Dr. Bronwyn Ragan-Martin, a Georgia educational leader with more than 31 years of experience, has been selected to lead the new office. Dr. Ragan-Martin, who most recently served as Superintendent of the Early County School System and President of the Georgia School Superintendents Association, will serve as Deputy Superintendent for Rural Education and Innovation beginning in October.

“It is a top priority of my administration to strengthen and bring greater opportunities and economic prosperity to rural Georgia,” Governor Brian Kemp said. “The Georgia Department of Education’s new Office of Rural Education and Innovation will support those efforts to renew and revitalize rural Georgia and ensure our state remains the best place to live, work, and raise a family.”

When students don’t have good teachers, it can affect their cognitive growth — and over time can result in measurable economic loss.

Teacher shortages, therefore, are the type of crisis that “can put an entire society at risk,” said Nicole Smith, the chief economist and research professor at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

It was a sobering comment during SREB’s June 11 online discussion with a panel of education leaders on teacher shortages and what can be done about them.

By definition, first-generation college (FGC) students share similar levels of parental education, and they often receive support on college campuses as though they represent a homogenous group. However, FGC students come from a wide variety of backgrounds that may necessitate different forms of support. This article takes a step toward exploring this variation by examining how rural and urban FGC freshmen differentially use their social networks to help them choose college majors and career pathways. The case study uses longitudinal interviews with 18 rural FGCs and 15 urban FGCs to tease apart the ways in which rural and urban places create distinct challenges and opportunities that affect the transition to college. The analysis also examines the ways in which race interacts with a place to further shape these processes. Most notably, urban students benefited from career exploration opportunities available in their cities and high schools and were preconditioned to see their home communities as sources of social capital, while rural students relied heavily upon fewer hometown mentors but also understood the urgency of forming new ties in college and ultimately bridged more successfully into the collegiate sphere. In addition, with potential implications for student affairs professionals, administrators, faculty, and others seeking to support and mentor FGC students, rural students, in particular, rejected the FGC label and associated more strongly with their geographic background. Finally, while Black and White students from rural and urban areas often pursued similar college majors, their experiences along these trajectories often diverged in meaningful ways.

Gristy, C., Hargreaves, L., & Kučerová, S. R. (Eds.). (2020). Educational Research and Schooling in Rural Europe: An Engagement with Changing Patterns of Education, Space, and Place. Information Age.

In his wonderful account of rural life in Italy in the 1930s, during his exile imposed due to his antifascist activities against Mussolini’s regime, the Italian writer Carlo Levi noted in his book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, “Gagliano like all Italy, was in the hands of schoolmasters” (1947/2000, p. 62). Levi, originally from Turin, offered in his experience of exile in southern rural Italy the confrontation of two cultures, his modern urban and the rural peasant way of life. Amid a rural landscape of economic hardship and poverty, and alien to the process of modernization and fascism engulfing Italy and much of Europe, Levi could not help but notice the centrality of comparaggio in the inhabitants’ everyday lives—that is, an acquired and symbolic kinship, a unifying web beyond family ties, a sense of communality that brought together the people of Gagliano. Underpinning this fraternal tie was, obviously, a social history but also the centrality of the institutions of church, schooling, and agricultural work in comparison to the absence of the state. Closer in time, Mara Tieken (2014), in her important book Why Rural Schools Matter in the United States, also reminds urban and rural readers alike of the centrality of schools in the everyday lives of individuals and the community at large. Her book, however, alerts us of the “imperfect and important relationship” between schools and communities, and most importantly of the threats of school consolidation and the “whispered fears that would ripple through staff” that their school “would finally be deemed just too small and too rural to remain open” (p. 3).

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), with congressional approval, launched an Emergency Broadband Program in which Pell Grant recipients are eligible for up to $50 per month — or $75 in Tribal areas — to pay for internet service. A recent panel convened by New America looked to highlight the usage of the program and encouraged students to access the benefit to help promote their access to higher education.

While the Department of Education (ED) has contacted Pell Grant recipients about the benefit through an email, some eligible students may not have recognized the correspondence or have been on the lookout for it.