This paper summarizes arguments surrounding the closing of Hisel School in Jackson County, Kentucky, in an effort to analyze the debate on rural education in Appalachia and how it relates to school-community relationships. Events surrounding closure of the school are summarized, including a two-year period in which a school community volunteer group maintained the facility. Community support and activism through 1986 delayed consolidation of the school, which now serves 45 children in grades 1-8. While debate about the merits of the school included class conflict, culture conflict and narrow self-interest, four frames of reference emerge as those most frequently used to define the issue: Romantic-Traditional, Urban-Idealistic, Rational-Technocratic, and Democratic-Localist. Romantic-Traditional thinking was reflected in many media references to the one-room school houses of long ago. Such consciousness contrasted the one-room school with the new, modern, less personal building. The Urban-Idealistic approach accepted urban institutions as synonymous with progress, seeing the smaller schools as obstacles. Rational-Technocratic thinking assumed that a modern school would be more cost-effective and reasonable; and finally, Democratic-Localist consciousness was evidenced in statements about the opportunity the smaller school provided for a personalized, family-like education of rural students. The evidence indicates that the Rational-Technocratic argument, often reflected by administrators and government policy makers, was the most powerful and offered the prime justification for closing the school. The paper concludes by suggesting that educational reformers would do well to study how school-community relationships are influenced by frames of reference that take the form of types of consciousness. There is a nine-item list of references. (TES)