We have an enormous K-12 administration level partly because we have so many local school districts, each of which typically needs to separately buy textbooks, serve food, apply for state and federal funding and handle compliance, run HR and physical plant operations and janitorial and IT, manage transportation, respond to inquiries from the public, etc.
It’s very hard politically to merge school districts because even beyond labor considerations, people have a sense that their district is superior to the one next door and think a merger will create immediate chaos and long term harm to their kids’ educations and their property values.
Spending isn't the problem, when you ignore how the spending is composed.
We flattened out decades ago, and that's because we went from subsidizing schools to funding loans. The money makeup per studnet won't look different... until the student graduates and can't pay it off.
So our solution was obvious: make it so they can't bankrupt and stay in debt forever. Great way to build an educated citizenship.
It's not a bad idea to be slightly suspicious of a county that's quite willing to stave millions of its own people to death and call it a "great leap".
Give your subscribers the option to self install. Give them the tower to point their antenna toward and how to dial in the direction for max gain.
I suspect a many would jump at the opportunity as rural folks tend to be quite resourceful.
I've done this for churches for campus point to point. Don't have enough installers, but about 30% have volunteers that got it done or mostly done. Some we just did the Cat-5 terminations for them.
We did something like that starting up our ISP with fiber installations. The whole village helped digging the trenches, pulling the fiber. The welding we got a little lesson on, and then had a few people doing the fiber welding all over the village with borrowed equipment. This was about 25 years ago, webserver was running on a then ancient 8086 (or 286?) running Linux :-)
Seems I have the computers mixed up in my memory, it was definitely a IBM PS/2 Model 70 486. But our computer club were running some 8086 with a version of Linux before that as a router, think you had to compile the core yourself to get it working. Not to mention getting two different network cards running... My memory is fuzzy, wasn't me doing it, just watched the guy do it and bought him lunch :-)
Honestly this is something I need to promote more. We've had a few people self-install which is amazing, and it turns a 4-8 hour install job into a 30 minute alignment one. It's something we can only offer to those who have an unambiguously clear line of sight to one of our access points though, and since we mostly operate in the mountains, trees can often make things very difficult.
Spending isn't the problem.