A proposal published in the Federal Register in the final hours of the Trump administration would change the definition of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, potentially affecting the way scholars, policymakers, and federal funding agencies address rural needs.

The proposal, posted on January 19, would raise the minimum population of cities that constitute the core of Metropolitan Statistical Areas from 50,000 to 100,000.

The change would eliminate 144 metropolitan areas from the Office of Management and Budget’s list of metro areas. It would reclassify the 251 counties in those metropolitan areas as nonmetropolitan. Those counties have a combined population of 18 million, meaning the nonmetropolitan U.S. population would expand from about 46 million to 64 million – a change of nearly 40%, at least on paper.

Rebecca Potter has been a teacher in Letcher County, Kentucky, for 29 years, but she’s never had a school year quite like this one. Like most teachers across the country, she has been teaching her students remotely, with the aid of educational software like Google Classroom. But that transition has not been an easy one.

“Teaching has always been about adjusting on the fly, but you’re already trying to adjust to technology,” she said. “And so when you have to adjust on the fly with technology, it’s a lot harder.”

Amy Price Azano, Associate Professor of Education, Virginia Tech, Devon Brenner, Professor and Assitant to the VP of Research, Mississippi State University, Jayne Downey, Professor, Montana State University, Karen Eppley, Associate Professor of Education, Penn State University and Ann K Schulte, Professor, California State University-Chico

This teacher education textbook will help preservice and beginning teachers to think critically about the impact of rurality on their work by providing a thorough overview of what it means to live, teach, learn, and thrive as educators in a rural community. This book invites the reader to think about teaching in a rural school as an act of social justice, work that can help dismantle spatial barriers to economic, social, and political justice. The first of its kind, this comprehensive textbook for rural teacher education is targeted toward preservice teachers in traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs.

The full financial impact of COVID-19 is now unfolding for school districts, and it is a story of much more than PPE, hand sanitizer, and laptops. Looking ahead at the bigger picture, we see that the magnitude of cost pressures to come will far outweigh even the costs that districts have incurred to date. Particularly for large, urban school districts, COVID-19 has greatly exacerbated the “triple squeeze” of rising costs, declining revenue, and greater student need — challenges that districts were contending with even before the pandemic struck.