Educational achievement in rural America is one of the country's great overlooked challenges. Rural students achieve below the U.S. average on national tests, and high school dropout rates are higher and college attendance lower than they are in cities and suburbs. When the U.S. Department of Education asks low-achieving schools to be turned around, rural educators usually say they lack options: schools in many communities can't be closed because there are no other choices, and populations are too thin to support charter schools. But the Walton Rural Life Center, serving a population that has many of these problems, shows that there is genuine promise for rural carter schools--if, like Walton, they have the will and the imagination to try new approaches and to take advantage of the unique strengths of their communities. This paper describes how the Walton 21st Century Rural Life Center, a small school in rural Kansas, transformed both its students and its community. (Contains 9 notes.)