This multi-sited qualitative case study explores how faculty members that are in school districts experiencing enrollment decline made sense of a policy that has potential implications to disrupt the work that they do in the school. The study is based on the notion that the context that a policy is playing out in matters for how the policy is enacted. While not a novel idea, this study seeks to examine what can happen when a policy is potentially in conflict with the local context. The push to increase the number of students going to college, something that is a feature of recent legislation, has the potential to create tension in places where school districts are losing students because of the threat of future enrollment decline and the negative consequences of enrollment loss. When making sense of the policies in question, there were not major differences with respect to the rural or urban nature of the school that were not associated with the size of the school district or school. The study found that while faulty members were sensitive to their respective contexts, they did not use it directly to help them make sense of the policy. The study also found that faculty members’ connection to community as defined by the study did not prove to be valuable when looking at how faculty members made sense of policy as individuals, but it did help explain why one district was better able to adapt to the policy changes in question.
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