The role of parents in ensuring sustainability of rural schools (results of an exploratory study in the Republic of Bashkortostan)

Abstract

The article presents, on the one hand, the author’s analytical findings based on the participant observation in his home region (Republic of Bashkortostan), where he has long been involved in addressing issues of school management, professional development, and retraining of school teachers and administrators to prevent and overcome management risks in the school education system at the municipal and regional levels; on the other hand, the results of an exploratory study conducted in several northern districts of Bashkortostan with survey, focus groups, and expert semi-structured interviews to identify the main categories of risks in school management from the perspective of schoolchildren’s parents and to assess the potential of the parent community to overcome them. The author previously published the general findings of another exploratory study, conducted in the same districts with the same methods but to understand how schoolchildren’s parents perceive the realities and potential of school self-government and their participation in it (Ishmukhametov, 2025). This article presents the results of a similarly designed but thematically different study conducted in some rural communities. While recognizing the limited generalizability of empirical data in an exploratory project with a small, biased sample (the opinions of the most interested and responsible parents were taken into account), the author notes both the well-known objective limitations of schools in peripheral (according to various criteria) areas and the specific problems of rural schools in the region-case under study; both the significant involvement of parents in school life, especially compared to the urban situation, and the potential for expanding parental participation; both the proactive and forced-compensatory functions of parents in supporting the functioning of rural schools.