High Poverty in Rural Education

According to NEA in Rural Schools, in many rural areas, there exists a real challenge of adequately educating children of poverty. Rural areas historically have had a higher percentage of rural students (Kominiak, T. 2018). There are 467 counties in the USA where at least 20% of the working-age population lacks a high school diploma. 80% of these counties exist in rural areas. This challenge exists because of multiple reasons. This includes high teacher turnover, limited resources, and the overall effects of poverty on students in rural education.

Introduction: Today, we are going to have some fun with puzzles while addressing the adverse effects of poverty and discussing strategies for change.

Directions: You will group yourselves into groups of four. Each group will receive a bag with four puzzle pieces. Each participant will have to design a puzzle piece using coloring pencils and markers. Each participant is asked to draw a picture relating to what poverty looks like in our school. You can't use any written words. Next, you will put the pieces together to form a puzzle within your individual group. Each participant will have to share information about what they drew as it relates to poverty within our school. Each group will select a recorder to paraphrase what everyone shared and write it on an index card. Lastly, each group will select a speaker to share the information written on the card. This activity will help us to define poverty as it relates specifically to our school and its adverse effects.

• Teacher Recruitment and Retention: Recruiting and retaining quality teachers can be challenging for multiple reasons. These reasons include reduced pay, lack of opportunity for professional development, and professional isolation.

• Limited Resources: Rural schools have limited resources due to the small school populations that result in limited state and federal spending dollars.

• Poverty: Poverty within the school setting is determined by the number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. The impact of poverty on rural students can be crippling because of situational problems at home. These factors can cause rural kids to internalize a sense of limited expectations, if not hopelessness.

We will create a positive school culture and climate while focusing on relationship building

• Establish a Leadership Team with a shared vision
• Establish strong grade-level teams and partner with neighboring schools to increase collaboration
• Develop focused Professional Learning Communities
• Partner with neighboring schools to maximize resources
• Partner with community organizations and local universities to support initiatives
  
• Establish a Grant Writing Team to support initiates
  
• Foster effective teacher-student relationships
  

Poor Students, Rich Teaching: Mindsets for Change by Eric Jensen provides strategies on building positive relationships with students of poverty (2016). He also discusses how to create a positive school culture while addressing the barriers of childhood poverty. This will serve as our year-long professional development reading as we address the adverse effects of poverty on our students' academic achievement.

Teacher Recruitment and Retention: By creating a collaborative culture, we aim to decrease our teacher turn over rate and attract more high-quality teachers to our school. For example, when Pike County School in Alabama, created a collaborative culture, teachers actually wanted to be placed at Pike County Elementary School. The elementary principal shared that pre-service teachers were noticing the positive changes within the rural, high poverty school and requested to be positioned at her school.

Limited Resources: Through effective planning and collaboration, we want to form rural collaborative relationships with neighboring schools, community resources, and partner with other organizations to increase our resources. Once we identify our needs, we want to be creative in developing a plan of action to secure adequate resources.

Poverty- Through the use of on-going collaboration and professional development we want to address the social and emotional issues encountered by our students as a result of poverty. We want to decrease our office referrals, absentees, and increase student achievement. We will utilize multiple data forms of data to measure our effectiveness.

Jensen, E. (2016). Poor students, rich teaching: Mindsets for change. Bloomington,

IN: Solution Tree Press.

Don’t forget rural schools - AEI. Retrieved July 25, 2019, from

http://www.aei.org/publication /dont-forget-rural-schools/

Research & Publications - National Rural Education Association. Retrieved July 25, 2019,

from https://www.nrea.net/Research_and_Publications

Crisis in Rural American Education | HuffPost.

Retrieved July 25, 2019, from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/crisis-in-rural-american

education_b_59305c2ce4b09e93d7964875

Rural Schools. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/16358.htm

Top Stories of 2018: Rural schools face common challenges, but need unique solutions - Kominiak, T. (2019). Retrieved from: https://www.k12insight.com/trusted/report-rural-schools/

Crain, T. P. (2018). How one rural district is closing the gap, raising scores for all children retrieved from the Birmingham Real-Time News

Email: smith-moodyl@uwa.edu