Students sleep on the bus as they travel 60 kilometres or more to the nearest school. Parents battle education bureaucrats and government number crunchers to try to save their local schools and rural school boards. Increasing
numbers of parents decide to keep their children home to gain their education through computer or government-developed at-home study programs, under the watchful eye of a parent. These all are part of the landscape of rural education in the 1990s as the chill winds of budget-cutting, amalgamation and rural depopulation blow across the
prairie countryside. In this special report, reporter Dene Moore examines the trends, the political battles and the at-home implications of the fight to retain, and change, rural education.
