This is a good piece on a great topic that is not covered enough - the challenges facing rural schools, in particular funding inequities. There is a lot of important information explored in this piece. For example, in La Harpe, IL, where the population peaked in the year 1870, the school superintendent doubles as the elementary school principal and property values are 10 times less than in parts of suburban Chicago. School funding is based heavily on property taxes, and in real dollars, the value of property in La Harpe and many rural areas is going down. It's a huge problem in many states, and in IL in particular. The piece explains the "property tax as driver of school funding" problem and discusses some of the history and politics of school funding. The piece starts at the high school in La Harpe, where residents are about to vote on whether to merge with two nearby high schools and raise property taxes. The piece introduces us to many experts and officials who help describe the history and politics of the rural/ urban (or rich/ poor) school divide. The piece also takes us to another area of IL, one of the first consolidated school systems in the state, where families are being asked to pay as much as $400 to enroll their kids in extracurricular activites. It's an information rich documentary that would fit well in a series or discussion about education funding. That said, I think the documentary is a bit flat in spots and might suffer from being about too many ideas, too many issues. I also felt that overall in this piece I was being "told" a lot by the producers and the experts, but I didn't get to "see" a lot for myself. The students at the school, the superintendent/ principal, the family from the consolidated school district - these were all characters that had a huge stake in the issues, and yet I felt like their voices, their characters were not central enough to the story. I wished the piece had more, fuller chracters who played a more central role in helping me care about this issue. Many of the facts were shocking and revealing and well told, but I din't feel the human side of the story enough.