Creating Constraints to Community Resiliency: The Event of a Rural School's Closure

Abstract

In this study, a community resilience model is utilized to explore the impacts of a rural school’s closure and its implication on community resiliency in the Village of Limerick, Saskatchewan. The findings from four semi-structured interviews and three focus groups indicate that the school’s closure created a number of constraints that have considerable implications for community resilience. In particular, the school’s closure decreased the residents’ sense of community. In addition, as a result of the school’s closure, the community resident’s experienced diminishing civic engagement in the form of volunteerism, community recreation participation, and intergenerational relationships. This paper demonstrates the challenges of a rural school’s closure on cultivating community resiliency, but also the changes to rural residents’ lives and their communities.