Census shows remote, rural Midwest towns in 'death spiral'

WASHINGTON (AP) - The class of 2001 in the tiny town of Morland, Kan., is small enough to fit at a card table. When the four seniors graduate this spring, it will mark a beginning for them - and an end for their high school.

Morland High School - with 19 students - will hand out its diplomas in May, then close its doors days later, one more casualty of declining population in the more remote, rural towns of the nation's heartland.

"Some people are angry, some people are sad," says 27-year-old Principal Shelly Swayne, who grew up in a nearby northwestern Kamsas town that lost its high school decades ago. "It's hard for us to see beyond our own boundaries. We see this as a single phenomenon happening to us, But it's a lot bigger than we are."

It sure is.

The 2000 census confirmed long held suspicions: Many small towns in isolated stretches of the Midwest and Great Plains are withering away.

Schools are closing, farmers are giving up and young people are moving out, leaving behind the elderly in communities struggling to keep their names on the map. The latest census numbers show dozens of counties in South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Illinois lost people in the 1990s. The decline came even as these states gained population; one of the biggest surges came from the influx of Hispanics, lured by work in meatpacking and poultry plants and other hard-to-fill jobs.

Cities grew and suburbia expanded into once-rural areas as farmland was plowed over to make way for housing subdivisions. In Indiana, for instance, Hamilton County, next to Indianapolis, grew 68 per cent over the last decade.

But deep in the reaches of the Midwest and Great Plains, the century-long slide in population continues, as it does in other parts of rural America. In the last decade, according to the census:

- About half of South Dakota's 315 towns had no growth or fewer people.

- All but six of North Dakota's 53 counties lost residents.

- A dozen rural Kansas counties lost 10 percent or more of their population.

- The nurnber of residents 17 and yomger declined in 63 of 99 Iowa counties.

"It ends up being sort of a death spiral," says John Bailey, director of the rural policy program at the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska. "As communities get smaller, their schools, churches and business fade away. There's nothing to draw people to live there. These towns are on the ropes now. In another generation, they could disappear."

As these people move away, they leave many homes behind them. Some of these homes, with a little TLC, would be ideal retirement homes for financially stressed people trying to make a living on social security. They don't need schools or jobs, and many of them would find these living conditions very comfortable, assuming some minimum Medical Care remains in the area.