Two rural communities provide models for how others might enable students and families to access resources that otherwise would be out of reach. 

 

On its surface, the familiar educational mantra “Meet students where they are” seems simple enough. But if you poke at it just a little, its complexities quickly become apparent. 

For instance, how (and where) do teachers meet a middle school student who arrives to class not just hungry, having found nothing to eat at home, but angry and stressed because Mom and Dad didn’t come home until after midnight, and he had to take care of his younger sister and brother? What about students who come to school on winter mornings wearing flip-flops, or whose families have been living out of a car, or who have no clean clothes to replace the T-shirt and jeans they’ve been sporting all week?   

Meeting such needs is hard enough for teachers at large urban or suburban schools, but the challenges tend to be even more daunting in rural contexts, especially if the school is small and underfunded. For thousands of rural schools across the country — from Appalachia to small-town Nebraska to Native American reservations in the West — financial pressures and logistical barriers can make it difficult to offer even a fairly simple response to students’ needs (by providing breakfast at school, for example). In many districts, support staff are stretched thin, assigned to cover multiple schools over dozens of miles, and there may be no social worker available to help the 8th grader struggling on her own to care for her siblings.  

In some ways, the conditions associated with rural poverty in the United States — especially the limited availability of nearby and/or accesssible social services — have more in common with conditions in the developing world than they do with the challenges facing urban America. Further, poverty is often even more pervasive in rural America than in urban centers. For example, 2000 Census data showed poverty rates to be much higher in the most isolated rural communities (reaching as high as 57% of the local population) than in struggling cities (reaching as high as 37%). Moreover, rural families tend to remain poor for longer stretches of time (Miller, Crandall, & Weber, 2002), and more recent data show that the more rural a county is — e.g., “completely rural” versus “partly rural” — the higher the rate of child poverty and of children living with grandparents rather than parents (Holder, Fields, & Lofquist, 2016). Rural families also face greater food insecurity and hunger. According to the hunger-relief organization Feeding America (n.d.), “Three-quarters of the counties with the highest rates of food insecurity are in rural areas, and . . . . 86% of the counties with the highest rates of child food insecurity are rural.” Specific challenges vary across rural regions, too. For instance, many Appalachian communities, already reeling from the decline of the coal industry, are now at the epicenter of the national opioid crisis that has exploded in the past decade (Moody, Satterwhite, & Bickel, 2017). 

Yet, while such intense poverty takes a terrible toll on children’s academic performance, just as it does in urban areas, the challenges facing rural schools tend to receive far less attention and fewer resources from education policy makers. As my colleague Noelle Ellerson and I noted several years ago, quirks in the flagship federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act put rural areas at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to securing funding for high-needs schools and their students (Ellerson & Weiss, 2014). As we wrote, “An unintentional flaw in the Title I formula means that larger, but less poor, school districts end up with a higher per-pupil Title I allocation, a flaw that disproportionately impacts small, rural schools.” A shift in the past decade toward making funding contingent on competitive grants put those districts, which have less capacity to compete for such grants, at further disadvantage. Moreover, schools in remote areas have a particularly hard time recruiting teachers, and when they do succeed, they tend to lose those teachers at higher rates than urban and suburban schools, leaving vacancies that tend to be filled by the least qualified teachers (Fowles, Butler, & Cowen, 2013), who must stumble along without experienced colleagues and mentors to guide them. In other words, rural schools are disproportionately ill-equipped to provide either high-quality instruction or the integrated student supports many students need, including “wraparound” services like physical and mental health care, housing assistance, and career counseling.   

Fortunately, a growing number of rural schools and communities have begun to come up with promising strategies by which to secure such educational resources and meet the many needs of students living in poverty. As Paul Reville and I have argued (Weiss & Reville, 2019), some of those strategies deserve to be shared widely, adapted, and adopted by educators across the country. We’ve been particularly impressed with the work we’ve seen in two communities — Pea Ridge, Arkansas, a semi-rural district not far from Walmart’s Bentonville headquarters, and a string of Eastern Appalachian Kentucky counties supported by Partners for Education, a social service agency housed at Berea College — that all rural educators should have on their radar.  

Promising strategies from pioneering communities 

Educators, like parents, understand that learning begins long before kindergarten. Nurturing relationships and stimulating environments help babies and young children establish the neural connections that lay the foundation for their future brain development (Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 2016). It is harder for schools and families in rural areas, however, to take advantage of this critical window of opportunity. Families often live long distances from institutions that offer preschool programs and classes on child development and effective parenting techniques, and they may also live far from public libraries, parks, zoos, theaters, and museums and other enrichment opportunities for young children. 

Pea Ridge school superintendent Rick Neal was determined to provide high-quality preschool to more of the young children in his area, so in 2013 he reached out to the Endeavor Foundation, which works in Northwest Arkansas, to support 20 children from low-income families, pairing them with 20 children from families who could afford to pay tuition, which not only helped subsidize the program but also created an economically and racially integrated enrollment. (This program is modeled after the state’s high-quality Arkansas Better Chance preschool program, which doesn’t reach some smaller districts. At the time, the Pea Ridge district served only about 1,000 students in all, from kindergarten through 12th grade, so 40 preschoolers represented a significant portion of the area’s young children.)    

Rural schools are becoming increasingly adept at using technology to provide resources and instruction.

In Pea Ridge — a district that is relatively small in size, making it possible to locate a preschool in a spot that’s accessible to all families — that strategy has worked well. But what about districts where the families are dispersed among a much larger area? In Kentucky’s Clay and Owsley counties, for example, many young families live a mile or two from the closest neighbor and at least a 40-minute drive to the nearest state-funded preschool. Further, the local population has some of the country’s lowest levels of educational attainment, and distrust of schools is common. And with high rates of opioid addiction placing great stress on many of the area’s families, it can be a logistical challenge to get 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled.  

So Partners for Education — which has more than 50 years of experience providing social services throughout Eastern Kentucky — got creative. They retrofitted two school buses into mini-preschool classrooms, complete with a play area, a small library, and parent education supplies. (In the winter, they even added a mini photo booth. Staff created cardboard frames to turn the adorable pictures of their students posing with reindeer antlers and ribbons on their heads into personalized Christmas gifts for parents.) After spending half an hour playing and reading with their children together with early childhood specialists, parents enjoy 30 minutes of tailored individual coaching on ways to support their kids’ learning at home. Colorful paintings by local Appalachian artists are wrapped around the buses to remind parents and children of their region’s rich cultural heritage.  

For decades, many rural districts have made this kind of effort to reach students at home, most often by loading up bookmobiles to deliver reading materials to remote areas. However, rural schools are becoming increasingly adept at using technology, as well, to provide resources and instruction. For example, and taking advantage of the gradually improving internet access in the area, Partners for Education has created online book clubs, run by local teachers, where students can access and discuss summer reading materials.  

In many rural areas, internet access remains spotty, though (Croft & Moore, 2019), and schools have had to find other ways to deliver materials. For example, staff members at Clay County Elementary School knew that few of their students had books at home, few had internet service, and few lived close to a public library. So, in 2017, with support from Partners for Education, they purchased tablets for every student in the school, along with access to a 10,000-book digital library. Teachers can now help students pick out age-appropriate books and download them onto their device using the school’s internet access, so they can take materials home to read on weekends, over the summer, and during school closures, like the many snow days in this mountainous Kentucky region.   

Despite initial fears that students wouldn’t know how to use the tablets — or, worse, that they would break or lose them, squandering what was a major and unprecented investment by the school district — the initiative has been wildly successful. Most children treat the devices like treasures, and teachers have the capacity to verify how many of the books their students are reading.   

Note that the point here is to supplement and complement, rather than supplant, what a good teacher does in the classroom. The tablets aren’t meant to replace face-to-face discussions or hands-on activities but to compensate for the absence of resources that affluent kids may take for granted (e.g., robust home libraries) and that children in low-income urban areas can usually access in other ways (at nearby public libraries).  

Further, technology can be used to open doors to worlds that rural children may not otherwise see. For example, Owsley County High School has had great success using online resources to provide high-level instruction in the STEM fields. Given the area’s shrinking student population, the district can no longer afford to hire dedicated teachers to provide advanced courses in some of the subjects they used to. Nonetheless, thanks to the newest generation of digital tools, the school’s remaining STEM teachers have found ways to provide sophisticated instruction that students in much bigger towns and cities should envy. In a 10th-grade biology class, for example, students can use virtual reality headsets to explore (and “physically” manipulate) a three-dimensional, beating human heart, to learn about blood flow. An 11th-grade class had the opportunity to watch in real time as a cardiac surgeon performed open-heart surgery at a Lexington hospital, and another group of students participated remotely in the dissection of a human cadaver that was being performed by medical students. As Owsley County principal Charlie Daniels argues, these digital tools have made it possible, for the first time, to expose his students — raised in isolated rural communities — to such academic settings and experiences. And even if the technology brings them only as far as the medical school in Lexington, it opens their eyes to a much bigger world than they would otherwise know. 

The region’s schools have also come up with creative ways to use digital technology to help meet students’ basic health needs. In recent years, for example, staff members at Owsley High School noticed that when students got sick, they would often end up missing multiple days or even weeks of class. Many parents lacked health insurance and couldn’t afford to take their kid to a doctor; and even if they did have insurance, they were reluctant to make the long trip to the doctor’s office, which often required taking time off from work. So mild illnesses tended to go untreated and become much more serious.   

The solution was to provide the school nurse with digital tools that allow her to intervene as soon as students begin to feel sick. After measuring a student’s temperature, pulse, and blood pressure, she can relay the results, along with a description of the student’s symptoms, to a doctor, whom she can talk to in real time. If necessary, the doctor can write a prescription on the spot, forwarding it to the pharmacy near the school. Or in more serious cases, they can refer the student to the area hospital. 

Finally, the Clay and Owsley county schools have also leveraged existing technology to ramp up their advising services. Students in rural areas tend to be at particular risk of lacking access to adult mentors, counselors, academic tutors, and other people who can provide guidance on choosing middle and high school classes, exploring potentially interesting careers, and especially, navigating the complex college application and financial aid systems. So Partners in Education launched a Skype mentoring program, staffed in large part by students from Berea College (most of whom were born and raised in the Appalachian region and can relate to the challenges area high school students face). Pairs of mentors and mentees connect weekly to talk about everything from homework problems to dealing with difficult teachers to planning for college. 

Rural problems, rural solutions  

If public education is to provide meaningful opportunities for children from low-income backgrounds to flourish, then federal and state policy makers will have to get much more serious about tackling the funding disparities, resource gaps, and other inequities baked into every part of our school system — in urban, suburban, and rural districts alike.  

But it’s important to recognize, also, that rural schools face distinct challenges of their own, having to do with the availability of critical resources and the difficulty of accessing those that do exist. Even as we fight for better educational services across the board, we need to think strategically about ways to meet the distinct needs of students living on farms, in small towns, and especially in remote rural areas.   

Granted, the two communities featured here are unusually lucky. One is close to Walmart headquarters and its associated resources. The other is supported by a social service agency housed at a mission-driven college and funded by a range of federal and private grants. That said, educators and their partners in Pea Ridge and Clay and Owsley counties have come up with creative, effective, and replicable strategies — leveraging both old resources and new technologies — by which to improve early education, advanced instruction, student health, and advising in low-income, rural districts. Surely, such approaches are deserving of support from any number of local, regional, and national foundations that aim to serve rural communities across the country. Given how much attention has been devoted, since the 2016 presidential election, to the “forgotten” residents of rural America, the time is ripe for serious investments in meeting their needs. 

References 

Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2016). From best practices to breakthrough impacts: A science-based approach to building a more promising future for young children and families. Cambridge, MA: Author. 

Croft, M. & Moore, R. (2019). Rural students: Technology, coursework, and extracurricular activities. Iowa City: IA: ACT Center for Equity in Learning.  

Ellerson, N. & Weiss, E. (2014). Rich Hill: The gap between student needs and school capacity. Washington, DC: AASA and the Economic Policy Institute.  

Feeding America. (n.d.). Millions of rural children struggle with hunger. www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/rural-hunger-facts 

Fowles, J., Butler, J.S., & Cowen, J.M. (2013). Public employee quality in a geographic context: A study of rural teachers. American Review of Public Administration, 44 (5), 503-521.  

Holder, K.A., Fields, A., & Lofquist, D. (2016). Rurality matters. Census Blogs. www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/12/rurality_matters.html 

Miller, K.K., Crandall, M.S., & Weber, B.A. (2002, November). Persistent poverty and place: How do persistent poverty and poverty demographics vary across the rural-urban continuum? Paper prepared for the conference on Measuring Rural Diversity sponsored by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Southern Rural Development Center, and the Farm Foundation, Washington, DC. 

Moody, L, Satterwhite, E., & Bickel, W.K. (2017). Substance use in rural Central Appalachia: Current status and treatment considerations. Rural Mental Health, 41 (2), 123-135.  

Weiss, E. & Reville, P. (2019). Broader, bolder, better: How schools and communities help students overcome the disadvantages of poverty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. 

Citation: Weiss, E. (2019, Sept. 23) Tailoring integrated students supports to rural contexts. Phi Delta Kappan, 101 (20), 46-51.