Educational researchers call them "the stayers," those who remain in a community and don't go away for college or employment. They tend to be treated as second-class students, a blend of dropouts and low- and underachievers. They stay put in a community and are stigmatized because they supposedly pull down educational levels and employment. They're also our neighbors.

Some of this research is drawn from a book called "Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America" by sociologists Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas. They examined rural school systems and divided students into four categories: achievers, stayers, seekers and returners.

We know about achievers. They're highly visible and supposedly the brightest, the "top twenty-fivers" in a high school, the ones with high GPAs. They win awards and are expected to go away for college and to the big cities-- after all, they're too smart to stay in rural America.

Seekers are average students but nonetheless want to leave. They have no interest in staying in their typically modest homes and find other means to escape, the military sometimes being an option.

The returners are the high achievers who choose to come back home. They're welcomed, treated like royalty (they bless us with their presence).

Some call them boomerangs who were able to fly away and now return. Sometimes, though, they're questioned about why they have returned, as if something must be wrong -- that's the only reason why they'd come back home.

While these categories are not new, the fourth category, the stayers, has often been ignored. There's an unspoken bias against those who stick around. Staying put suggests failure. In some circles, stayers are losers.

I find the term brain drain insulting -- it implies those who stay behind don't have much of a brain. Yet it's the stayers who have the most impact on a rural community. They remain part of the social fabric, add to or are a drag on the local economy with low educational levels.

Typically, stayers are discouraged from investing more meaningfully in their educational pursuits They often begin work as teens and initially feel the advantage of jobs over extended schooling. They do have an appreciation of small town life.

Included are dropouts who blend into our communities. They live with parents or extended family, do part-time or seasonal work, and become invisible.

If you assume education is one of the major factors in a community's economic development, paying more attention to the stayers will have the most impact. For example, with the demise of the old vocational ed high school programs, where do the stayers get their training? There are newer career and technical programs that supposedly train students in occupational programs -- but many are biased toward a four-year college prep emphasis. (Somehow the institution of community colleges gets left out of the equation.)

We have created an exclusion and inclusion dilemma. Especially in rural communities, we educate youth to envision their future lives elsewhere. Moving up implies moving out. Go away for something better or stick around and be marginalized in their own communities, excluded from better things in life. We lack a culture of inclusion, a culture of place, believing that our existing communities have things to offer the stayers.

So where do we put our resources? On the one hand, those who excel in school should be rewarded, no matter if they stay or not. But why not do both?