III, the John and Maria Neag Professor of Urban Education, says he was talking with a neighbor in upstate New York not long ago about the rules that dictate what that state’s hunters can and cannot do, when the idea of using those regulations to protect public schools sparked in him an aha moment.

He conceived the idea that local and state governments could create “education preserves” around rural public school districts and issue regulations to govern charter schools and voucher programs within those borders, similar to the way hunting preserves have regulations to protect the natural resources within them.

“There’s an appetite to do something like this because people want school choice, but they don’t want choice at the expense of their public schools,” Green says. “This method provides a way to have choice where there’s a capacity for it yet maintain public schools, especially those that are most vulnerable.”

With colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Miami, Green will publish “Preserving Rural School Districts from the Threat of Vouchers and Charters” in the forthcoming fall edition of the Idaho Law Review.

He says that while his paper focuses on rural districts – “because that’s where the five-alarm fire is,” and that’s where 20% of the nation’s school-aged children live – school choice is something even the largest districts in the largest municipalities soon will face if they haven’t already.

At least one voucher program currently exists in 14 states, along with Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., the paper says. There’s at least one tax credit scholarship in 22 states, and there are 18 states that offer education savings accounts.

The paper goes on to note that in 1999-2000, 11,426 students nationwide used school vouchers, a number that jumped to 1.3 million in 2025. In charter schools, which can be found in 47 states and Washington, D.C., some 3.7 million students are enrolled.

“We wrote this paper with a national concern in mind,” he says. “Even in states where you don’t have voucher programs, you do have charters. And if the Supreme Court does what we think it’s going to do with charters, then this becomes a nationwide issue. Charter schools, parochial schools, and private schools will look to obtain public funding for education any way they can – and if they don’t do it through vouchers, they will do it via charters.”

Green suggests in the paper that an education preserve could prohibit students living in it from participating in a voucher program or limit the number of students who could. It also could prohibit private schools within the preserve’s geographic boundary from participating in a voucher program. States even could prohibit charter schools from locating there.

However it’s done, he says, preserves are a way for communities to balance competition.

The birth rate over the last 40 years has declined from 23.7 live births per 1,000 people to 11 in 2020 and 2021, naturally decreasing the total number of students enrolling in school. Simultaneously though, charter school enrollment has risen and voucher programs have increased in number, resulting in fewer students seeking public education.

Fewer public school children equals fewer public schools.

A study of Texas school closures from 1998-2015 found that test scores dropped and discipline problems increased when schools closed, according to Green’s paper. And researchers have found that some rural public school students have logged as many as four hours a day on a bus to and from their new, far-away schools.

Public schools that far away oftentimes mean fewer parents will attend teacher conferences, there will be less participation in after-school activities, and extracurricular events and sports teams will have lower turnout, Green’s study adds.

“When charters and vouchers started to take hold in the 1990s, there were quite a few people who spoke of the concern about how these programs would affect the public good, and that if these programs expanded, public education eventually could be endangered,” Green says.

“Their concerns are coming to fruition now. You have this perfect storm of decline in the birth rate and more choice without any mechanism in place to manage this tension now that the Supreme Court’s case law on religion has been weakened,” he continues.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 4-4 ruling this year in an Oklahoma case that could have allowed public funding of a religious charter school. Justice Amy Coney Barrett abstained, affirming the ruling of the Oklahoma Supreme Court that a religious charter school is not eligible for taxpayer funds.

But the outcome of another similar case before the U.S. Supreme Court is uncertain, the paper says, still leaving open the question of whether religious education can become publicly funded.

Last year, Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska voters defeated school choice programs, Green says, and rural communities in Idaho now are fighting a recently approved voucher law.

Connecticut doesn’t yet have much reason to worry, but other New England states do. Maine is designated the most rural state in the nation, and Vermont isn’t far behind, he says. Even a state like California has taken notice of Green’s “Aha!” moment.

“People care about their public schools,” he says. “Schools are community hubs. They help to hold communities together, so if you remove the school, you endanger the community. Public schooling is important for educational purposes and for being the community glue. We have to protect them because of that.”