Situated in Finland's lake district, in the municipality of Asikkala (population 8,000), the picturesque village of Kalkkinen offers a slice of rural tranquillity for residents and visitors alike.
Nestled along tourist routes by the country's largest lake, Päijänne, Kalkkinen once thrived on agriculture and forest industries.
Nowadays things are different, as the population of around 500 doubles in the summer as second-home owners and holidaymakers flock to enjoy cottage life.
That makes the village emblematic of a broader trend in Finland: a steady decline of the younger population in rural areas. This demographic shift is forcing cuts to local services that could change the face of these communities.
Asikkala has lost a tenth of its residents since 1990, leaving the local government scrambling to balance the books. It has proposed plans to close down three of the municipality's six schools as a cost-cutting measure, with the goal of saving €1.8million. One school in the firing line is in the village of Kalkkinen.
Egle Ilves settled in Kalkkinen after meeting her now partner, Janne, in 2013.
"I came for work and then stayed for love," she told Yle News. The pair now run the local berry winery Pihamaa, which grows its own berries, in the heart of the village.
As a mother of three young children, the closure of the local school will bring drastic changes to her routines.
"Currently my eldest daughter attends the school, which is a five-minute walk from our house, but soon that journey will be a 45-minute bus ride each way," said Ilves.
When discussing her two younger children aged one and three, she worries about them being so far away when they turn six and start school.
"If anything were to happen I feel safer knowing that I’m close by," said Ilves.
Kalkkinen is not alone in facing school closures due to falling enrolment. Driven by declining numbers of younger people, school shutdowns and consolidations have become common across the country.
The number of under twenty-year-olds in Finland has been in decline for the past six decades. In 1963 the number of 0 to 19 year-olds peaked at 1.74 million, today there are 1.16 million and this is projected to fall to under a million by 2037, according to the OECD.
All of Finland's municipalities are fighting to try to entice young families to move within their borders in order to increase their tax bases, according to Asikkala Mayor Rinna Ikola-Norrbacka. "As the age profile of Finland changes, municipalities need to rebalance the services we provide," she added.
"If we had more pupils, of course we'd keep the schools open," Ikola-Norrbacka told Yle News. When the number of school children drops below a certain tipping point, it becomes too expensive to keep a village school open.
Some children have no peers their age, so it makes sense for the local government to bus the children to a bigger school, argued Ikola-Norrbacka.
The Finnish population has not declined overall, but rural areas are emptying out and any growth comes from immigration — and newcomers don't tend to settle in smaller rural areas when they first move to Finland.
Since 1990 Asikkala's population has fallen roughly 10 percent while Helsinki's has increased by 25 percent, driven mainly by immigration, according to Statistics Finland. This population increase in larger cities helps mask a lot of the effects of falling birth rates.
For residents of sparsely populated rural areas, losing local services like schools means longer journey times. In the case of Kalkkinen, the municipality's plan is to transport the children to a newly refurbished school 30 kilometres away in neighbouring Vääksy.
"We have to remember a village is not only about one school, the reason for the consolidation is that we want to keep the same high level of quality of services for every child, we can’t just give up and do nothing," Rinna added.
Timo Aro, the research director for the city of Turku who has spent his career studying demography, told Yle News that Asikkala is a microcosm for what is taking place across Finland.
Aro said that the further a municipality is from a large city, the harder it is to keep and attract new residents, which leads to closures in local services.
"The school closures first started in the further flung municipalities and now have moved closer to places like Asikkala that neighbour a large city like Lahti."
Aro says the population decline started even earlier for sparsely populated municipalities far away from bigger hubs. These communities had to grapple with school closures first, especially in Northern and Eastern Finland.
"The situation is much worse when a local school closes and the next closest one is 40 to 50 kilometres away," he added.
Assuming no immigration, a country’s population stays static when the fertility rate, number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime, is 2.1, a figure that Finland last reached in 1968 according to the World Bank.
Today Finland’s fertility rate is below 1.5, the lowest since records began.
"The last time we had this few babies born in the country was in 1836, when Finland had a population of 1.5 million and we were dealing with a cholera outbreak," Aro noted.
Back in Kalkkinen, Yle News spoke to landscape gardener Harri Taavila, who serves locals and holidaymakers alike.
He went to the local school in the mid- 1970s when there were 45 students in attendance. His daughter went to the same school in the 2000s when there were 30 students. This autumn there would have been nine students enrolled in the Kalkkinen school.
"I hope that Kalkkinen doesn't become a place solely for holiday homes, where the village is only active over the summer months," Taavila told Yle News.
In Asikkala around 40 percent of the 10,000 homes are classed as leisure homes as opposed to permanent accommodation according to the mayor's office.
That has significant effects on the local economy, even for businesses that also serve cottage-owners who are absent during the winter.
"Speaking as an entrepreneur, we already have trouble hiring people. I don’t want it to be harder to attract workers and their families to our village," Egle concluded.
Story by Kristo Mikkonen
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