Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. We will be taking the next edition off as we head into Christmas. Subscribe to stay in touch with us during the New Year.
Compared to their urban and suburban counterparts, a greater share of the rural population lives in states with the most restrictive abortion legislation, according to my analysis of data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that focuses on reproductive rights. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, it became harder for women to access reproductive care, but the burden often disproportionately hurt rural women.
About 46% of nonmetropolitan, or rural, Americans live in states with either ‘most restrictive’ or ‘very restrictive’ abortion legislation, representing 21.3 million people. Approximately 35% of metro Americans live in these states, representing roughly 99.1 million people.
State-level abortion legislation is complex; it’s rarely as simple as an outright ban or permit. Abortion policies can include stipulations like waiting periods, ultrasound requirements, gestational duration bans, insurance coverage bans, telehealth bans, and more. To deal with some of this complexity, the Guttmacher dataset groups states into one of seven categories that broadly captures the state’s access to abortion:
Seventeen states make up the ‘Most Restrictive’ category, and 13 of those states have enacted full bans with few exceptions. Those states include Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. The rural population in those states equals about 15.8 million people.
Rurality Exacerbates Access Challenges
In the Post-Roe landscape, pre-existing rural challenges are exacerbated by restrictive abortion legislation, a change that has led to increased maternal mortality, particularly for women of color. The new state of abortion in America means people often have to travel much further to get the care they need, often out of state.
An ABC special that featured women who had to travel for abortions highlighted the story of Idaho resident Jennifer Adkins, who was excited when she found out she was pregnant with her first baby. But a 12-week ultrasound showed that continuing her pregnancy would put her life in danger. With financial help from family and friends, Adkins had to travel to the nearest clinic in Oregon to receive the care she needed.
My previous analysis of abortion data showed that rural travel to abortion clinics increased from 103 miles on average in 2021 to 159 miles on average after Roe v. Wade was overturned. But travel distance varies by state, with women in parts of rural South Texas having to travel up to almost 800 miles to receive care.
In rural Louisiana, where all the bordering states have also issued abortion bans, the distance to a clinic has increased by almost 400 miles since Roe was overturned. The average rural Louisianan is about 492 miles away from the nearest abortion clinic. The data for that analysis came from the Myers Abortion Facility Database.
In 2024, approximately 12,000 Texans traveled to New Mexico to receive an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute data. Nearly 7,000 Texans traveled to Kansas, and another 4,000 traveled to Colorado. Texas enacted a near total ban on abortions in July of 2022. In Idaho, which enacted an abortion ban in August of 2022, 440 people travel to Washington and 140 travel to Oregon for abortions in 2024. (Visit the Guttmacher’s interactive map of abortion travel by state to explore the topic in more detail.)
Abortion and Rural Voters: More Complex Than You Might Think
Every time I write something about how rural people suffer from GOP policies, I get comments and emails from readers saying some version of, “They voted for this.” I take issue with this response for many reasons. It’s unkind, and it erases the thousands of rural voters who don’t support these policies. While some people are going to say you get what you deserve, here’s another way to look at it.
In a previous analysis of voting data from the nine states that had abortion on a ballot measure in 2024, I found that support for Trump didn’t always line up with support for abortion restriction. In 2024, approximately 73% of rural voters supported Trump, but only 61% voted to restrict abortion access.
While 61% is still a majority vote, the 12-point gap between support for Trump and support for abortion restriction demonstrates that abortion access is a complicated issue for many Americans across the geographic spectrum. This data shows a rural voting base that is willing to split with the broader Republican platform on key issues.
“All voters are complex,” said Nicholas Jacobs, rural sociologist. “People voted for [Trump], even if they wanted more access to reproductive care or were disappointed that a national standard was lifted by the courts.”
In Louisiana, Land Along the Coast Is Disappearing
Louisiana’s land is disappearing for many reasons: rising sea levels, erosion, wetland degradation, and more frequent severe storms all contributed to a loss of more than 2,000 square miles of coastline between 1932 and 2015, according to estimates from the state’s government.
These risks are expected to increase over the next 25 years. A Climate Central analysis showed the likelihood of coastal flooding in the U.S. will increase tenfold by 2050, affecting an estimated 2.5 million people. Louisiana ranked fourth in the analysis’ list of states with the most people at risk, but tops the list for the amount of land it is expected to lose to flooding by 2050, at about 9,200 square miles.
Cities like New Orleans have built structural protections called levees to abate the land loss, but some flood-prone rural areas have been left to weather the coming storms without such protection.
A new home-elevation project led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in partnership with the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is an attempt to change this — if they can get the rural communities on board.
In the rural parishes of Calcasieu, Cameron, and Vermillion, the so-called Southwest Coastal Louisiana Home Elevation Project allocates more than $400 million to raise the heights of residents’ homes by placing them on stilts or laying thicker foundations. About 3,900 properties have been identified in the three parishes to have a severe risk of flooding and could potentially qualify for the program.
The Corps broke ground on the first home in October of 2024, but since then community participation in the project has been much lower than anticipated — even though it comes at no cost to approved applicants.
To understand why this is, the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund conducted focus groups of residents from the three parishes. The reasons they found ranged from high levels of skepticism and distrust of the project to a history of abandonment by the state and federal governments during past hurricane seasons.
In 2020, after Hurricane Laura made landfall in southwestern Louisiana on top of Cameron Parish, some communities in the region had to wait a year or longer to receive disaster aid. Many homes required significant repairs, making people less willing to go through yet another construction project.
“A good amount of these residents expressed that they have had really bad experiences with contractors that have come and done work on their homes,” said Allie Olsonoski, project manager of climate resilient coasts and watersheds for the Environmental Defense Fund.
Olsonoksi was at the focus groups as they happened and wrote a report on the key takeaways. Among them, she found that homeowners want assurance that they won’t be held liable if something goes wrong with the construction.
“There is a level of distrust of government intervention in the first place,” Olsonoski said. “‘Mr. Federal Government’ coming in and changing communities, people are weary of that.”
There were also questions about how the project could affect participants’ homeowners insurance. The cost of insurance in Louisiana is 44% higher than the national average because of the state’s high flood risk, according to a 2025 LendingTree analysis.
While the project does not require applicants to have flood insurance, some residents have wondered if their participation in the program could help lower their flood insurance premiums. But there are also questions about how their homeowners insurance could be affected by factors like wind if their homes are higher in the air.
So far, no one involved in the project’s rollout is comfortable answering these questions, according to Olsonoski.
“There are just question marks around that that no one is able to answer at this moment in time, but hopefully as homes are elevated, that becomes illuminated,” she said.
Even with the concerns people had, Olsonoski said there was still hope from many of the residents about the project’s potential to help them “adapt in place” to a changing climate.
“If there is an opportunity for them to make their homes safer into the future so that they may be passed down to their kids and grandchildren, like those homes were passed down to them, that’s a really, really important and exciting opportunity,” she said.
“This [project] allows them to be in the same spot down the block from their neighbors, their friends, their family.” More information about the project and how to apply can be found here.
Behind the Plants: Living in the Shadow of Industry on Cancer Alley
Living in the Shadow of Industry CANCER ALLEY, USA: On August 25, 2023, thick black smoke filled the sky over Garyville, Louisiana, as a fire erupted at the Marathon Petroleum refinery. The blaze, fueled by highly flammable naphtha, sent residents scrambling, unsure if it was safe to stay or flee. Sani, 13, stood outside with […]
The average cost of storm repairs is about $10,000 for “moderate” wind-based damage, and a minimum of $4,000 to handle water damage. That’s less than a quarter of a new home price. Add in price-gouged flood insurance costs and consider a scenario of heavy damage, rebuilding is still a fraction of buying anew.
GRAPHIC: Ports in New Orleans and the Northwest account for most agricultural export traffic
Around 20% of U.S. agriculture products are exported to other countries, making the nation’s seaports a critical part of the crop and meat industries.
Soybeans and grain are the most significant agricultural exports at more than 58 million tons combined, according to the USDA’s “U.S. Agricultural Port Profiles” report from 2023.
Meat, mainly pork, accounts for 3.6 million tons and has been an increasing export over the past few decades.
The New Orleans Port Region, which includes multiple ports along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, funnels 35% of all U.S. agricultural exports, more crops and meat than any other port.
The Northwest accounts for more than 20% of exports, but that’s a combination of four ports near Seattle and Portland, including the Port of Kamala in Washington state, which is the second largest port for agricultural exports.
Much of the nation’s agricultural exports head to Asia, with China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan accounting for the top four country destinations. Growing pork exports to Asian markets has also increased traffic through ports along the West Coast.
How does climate change threaten your neighborhood? A new map has the details.
If you’ve been wondering what climate change means for your neighborhood, you’re in luck. The most detailed interactive map yet of the United States’ vulnerability to dangers such as fire, flooding, and pollution was released on Monday by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University.
The fine-grained analysis spans more than 70,000 census tracts, which roughly resemble neighborhoods, mapping out environmental risks alongside factors that make it harder for people to deal with hazards. Clicking on a report for a census tract yields details on heat, wildfire smoke, and drought, in addition to what drives vulnerability to extreme weather, such as income levels and access to health care and transportation.
The “Climate Vulnerability Index” tool is intended to help communities secure funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law President Joe Biden signed last summer. An executive order from Biden’s early months in office promised that “disadvantaged communities” would receive at least 40 percent of the federal investments in climate and clean energy programs. As a result of the infrastructure law signed in 2021, more than $1 billion has gone toward replacing lead pipes and more than $2 billion has been spent on updating the electric grid to be more reliable.
“The Biden Administration has made a historic level of funding available to build toward climate justice and equity, but the right investments need to flow to the right places for the biggest impact,” Grace Tee Lewis, a health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement.
According to the data, all 10 of the country’s most vulnerable counties are in the South, many along the Gulf Coast, where there are high rates of poverty and health problems. Half are in Louisiana, which faces dangers from flooding, hurricanes, and industrial pollution. St. John the Baptist Parish, just up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, ranks as the most vulnerable county, a result of costly floods, poor child and maternal health, a list of toxic air pollutants, and the highest rate of disaster-related deaths in Louisiana.
“We know that our community is not prepared at all for emergencies, the federal government is not prepared, the local parish is not prepared,” Jo Banner, a community activist in St. John the Baptist, told Capital B News.
Even in cities where climate risk is comparatively low, like Seattle, the data shows a sharp divide. North Seattle is relatively insulated from environmental dangers, whereas South Seattle — home to a more racially diverse population, the result of a history of housing covenants that excluded people on the basis of race or ethnicity — suffers from air pollution, flood risk, and poorer infrastructure.
A map shows a divide between the North and South Seattle, with darker tones indicating areas that are more vulnerable to environmental hazards.
The U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index; Mapbox / OpenStreetMap
Similar maps of local climate impacts have been released before, including by the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, but the new tool is considered the most comprehensive assessment to date. While it includes Alaska and Hawai‘i, it doesn’t cover U.S. territories like Puerto Rico or Guam. The map is available here, and tutorials on how to use the tool, for general interest or for community advocates, are here.
To fight teacher shortages, schools turn to custodians, bus drivers and aides
MORGAN CITY, La. — Jenna Gros jangles as she walks the halls of Wyandotte Elementary School in St Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. The dozens of keys she carries while she sweeps, sprays, shelves and sorts make a loud sound, and when children hear her coming, they call out, “Miss Jenna!”
Gros is head custodian at Wyandotte, in this small town in southern Louisiana. She’s also a teacher-in-training.
In August 2020, she signed up for a new program designed to provide people working in school settings the chance to turn their job into an undergraduate degree in education, at a low cost. There’s untapped potential among people who work in schools right now, as classroom aides, lunchroom workers, afterschool staff and more, the thinking goes, and helping them become teachers could ease the shortage that’s dire in some districts around the country, particularly in rural areas like this one.
Brusly Elementary School has 595 students, ranging from ages two to seven. Principal Lesley Green says teacher retention is one of her top priorities: “Because we know that the best thing for our babies is stability and consistency. And that’s very important at this age level, especially where they thrive off of routines, procedures and familiar faces.” Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
In two and a half years, the teacher training program, run by nonprofit Reach University, has grown from 50 applicants to about 1,000, with most coming from rural areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and California. The “apprenticeship degree” model costs students $75 dollars a month. The rest of the funding comes from Pell Grants and philanthropic donations. The classes, which are online, are taught by award-winning teachers, and districts must agree to have students work in the classroom for 15 hours a week as part of their training.
“We have overlooked a talent pool to our detriment,” said Joe Ross, president of Reach University. “These people have heart and they have the grit and they have the intelligence. There’s a piece of paper standing in the way.”
Efforts to recruit teacher candidates from the local community date back to the 1990s, but programs have “exploded” in number over the past five years, said Danielle Edwards, assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and workforce development at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Some of these “grow your own” programs, like Reach’s, recruit school employees who don’t have college degrees or degrees in education, while others focus on retired professionals, military veterans, college students, and even K12 students, with some starting as young as middle school.
“‘Grow your own’ has really caught on fire,” said Edwards, in part because of research showing that about 85 percent of teachers teach within 40 miles of where they grew up. But while these programs are increasingly popular, she says it isn’t clear what the teacher outcomes are in terms of effectiveness or retention.
Nationwide, there are at least 36,500 teacher vacancies, along with approximately 163,000 positions held by underqualified teachers, according to estimates by Tuan Nguyen, anassociate professor of education at Kansas State University. At Wyandotte, Principal Celeste Pipes has three uncertified teachers out of 26.
“We are pulling people literally off the streets to fill spots in a classroom,” she said. Surrounding parishes in this part of Louisiana, 85 miles west of New Orleans, pay more than the starting salary of $46,000 she can offer; some even cover the full cost of health insurance.
Data suggests not having qualified teachers can worsen student achievement and increase costs for districts. An unstable workforce also affects the school culture, said Pipes: “Once we have people here that are years and years and years in, we know how things are run.”
Jenna Gros, head custodian at Wyandotte Elementary School in St Mary’s Parish, Louisiana, stops to tie a student’s shoe. She said she makes it a point to develop relationships with students: “We don’t just do garbage, you know?” Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
As Gros walks the hallways, she stops to swat a fly for a scared child, ties a first grader’s shoelaces and asks a third about their math homework. Her colleagues had long noticed her calm, encouraging manner, and so, when a teacher’s aide at Wyandotte heard about Reach, she urged Gros to sign up with her.
Gros grew up in this town — her father worked as a mechanic in the oil rigs — and always wanted to be a teacher. But with three children and a salary of $22,000 a year, she couldn’t afford to do so. The low cost and logistics of Reach’s program suddenly made it possible: Her district agreed to her spending 15 hours of her work week in the classroom, mentoring or tutoring students. She takes her online classes at night or on weekends.
Like other teacher-candidates at Reach University, Jenna Gros spends 15 hours a week in classrooms. She sometimes observes teachers, and other times helps children in small groups. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Current employees are also in the retirement system, meaning the years they’ve already worked count toward their pension. For Gros, who has worked for 18 years in her school system, that was an important consideration, she said.
Pipes said people like Gros understand the vibe of this rural community — the importance of family, the focus on church, the love of hunting. And people with community roots are also less likely to leave, said Chandler Smith, the superintendent in West Baton Rouge Parish School System, a few hours’ drive away.
His district is the second-highest paying in the state but still struggles to attract and retain teachers: It saw a 15 percent teacher turnover rate last year. Now, it has 29 teacher candidates through Reach.
In West Baton Rouge Parish, Jackie Noble is walking back into the Brusly Elementary school building at 6:45 p.m. She’d finished her workday as a special education teacher’s aide around 3:30 p.m., then babysat her granddaughter for a few hours, spent time with her husband, and picked up a McDonald’s order of chicken nuggets, a large coffee and a Coke to get her through her evening classes. Some Reach classes go until 11 p.m.
Noble was a bus driver in this area for five years, but she longed to be a teacher. When she mustered the courage to research options for joining the profession, she learned it would cost somewhere between $5,000 to $15,000 a year over at least four years. “I wasn’t even financially able to pay for my transcript because it was going to cost me almost $100,” she said.
When Noble heard about Reach and the monthly tuition of $75 a month, she said, “My mouth hit the floor.”
Jackie Noble was a bus driver for years before she enrolled in Reach University’s online classes. Evening and weekend classes can be challenging but she says it will be worth it. She hopes to be a special education teacher for first graders when she graduates. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger ReportJackie Noble, a former bus driver and current paraprofessional, works on a science experiment with first graders at Brusly Elementary School in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. Noble takes online classes in the evenings and weekends with Reach University as she studies to be a teacher and as part of the agreement, her district allows her 15 hours a week of classroom time. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Ross, of Reach University, said he often hears some variation of: “I had to choose between a job and a degree.”
“What if we eliminate the question?” he said. “Let’s turn jobs into degrees.”
Brusly Elementary is quiet as Noble settles down in a classroom. She moves her food strategically off camera and ensures she has multiple devices logged in: her phone, laptop and desktop. Sometimes the internet here is spotty, and she doesn’t want to take any chances.
It’s the night of the final class of her course, “Children with Special Needs: History and Practice.” Her 24 classmates smile and wave as they log on from different states. They’ve been taking turns presenting on disabilities such as dyslexia, brain injuries and deafness; Noble gave hers, on assistive technologies for children with physical disabilities, last week.
Reach began in 2006 as a certification program for entry-level teachers who had a degree but still needed a credential. It then expanded to offer credentials to teachers who wanted to move into administration as well as graduate degrees in teaching and leadership. In 2020, Reach University started the program focused on school employees without a degree.
Kim Eckert, a former Louisiana teacher of the year and Reach’s dean, says she was drawn to the program because, as a high school special education teacher, she saw how little opportunity there was for classroom aides in her school to boost their skills. She started monthly workshops specifically for them.
Kimberly Eckert, dean of Reach University and the 2018 Louisiana Teacher of the Year, stands outside Brusly Elementary School in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. She says there’s an untapped pool of potential teacher candidates working as secretaries, bus drivers and janitors that society hasn’t traditionally considered as possible educators. “We definitely have blinders on. I think we’re conditioned to think that teachers look and sound and behave a certain way and we need to push ourselves and those limitations as well.” Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
In growing the Reach program, Eckert drew from her teacher-of-the-year class, hiring people who understood the realities of classroom management and could model what it’s like to be a great teacher. She shied away from those who haven’t proven themselves in the classroom, even if they have degrees from top universities. “Everybody thinks they can be a teacher because they’ve had a teacher,” she said, but that’s not true.
The 15 hours a week of “in-class training,” which can include observing a teacher, tutoring students or helping write lessons, is designed to allow students to test out what they’re learning almost immediately, without having to wait months or years to put their studies into practice. Michelle Cottrell Williams, a Reach administrator and Virginia’s 2018 teacher of the year, recalls discussing an exercise in class about Disney’s portrayal of historical events versus the reality. One of her students, a classroom aide, shared it with the fifth graders she was working with the next day.
Noble says she’ll carry lessons about managing students from the bus to her classroom. She was responsible for up to 70 students while driving 45 miles an hour — so 20 in a classroom seems doable, she said.
She can’t wait to have her own classroom where she is responsible for everything. “Being with the students approximately eight hours a day, you make a very, very larger impression on their lives,” she said.
In May, Reach graduated its first class of teachers, a group of 13 students from Louisiana who had prior credits. The organization’s first full cohort will walk across the stage in spring 2024.
There are promising signs. Nationwide, about half of teacher candidates pass their state’s teaching licensure exam; more than 60 percent of the 13 Reach graduates did. All of them had a job waiting for them, not only in their local community, but in the building where they’d been working.
But Roddy Theobald, deputy director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and researcher at the American Institutes for Research, says far more research is needed on “grow your own” programs. “There’s very, very little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of these pathways,” he said.
One of the challenges is that the programs rarely target the specific needs of schools, he said. Some states have staffing shortages only in specific areas, like special education, STEM or elementary ed. “Sometimes they result in even more teachers with the right credentials to teach courses that the state doesn’t actually need,” he said.
Reach University has several state Teachers of the Year among its faculty for its ‘grown your own’ program, including from Virginia, Idaho, Delaware and Hawaii. Dean Kim Eckert, herself a 2018 teacher of the year from Louisiana, says she wanted the best educators with the latest information in front of her teacher candidates. “It’s not like a typical university where in four years you’ll have your own class and you’ll be a great teacher. You are in your own class right now,” Eckert says. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Edwards, one of the first researchers to study “grow your own” programs, is investigating whether teachers who complete them are effective in the classroom and stay employed in the field long term, as well as how diverse these educators are and whether they actually end up in hard-to-staff schools.
“States are investing millions of dollars into this strategy, and we don’t know anything about its effectiveness,” she said. “We could be putting all this money into something that may or may not work.”
Ross, of Reach University, says his group plans to research whether its new teachers are effective and stay in their jobs. In terms of meeting schools’ specific labor needs, Reach has agreements with other organizations such as TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) and the University of West Alabama to help people take higher-level courses in hard-to-fill specialties such as high school math. But while Reach staff look at information on teacher vacancies before partnering with a school district, they don’t focus on matching the district’s exact staffing needs said Ross: “Our hope is the numbers work themselves out.”
Jenna Gros, the head custodian of Wyandotte, makes it a point to know children’s names and speak to them as she works. “It’s about building a bond. You have to be able to bond with them in order to make them feel like they are someone and that they can be someone,” she says. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
In Louisiana, Ross said he believes the organization could put a serious dent in the teacher vacancy numbers statewide. Some 84 percent of all parishes have signed on for Reach trainees, he said, and 650 teachers-in-training are enrolled. That amounts to more than a quarter of the teacher vacancy numbers statewide, 2,500.
“We’re getting pretty close to being a material contribution to the solution in that state,” he said.
His group is also looking to partner with states, including Louisiana, to use Department of Labor money for teacher apprenticeships. At least 16 states have such programs. Under a Labor Department rule last year, teacher apprenticeships can now access millions in federal job-training funds. Reach is in talks to use some of that money, which Ross says would allow it to make the programs free to students and rely less on philanthropy.
A straight-A student since her first semester, head custodian Jenna Gros expects to graduate without any debt in May 2024. She expects to teach at this same elementary school. At that point, her salary will almost double.
She said she loves how a teacher can shape a child’s future for the better. “That’s what a teacher is — a nurturer trying to provide them with the resources that they are going to need for later on in life.
I think I can be that person,” she said. She pauses. “I know I can.”
This story about grow your own programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Biden’s EPA Has Resolved Only One Civil Rights Complaint Brought Since 2021
The Environmental Protection Agency’s recent dismissals of three cases that would fix some of the problems in “Cancer Alley” underscores a difficult complaint process that works against Black communities’ best interests. They fall in line with a history of neglecting marginalized residents and failing to fully realize the legal power of the Civil Rights Act […]
