The Owsley County School District in eastern Kentucky is fairly small, serving 705 students — down from 785 a few years ago, according to Superintendent Tim Bobrowski. Like all districts, Bobolwski said staff are often frustrated by the paucity of resources, and the district has seen declining enrollment in recent years.
“The loss of 80 students doesn’t sound big, but it is for folks in my area. So it really takes a lot of the flexibility away,” he said. “It’s really small towns that have very limited opportunities for work and employment. There’s no factories or large retail chain stores.”
Through federal funding opportunities and partnering with community organizations, Bobrowski has been able to secure enough Chromebooks to implement a 1:1 policy which allows students to take the devices home.
Now, in the aftermath of a rancorous presidential election that frequently addressed hardships facing rural communities, the challenges and opportunities for rural educators and administrators are receiving increased attention, according to Alan Richard, chair of the Rural School and Community Trust.
“One thing that’s different is that rural is sort of a hot topic right now,” he said. “And that’s encouraging to us, because we’re not used to being cool.”
However, Richard cautioned that the umbrella term ‘rural’ consisted of many diverse communities and regions, from sections of Pennsylvania, to areas like the Mississippi Delta, the Desert Southwest and Alaska, and it would be a misnomer to think all rural school districts faced comparable challenges. Richard hopes the release of the Trust’s report, “Why Rural Matters 2015-2016: Understanding the Changing Landscape,” will help add clarity to an increasingly populated dialogue.
Rural school districts undergo changes, face challenges
Rural communities are undergoing demographic shifts that mirror transitions occurring in the country at large. Areas in Nebraska, Illinois and Iowa are seeing increases in their districts’ Hispanic population. Accompanying the shift is a higher need for services like ELL educators, which these districts often have difficulty procuring.
Many new educators tend to gravitate towards urban school districts, where there is more job opportunity and the promise of more exciting amenities, but Richard noted many teachers in rural districts commute from other areas without much pay and support, leading to a higher probability that they will not teach in the district for the long term. STEM subjects in rural districts face particularly worrisome teacher shortages; a 2012 report Schools and Staffing Survey found that 7.6% of rural public schools reported shortages in math teachers, 5.1% for biology and life sciences and 6.9% for physical sciences.
Salary discrepancies between rural and urban/suburban educators also account for the difficulty rural districts have in attracting talent. The average salary for a full-time instructional position in a rural school district is $57,798, according to the Trust’s report, in comparison to $68,850 for urban district and $70,830 for suburban districts. In Kansas, the average salary in a rural district is $40,897.
Blended learning can offer new opportunities
Richard said the lack of resources in rural areas, primarily from a dearth of local tax revenue, can hinder a rural district’s ability to compete with other district salaries, a claim echoed by Doug Rawlins, principal of Claude Elementary School in the Claude Independent School District located outside of Amarillo, Texas. The rural district includes an elementary and a middle/high school, with 354 total enrolled students as of the last school year. Rawlins said the district was 30 miles away from schools that could offer starting teachers $30,000 more than Claude can.
“For us to attract teachers, we have to have something they want,” he said. “We’re 20 minutes from an international airport, we’ve got no crime, no violence and we’ve got high-speed internet. We’re attracting people all the time that are bringing in two, three or four kids.”
Rawlins came on board in 2015, and the school is incorporating blended learning techniques into the classroom, enabling educators to offer more individualized lessons and teaching for students. All students in the district spend 30 minutes on math and 30 minutes on reading in computer labs or at classroom kiosks each day, completing work for an individualized portfolio. Rawlins said the practice helps teachers to assess their own strengths as well as the strengths of their students.
“I call it teaching like an archer versus teaching like a shotgun. They’re doing a scattered pattern of getting everything they can to their kids, versus a more focused instruction,” Rawlins said.
Instead of immediately investing in computers, Rawlins purchased 30 Chromebooks, putting five in each classroom; he said the district could not have afforded physical materials for each student, but its digital platforms were available for use by students for the entire year, including during the summer, in an attempt to stem summer regression losses.
“We started with very low bandwidth coming into our school, so you have to make sure you have to maximize the bandwidth you have,” he said. “That’s all about planning and paying attention to everyone’s schedule and using what you have.”
Richard cautioned it is important not to expect all rural districts to be able to rely on online learning to help plug gaps in teacher shortages and subjects, as bandwidth and speed are still huge issues for those communities.
“We believe that technology is no substitute for having educators work with students on site,” Richard said. “Some policymakers want to suggest it’s a solution; it’s part of a solution.”
The Owsley County school district is one rural district with substantive broadband capability; Bobrowski said 98% of homes in the community were connected with significant speed, allowing the school districts to more easily integrate tech into learning.
“You’re talking about a massive amount of speed for a lot of different things to be done,” Bobrowski said. “It speaks highly of the fact that small places, rural places, can work together and come around behind a general idea.”
The district is a Google apps for Education district, and at the start of the past year, all but two grade levels had access to Chromebooks and blended learning, and the district now has enough funding to introduce the tech tools to those grade levels, as well. Bobrowski said the district had entirely eliminated the purchase of textbooks, and touted that the graduation rate for the district is 98%. He also wants to introduce coding into K-12 classrooms.
“That has changed the way we look for teachers,” he said. We believe for some kids, that is a wonderful way to secure skills down the road that can lead to a job, but we’ve got to educate them, it has to be a part of our curriculum.”
Rural school supporters eye Washington’s moves
The Trump administration has proposed drastic cuts that could affect rural school districts, though Richard cautioned that many of those proposals may not survive Congress. However, Richard said he and his colleagues at the trust are very concerned about how Congress and the administration will approach funding the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP). The program was initiated as a part of No Child Left Behind as a means to help rural district pursue federal funding. School districts could qualify for the Small, Rural School Achievement program (SRSA) or the Rural and Low-Income Schools program (RLIS), which have their own sets of criteria. RLIS grants, for example, can be utilized in a variety of ways, including funding teacher recruitment and retention (including signing bonuses), professional development, and technology for the classroom, among other attributes.
It remains somewhat unclear what effect the Every Student Succeeds Act will have, but Richard said the group is hopeful that the increased attention garnered by the recent presidential race could help shed insight for policymakers about the unique challenges facing these schools, challenges that differed from region to region and district to district.
“We want to make sure we speak up for the schools that need the most support,” he said.