Community Stability and School Conflict: The Influence of Three Socioeconomic Factors.

This paper explores the relationship between community stability and school conflict in a small rural Texas school district. Data included school district records; newspaper archives; and interviews with school district officials, community members, and officials of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Texas County (a pseudonym) is composed of two communities (Richards and Burnett) with an overall ethnic composition of 55 percent Anglo, 35 percent Hispanic, and 9 percent Black. Richards and Burnett have seen their economic base seriously eroded in recent years, and in 1983, their school districts were consolidated to form the Texas County Consolidated Independent School District (TCCISD). Conflict began in TCCISD in 1990 over minority hiring practices and the lack of Hispanic teachers. The conflict evolved from charges of racism against the superintendent and a principal to a concerted effort backed by LULAC to change the way in which members of the TCCISD board were elected (to allow more Hispanic representation). The conflict within TCCISD is analyzed in terms of the "principles of rural organization": (1) centripetalism, the tendency of various social and economic forces to centralize themselves in one location; (2) inclusiveness, which works to hold community residents together; and (3) social distinction, by which the residents of one rural community distinguish themselves from residents of another rural community. Economic decline and the changing ethnic composition of the school district have broken the assumed cohesiveness of the community along racial and ethnic lines and forced into the open Hispanics' feelings of exclusion. (KS)