The closure of rural municipal schools is a phenomenon that becomes relevant in recent years in Chile. These decisions have ceased to be isolated, materializing as a policy that it has been poorly studied. This article brings together 2 ethnographic investigations, with the objective to analyze and understand the psychosocial processes that emerge at the level of local community and school when closing a rural school. The results suggest that the school closures are not given as a process, but as isolated events according to the communities; and that the school in rural contexts are for them an engine that grants vitality, being its closure signified as the presage of a social death.