The Nye County School District has re-claimed its status as "rural" now that the U.S. Department of Education has fixed what Jason Umber, aide to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), said "essentially amounts to a clerical error."

In a county that's home to Duckwater Elementary School, a one-room schoolhouse with 12 students, and where student commutes to Tonopah or Round Mountain can be hours long, it's difficult to imagine the schools as being classified as "urban."

But that's just what happened when one of the two criteria for classification was overlooked by federal government.

The designation is based on the number of students within the entire school district and also the number of students per square mile.

Largely due to Pahrump, the county met the student population requirement for an urban designation, but the population density criterion was overlooked.

The county actually has only two students per square mile.

The urban designation was more than a technicality, affecting everything from funding through grants to teachers' students loans.

For one thing, the urban status meant that under the No Child Left Behind Act, teachers working for the district had to be "highly qualified" in more than one core subject area, meaning they would have to have a master's degree.

But smaller, rural schools like the ones located in Gabbs or Round Mountain often serve as a kind of training ground for teachers who are still in the process of obtaining their highly qualified status.

As Superintendent Rob Roberts pointed out in a letter asking for the senator's support in changing the school district's status back to rural, "Rural schools often have an extremely difficult time hiring teachers that have a 'highly qualified' status in more than one core subject area."

Working at a rural school gives a teacher three years to earn the required credit hours and their degree so they are designated as "highly qualified."

Furthermore, working at a rural school gives teachers a break on their student loans, and some schools will even offer financial incentives to teach in a rural environment.

"It's much better for us to have the rural designation," Bobbi Brock, human resources coordinator for the district said.

The urban designation also had an effect on grant funding.

Karen Holly, grant writer for the school district, said that the designation limited reap flex money, or money that could be transferred from one grant to a different grant that had a wider scope of what the money could be used for.

Furthermore, Holly said, the designation could potentially have limited the grants the district could apply for since some federal grants are specifically designated for rural schools.

"I'm just really happy it got fixed," Holly said. "I couldn't understand it because I have the guidelines and we still fit them."

The change is status did not go unnoticed by northern residents of the county.

in Beatty, a petition asking the school district to ignore the federal government's decree, calling it "absurd to say the least," garnered about 50 signatures from residents of Beatty, Amargosa Valley, and Round Mountain.

Roberts began to bring the problem to Sen. Reid, reminding him in a letter that Nye County was the largest school district in the lower 48 states and that "this change in our status has placed further restraints upon our already overburdened district."

In addition, the superintendent began working with the senator's staff and spoke again to the senator about the issue at a town hall meeting in Las Vegas on May 30, where he thanked the senator and his staff for being responsive to the issue.

"It's very gratifying to know that the senator can be accessed for our needs and concerns," Roberts said.

"The senator wanted to make sure the schools have access to the funding designated for rural schools," Umber said.