NREA Weekly Updates: July 30th, 2021

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2021 National Forum to Advance Rural Education: 113 Years of Highlighting Rural Education
2021 NREA State Affiliates: 43 States & Counting...
NREA "The Rural Voice" Podcast Series
Become A Member of NREA Join Online
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CONGRATS: Georgia DOE establishing new Office of Rural Education and Innovation
CONGRATS: Georgia DOE establishing new Office of Rural Education and Innovation
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.”
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FACT SHEET: President Biden to Announce New Actions to Get More Americans Vaccinated and Slow the Spread of the Delta Variant
FACT SHEET: President Biden to Announce New Actions to Get More Americans Vaccinated and Slow the Spread of the Delta Variant
Six months into the Biden Administration’s vaccination effort, 164 million Americans are fully vaccinated, including 80 percent of seniors and more than 60 percent of adults. This is significant progress, and as a result, the country and economy are in a stronger position than in January 2021.

We are now faced with a much more transmissible strain of this virus—the Delta variant. The good news is that we are prepared for this. We know how to stop it: get more people vaccinated.

Today, the President will announce additional efforts to do just that—imposing requirements to protect our federal workforce and those they serve, offering additional incentives for vaccination, and making it even easier for people, especially young people, to get themselves and their loved ones vaccinated.
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Committee for Education Funding:
I. Policy Intelligence and Education News
  • House adopts 12 education amendments to FY 2022 House Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations bill with slight funding changes – Yesterday the House completed its voting on amendments to the fiscal year (FY) 2022 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, the first part of a 7-bill FY 2022 omnibus appropriations package that continues to be debated this week. Three of the amendments added relatively small amounts to programs, offset by equal or larger cuts to Departmental Management. The net result cuts total Department of Education funding by less than $89,000, representing the following funding changes:
  • increase of $2 million for School-Based Mental Health Services Grants;
  • increase of $1 million for Statewide Family Engagement Centers;
  • increase of $1.4 million for the Office of Civil Rights; and
  • cut of $4.5 million for Departmental Management.
 
  • Updated CEF education funding table – The attached PDF table reflects the updated funding, with green highlights on the program funding levels that changed.
  • Voting results - Attached as a Word document and included below are the voting results for the 15 education funding-related amendments that were offered. Most were grouped into en bloc amendments, with a new amendment number shown first and the original amendment number that appears on the Rules Committee website in parenthesis. The list includes the primary sponsor and a short description that links to the amendment text. Red text signified amendments that did not pass, and green text marks those amendments that changed education funding.

En bloc amendment #1 (6 amendments total) rejected 154-264, including:
23. (Amdt #171) Hern (OK)          Cuts the Labor-HHS-Education bill’s funding, except for security funding, by 20% (% cut revised down from earlier version)
 
En bloc amendment #2 (34 amendments total) passed 220-223, including: 
 
En bloc amendment #4 (41 amendments total) rejected 192-232, including:
22. (Amdt #174) Grothman (WI) Cuts Higher Education Funding by $122 million
 
Rejected 147-276
 
 
Engage Youth in the Arts
Engage Youth in the Arts
Join us Wednesday, August 4th at 1 pm EDT for our next Rural Library Network Conversations for Action webinar. Regina Washington, director of Rural Impact Networks at Partners for Education, is joined by Theresa Davis, an educator, storyteller, poet, author, poetry slam champion and the host of the award-winning open mic Java Speaks. She has performed on stages across the nation as a poet and keynote speaker. The conversation will focus on using art to engage young people and the community around culture and academic achievement.
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MPACT OF TEACHER SHORTAGES IN MOST STATES FAR-REACHING
MPACT OF TEACHER SHORTAGES IN MOST STATES FAR-REACHING
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.
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Journal of Research in Rural Education:
“Since I Am From Where I Am From”: How Rural and Urban First-Generation College Students Differentially Use Social Capital to Choose a College Major
“Since I Am From Where I Am From”: How Rural and Urban First-Generation College Students Differentially Use Social Capital to Choose a College Major
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.
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Book Review
Book Review
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).
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Rural Broadband
Are You #Pelligible for a Broadband Discount?
Are You #Pelligible for a Broadband Discount?
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.
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NREA Foundation & Research Awards Announcements
The Rural Educator
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