Parental school choice is often studied in urban space. This paper presents a typology of attractive rural schools where school choice is widely practiced. Attractive (demanded) schools we defined as those with a higher proportion of students from outside the catchment area. The study is based in the Central European country, Czechia, where municipalities must delimit a catchment area for schools, but there is also liberal free school parental choice. We understand school community narrowly, as people with a distinct connection to a particular educational institution, especially through commuting relationships (Eppley et al., 2021). Traditionally, rural school communities were local or territorially close (Solstad and Andrews, 2020). As rural communities have evolved since the twentieth century, their social and ethnic composition, views, demands, and aspirations regarding education have diversified, influencing parental choice (Gristy et al., eds., 2020; Bagley and Hillyard, 2015). Even the rural school patterns are not static; individual schools vary in demand, and some become more attractive than others. Thus their regional scope changes, becoming schools for a different community of students and parents than just the municipality (Beach and Arrazola, 2020). Pull and push factors in family decision-making about school are often distinguished (Maroulis et al., 2019). We assume new communities form differently based on the prevalence of pull or push mechanisms in school choice, and depending also on the school's geographic position within the school system. Our study defines in-demand schools by analyzing administrative data on all rural schools in Czechia (N = 2086). From the schools with the highest proportion of students from outside the catchment area, we selected 13 cases based on school and municipality characteristics described in our partial studies. This paper focuses on 3 cases with different mechanisms of school community formation. Using mixed methods of spatial analysis of statistical data on students' place of residence, interviews with operators and headmasters, and a questionnaire survey among parents, we illustrate the combinations of factors leading to different types of rural school communities. Our analysis confirms that parents consider both school culture (curriculum, instruction, climate, shared values) and structural characteristics (organizational types, size, and location) when choosing a rural school. Finally, we emphasize the implications of parental choice for rural schools' strategies in the education quasi-market.

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