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.”
A newsletter about role of higher education in society — plus Open Campus developments.
Declining numbers of international students coming to study in the U.S. hurts local economies, according to new data released this week.
International students’ economic contributions declined by $1.1 billion this fall, costing the U.S. nearly 23,000 jobs, NAFSA and JB International found. Those figures are based on a 17% decline in international student enrollment.
Much of that decline was among graduate and non-degree students, according to the data. A slight increase in undergraduate enrollment this fall bolstered the overall numbers. There are still more than 1 million international students in the U.S.
It’s been a tense time for international students at colleges in the U.S. In the spring, President Donald Trump’s visa revocation and sudden reversal left many reeling, as our Jessica Priest reported in Texas. Trump has also limited visa interviews, told some universities to cap their international student enrollment, imposed travel restrictions on visitors from 19 countries, and made H1-B visas — which allow educated foreign citizens to work in “specialty occupations” — more expensive.
The U.S. must adopt policies to attract and retain international students and realize that job opportunities for them after graduation “are essential to our standing as the top destination for global talent,” said Fanta Aw, NAFSA executive director and CEO.
“Otherwise, international students will increasingly choose to go elsewhere—to the detriment of our economy, excellence in research and innovation, and global competitiveness and engagement,” Aw said in a release earlier this week.
Our reporters have been detailing the declines in international students on the campuses they cover — including DePaul University in Illinois and IU Indianapolis.
A separate report on international students released this week by the Institute of International Education found that their numbers were decreasing even before Trump took office: International student enrollment dropped by 7% in the 2024 school year, according to the report.
These declines matter — not just for college’s bottom lines, but for the broader economy. International students contributed $42.9 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 355,000 jobs last year, according to NAFSA.
The pre-Trump slump “suggests colleges face other headwinds, such as a slowing global economy, growing competition from nontraditional education hubs, and lingering unease because of the China Initiative,” in addition to current political turmoil, Karin Fischer, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s international education reporter, wrote in her newsletter this week.
India remains the country that sends the most students to the U.S. Marcello Fantoni, Kent State’s vice president of global education, travelled there last spring to talk with prospective students, our Amy Morona reported at Signal Ohio. He told them Kent State is still welcoming — one of the few things he can control amid the broader federal policy changes.
Still, he said Trump’s actions influenced how the students he spoke with viewed America.
“There is damage done there, and it will take a long time to be fixed,” he told Amy. “A long time.”
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Elsewhere on Open Campus
Shay Wiltshire, an intern at Land Rover and scholarship recipient, removes the splash shield from underneath a car on Nov. 6, 2025, at the Land Rover service center in Fort Worth. Credit: McKinnon Rice | Fort Worth Report
From Fort Worth: McKinnon Rice at our partner Fort Worth Report visited students who received paid, two-year auto technician internships through a partnership between Autobahn Fort Worth and Tarrant County College.
It’s a growing field in the area and offers opportunities to make good money without much college: “A technician hired after an internship starts out earning $24 to $30 per hour, based on their performance, and the wage grows as skills do — highly skilled technicians can make as much as $250,000 to $300,000 per year,” McKinnon wrote.
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The first announcement arrived in the mailbox outside my faculty apartment in early May. Inside a small white envelope was a card that read Congratulations, Class of 2012! It was covered with photos of a teenager, someone I recognized. She was tall, probably taller than me. She had traded her pink T-shirt and purple plastic barrettes for a long dress and sophisticated heels—but there she was, nearly 10 years older than the last time I’d seen her, a mortar board on her head and a diploma in her hand. My third graders were graduating from high school.
I knew the envelope’s postmark, too: Vanleer, Tennessee—a place with green hills and old tobacco barns and fences that no longer mark much, a place my third graders used to struggle to find on a map, a place that felt, at once, so familiar and so far. It was there that, just out of college, I began my teaching career. I found my way to Vanleer because I wanted a rural teaching job and the school’s principal was willing to hire me; I never imagined that, 10 years later, I’d be college faculty, teaching college kids and studying rural education and, from a distance, watching my third graders graduate.
Over the next few years, every May, the mailman would drop a stack of graduation announcements in my box, and more would appear on Facebook. With the photos were notes about their future plans, comments on the lives that awaited them. They were becoming mechanics, vet techs and linemen, some enrolling at the local community college for the associate degree or trade certificate they’d need. Under their caps and gowns, I could still see my smart, curious eight-year-olds, and I could see these eight-year-olds—and often, their families—in their plans, too.
(University of Chicago Press)
I also noticed what my kids weren’t doing. Few were going to four-year colleges, and none was headed to an elite school—the kind of school where I was teaching by then.
I had just been hired at Bates College, a small, wealthy, highly selective, private liberal arts college located in the small city of Lewiston, Maine. At Bates, courses are rigorous, extracurriculars are extensive and facilities are state of the art. A career office will edit your résumé, and a tutoring center can help with your math homework. Sometimes there’s even lobster mac and cheese in the dining hall.
So, why weren’t my former third graders enrolling at four-year schools? Why weren’t they going to colleges like Bates? I didn’t question my kids’ plans; their plans were sensible, and the work they would do, valuable. But I wondered whether these plans had been a choice—if they’d had options and what those options were. The resources, the opportunities, the abundances of college were striking, and I wanted all of that—or at least, the possibility of all of that—for my third graders, too.
After a few years of teaching at Bates, though, my questions started to change. Bates seemed far from rural Tennessee—really, far from rural anywhere. Busy streets and crowded apartment buildings surround the campus. Its trees are deliberately placed. The school’s majors wouldn’t be much help in hanging a power line or vaccinating a horse. Its students don’t go four-wheeling, and they wouldn’t know what to do with a turnip green. On warm spring days, when dorm room windows are open and music spills out, it’s not country.
I still wondered why my students hadn’t gone to a four-year college, but now I also wondered, what if they had?
College opportunity and place
College means opportunity, or at least it’s supposed to. Admission is taken as evidence of hard work and talent. Graduation is, theoretically, a chance to cash in on that investment, the opportunity for steady employment and future security. It’s both high school aspiration and national narrative—the stuff of American dreams—and for decades, policymakers and researchers have preached the bene- fits and, increasingly, the necessity of a degree.
Elite colleges occupy a particular place in this narrative: They’re a special destination with the biggest rewards for the best and brightest students. And their benefits are clear. They offer small classes, intensive advising and robust academic support, and unlike many colleges and universities, they boast high retention rates. Their students develop networks, acquire cultural capital, even find spouses. Their graduates are more likely to land good jobs and enter graduate school, and they earn more—over 20% more than graduates of the least selective schools.
But I was beginning to question the “best and brightest” part of that narrative. Not because my new college students weren’t talented and smart and determined—they were. But they were also mostly white and wealthy. And despite rural America making up 20% percent of the U.S. population, they weren’t rural. “Best and brightest” seemed also to signify something about race and class and geography.
The racial and class inequities of higher education are well documented. We know that, for example, 42% of white students enroll in college after high school, but only 37% of Black students and 36% of Hispanic students do. And while enrollment for students from the wealthiest quintile of families nears 90%, it’s less than 40% for those from the poorest. Study after study makes clear why. Students of color and low-income students face barriers throughout the college pipeline: inadequate college advising, rising tuition, shrinking state aid, racially hostile campuses, mounting debt and countless other obstacles and costs. These disparities, though intractable, are widely acknowledged by advocates, political leaders and college administrators, many of whom are working for change.
But so much of this is about who students are and what they have, not where they are or how the latter might shape the former. Geography has mostly been neglected as a factor structuring college access. It shouldn’t be. Where my rural third graders and my not-so-rural college students are from—and where they are going— suggests that place may actually matter a great deal. I was also beginning to suspect that it isn’t just at admission that it matters. Geography might shape it all: who gets a degree, what that degree means, and what that degree costs.
I wanted to know how.
Spatial injustice and college access
Talent is everywhere; opportunity is not—and this may be especially true in rural places. We know that opportunity is unequally distributed across geography. Some places enjoy more resources, like houses with working plumbing or grocery stores with fresh produce, than others. This asymmetry creates what the urban geographer Edward Soja calls “spatial injustice,” a geography of opportunity that marginalizes the residents of many places, both urban and rural.
A variety of factors produce these spatial inequities, including the political and social organization of space, as with, for example, segregation; discriminatory policies and practices, such as redlining; and uneven development, which leads to disparities like health care deserts and digital divides. Spatial injustice usually reinforces racial and economic injustice, such that the opportunities are most limited in places with larger Black and Brown communities and higher poverty levels. Geography also influences residents’ understanding of opportunities. Individuals learn about resources, like jobs and training programs, and the institutions that offer them, like factories and social service agencies, from their local social networks, in everyday conversations with family and neighbors. This information is based on a community’s accumulated experiences with the opportunity structure, and it is deeply influential. It defines values and perceptions—of the “right” decision or the “worthy” goal—and shapes whether and how residents access opportunities.
Studies of spatial inequity tend to focus on urban centers, and few consider the geography of college access and attainment. Yet spatial injustice may profoundly shape college opportunity for students—and for rural students specifically. One way is through local education levels. Parental education is known to predict children’s college aspirations and enrollment, as well as the type and selectivity of the institution that children pursue. College-educated parents understand application processes, financial aid forms and academic requirements, and they’re more likely to expect that their children will attend college, to talk with their children about college and financial aid and to take their children on college visits. But, because degree attainment is unequal across geography, many rural children don’t have college-educated parents, and therefore, they can’t access those parental supports.
Spatial inequities in wealth may also limit rural college attainment. Family income is a reliable predictor of college attendance for students from all geographies. Given the limited job opportunities and reduced salaries of rural places, rural families have lower incomes than nonrural families, forcing many rural students to either forgo college or take the cheapest college path available.
The geographic unevenness of school resources can shape college opportunity, too. Public schools rely on local property taxes for much of their revenue; because many rural communities don’t have the taxable wealth of more affluent metropolitan areas, their schools are often underfunded. Low-income schools are less likely to have resources like qualified teachers, experienced staff, and high-quality facilities that support rigorous academic preparation, an important predictor of aspirations, enrollment and attainment for rural students. Rural districts also face challenges related to sparsity and distance that can compromise quality; many rural schools lack strong postsecondary counseling programs or, in some cases, any counselors at all, and they’re less likely to offer advanced classes.
These disparities extend to higher education. Most U.S. students attend schools within 50 miles of home. According to the sociologist Ruth López Turley, proximity makes attending college “logistically, financially and emotionally easier.” The chance a student will even apply to college increases with each additional school nearby; living close to a college may raise awareness of the benefits of a degree and expand understanding of application processes. Many rural students don’t enjoy this kind of proximity, though, because most colleges and universities are located in more populated, metropolitan locations, while vast swaths of rural America are education deserts. Institution type also varies geographically: rural places tend to have fewer four-year colleges and more two-year schools. And most colleges do little to mitigate the distance, failing to send admissions officials to rural high schools to recruit students.
These spatial inequities—the distance of higher education, the underfunding of rural K-12 schools, the lack of parental education and wealth—undoubtedly shaped college access for my rural third graders. But another factor might have mattered, too, one that raises complicated questions about opportunity and choice: the rural economy.
Producing the “rural disadvantage”
From cotton to coal, rural economies historically centered on the cultivation, extraction and processing of natural resources, relying on industries like agriculture and logging and mining. It was often exploitative work, dependent on the labor of enslaved and poor men and women. Typically, this work marked every aspect of daily life, including children’s expectations for their adult lives—who they would be and what they would do. And mostly, these expectations did not include college, for work was something learned in the fields or the woods or the mines.
Today’s rural economies are diverse. Some sectors are growing, like tourism, clean energy and prisons. Thanks to the pandemic, remote work from rural areas is also expanding. Traditional rural industries, though, are shrinking. Only 10% of rural workers are now employed in the industries that once defined rural economies and structured rural life. Rural work—whether in traditional industries or in newer, service-oriented sectors—is also disproportionately low-wage work, especially for Black and Brown workers, such as jobs picking strawberries or cleaning hotel rooms that don’t leave much to live on.
And fewer and fewer people are left to do this rural work. In rural places where industries are failing and jobs are disappearing, populations are also shrinking. From 2010 to 2020, rural America recorded its first-ever decade-long population decline, with two-thirds of non-metropolitan counties experiencing loss. Much of that loss is due to out-migration, with many rural residents moving to cities, where jobs are more plentiful and better paid. Some, like the sociologists Maria Kefalas and David Carr, argue that rural America is getting hollowed out.
Even with all that change, one thing remains constant: most rural jobs do not require a college degree, whether in a declining rural industry, like farming or mining, or in a growing newer sector, like tourism or prisons. When a degree is necessary, it’s often a professional certification or two-year credential—and indeed, for these degrees, there is no urban-rural attainment gap. Bachelor’s degrees simply aren’t as relevant to rural work.
College, writes the education scholar Michael Corbett, remains “ ‘invisible’ training for invisible jobs in an elsewhere economy”—and this is especially true for four-year degrees. Thus, the decision to pursue one can feel fraught, like a choice between education and home. Therefore, it might also be the spatial asymmetry of the economy—which jobs are available where—fueling the rural-urban attainment gap, with rural young people just calibrating their plans to their local context.
And perhaps this is as intended. Even as rural economies change and restructure, the country remains dependent on its rural industries to feed, fuel, entertain and imprison. These rural industries are economically and politically necessary, and so rural workers are necessary. Rural youth become rural workers; limiting their education keeps them rural and working and cheap. The rural attainment gap, then, is more than an unfortunate statistic; it’s what sustains these industries. Rural youth—my third graders—aren’t supposed to want to go to college.
Those who go
Despite all this, though, some rural students do go to college. This “invisible minority,” as researchers Sarah Schmitt-Wilson and Soo-yong Byun have called them, often pursues a degree for practical reasons—specifically, employment. Those from places marked by poverty and economic decline may be especially motivated to earn a degree, and although some hope to return home after college, most recognize the challenges of finding work there. Their parents often support college aspirations; they may not be able to help with completing applications or navigating admissions, but they can offer more general support, like high expectations and conversations about careers, that promote college-going. Communities, too, can support college-going, with dense networks that expose students to careers and keep students “on track” for college.
Less is known about these rural students’ college experiences. A couple of studies suggest that they face challenges during college, such as difficulty adjusting and shifts in their identities, and they’re disproportionately likely to take on debt. They also have resources to rely on, including families and communities that encourage them to persist. But it’s not clear how they navigate those challenges, use those resources or understand those years. We also know little about their plans after college, how those plans might change as graduation nears, and what their degree means for them and for their families and communities.
So, as much as I wanted to know why my rural third graders weren’t going to college, I also wanted to know about those who do go: What’s college like for them? What’s it like for their parents, the ones with so much at stake in sending them? Did these families make the right choice? How does geography shape college opportunity?
What happens when they get there
For these students—for the nine, rural first-generation students I followed from matriculation to graduation during the course of my research—college was never an assumption. They grew up in rural places tied to industries that didn’t require college, transitioning to economies that won’t need them either. They were surrounded by adults who hadn’t gone to college and by neighbors who questioned whether they should. The postsecondary messaging of their K-12 schools was uneven—“go to college” messages were often coupled with low expectations and little support. Popular media has made an industry out of rural ignorance: rural people are uneducated, the TV shows and movies and news anchors say, and they have little interest in getting educated. Over and over, these students heard that college—especially the elite kind—isn’t a place for rural youth: rural kids stay home, get rural jobs, do rural work.
But these students resisted. Not in the ways so often written about—that is, resisting education—but instead, resisting through education: they went to college. For this group of high-performing, academically savvy students, college was an act of resistance. They were resisting an American economy that, despite restructuring, still depends on poorly compensated rural workers to pick produce, haul freight, clean hotel rooms. They were resisting the cultural messages that support this economy—the messages that tell them that they don’t need a degree, that they shouldn’t want one, that they aren’t meant for anything but this kind of work. And they were resisting an education that is conflicted, caught between its loftier ideals of equality and mobility and its darker charge of vocational sorting.
It’s not just that rural students aren’t expected “to go on and exceed”; there’s a vast economic system dependent on them not going. But these students did. They went to college—and to the kind of college that seemed the strongest guarantee against a lifetime of low-paid, undervalued rural work. And they finished that college, learning all the strategies (hiding, passing, code switching) and using all the resources (family, home, stubborn determination) to graduate.
The costs of that resistance, though, were high. Access was only partial, belonging was often conditional and promises were sometimes empty. They paid an emotional toll, too: loneliness and disappointment but also the pressure of big expectations, the worry of losing an increasingly distant home, the conflict and doubt and questions wrapped up in their rurality. For some, there was also regret—they didn’t want an urban life, after all. And there was fear—it’s too late, and they can’t return. These weren’t just their costs. Their parents felt them, too. These college decisions weren’t uncomplicated for them. There was the anxiety: the practical concerns of loans and bills and FAFSA forms, but also the apprehension that comes with sending a child to a place you don’t know and a world you don’t understand.
And there was the prickly reality that this departure would likely be not just four years but, instead, permanent. Their rural towns would also pay this price in the form of lost human capital, lost tax dollars, lost potential. So college was costly, for these students and for those who love and depend on them.
Research suggests that, as rural youth consider their futures, they face a hard choice: between college, for the opportunities it offers, and home, for its relationships and community. These students felt that tension, too, and four years later, it sometimes seemed as though college came at the price of home. But the students, I notice, never described that decision as a binary choice, even later, as the costs became more real. College was never just about the opportunities—at least, opportunities of the individualistic sort. For them, college was about their parents and their hopes and dreams. It was about stereotypes and the chance to disprove them. And it was about resistance: refusing to participate in rural undereducation and exploitation. College, then, wasn’t only—or even mostly—about them; it was also about their families, their friends and their communities. They went to college for them, too, so that higher education and its opportunities wouldn’t seem so remote. These students weren’t choosing opportunity over home; they were choosing both.
Now, after graduation, they’re doing everything they can to hold on to each. Most of them didn’t get the opportunities they were promised: the shiny résumé, the powerful connections, the “good job” in the city. And they can’t return home: there’s little work for them, and four years away has changed things. But they’re not yet willing to let go of either, and so they’re still holding on, still resisting.
Uncertainty About Federal Disaster Aid Looms As Storms Roll In
The power to grant a disaster declaration and access to the FEMA assistance programs for states hit by storms lies solely in the hands of President Trump, who wants to scale back FEMA and pass recovery costs to states. State officials say they’re not ready to take on that burden.
Rural Pharmacies Are Transforming to Take on More Healthcare Responsibilities
As rural pharmacies are striving to provide more services to their communities, East Tennessee State University is working to get more pharmacists into rural communities.
For the past 20 years, ETSU’s Gatton College of Pharmacy has educated pharmacists in northeastern Tennessee. Recently, the pharmacy program received $2.5 million in funding from the Tennessee General Assembly, the first state assistance for the program since it was founded in 2005. The funding allowed the school to lower tuition for in-state and out-of-state students and offer additional scholarships. The funding also allows the school to further its primary mission — to improve lives in rural America.
“Pharmacies are absolutely important in rural communities,” Ralph Lugo, associate dean and a professor in ETSU’s Department of Pharmacy Practice, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
“Ninety percent of the U.S. population is within five miles of a pharmacy. You cannot say that about all aspects of healthcare … there’s a significant shortage of primary care providers of all different types, and pharmacists play a key role in meeting the needs of the patients that are seeking healthcare.”
Located in south central Appalachia, ETSU is in the middle of a healthcare desert, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration.
As hospitals in rural communities close, pharmacists are changing their workflow and business models, Lugo said, to focus on providing more services. ETSU is part of that change, he said.
“We’re training pharmacies and pharmacists in the region to change a little bit of their workflow and their business model, to focus more on chronic diseases care and management, and to move away a little bit from the product and more toward the patient,” he said. “That’s a national initiative called ‘Flip the Pharmacy’ that we have been involved in over the past five years.”
Sponsored by Community Pharmacy Foundation, an organization focused on assisting community pharmacy practitioners, the Flip the Pharmacy program aims to move pharmacies away from prescription-level care processes and into patient-level care processes, the organization said.
The change in focus for rural pharmacies comes as many pharmacies, like many rural hospitals, are struggling to stay open. Many are independent small businesses, according to Jeffry Gray, associate professor of pharmacy at ETSU, and the strain of changing reimbursement systems, increased costs, and workforce challenges are adding to the difficulty of staying afloat.
“Pharmacies in general are under a great deal of assault — and that’s both financial and for the workforce, as well as other areas,” Gray said. “Rural pharmacies are carrying the burden of that much more. Pharmacies in rural environments … are escalating their non-dispensing services in ways they have not before. We often refer to that as transforming the pharmacy from what they used to be.”
Gray said pharmacists now help patients with providing essential services from testing and treating illnesses such as the flu, to providing flu and Covid-19 vaccines, to helping patients manage their chronic conditions.
But none of that is possible if there aren’t pharmacists in rural areas, they both said. To get more pharmacists into rural communities, the school looks first to rural communities to recruit students. Most of the school’s recruitment comes from within a 150-mile radius of Johnson City, Tennessee, Lugo said.
“We find that actually putting students back into the region, where pharmacists and pharmacies are most needed, is to recruit them from this region,” he said. “Our students that are from this region didn’t want to leave this region, and so it really spoke to the necessity of having a college of pharmacy placed in northeast Tennessee that serves the needs of the people in this region.”
Steve Ellis, ETSU’s assistant dean of student affairs, said that a third of its students come from rural ZIP codes. Coming from rural communities is a good indicator that they will go back to a rural community, he said.
“Certainly, our students go places nationally, but by and large, we really want to serve this region and get healthcare providers into those rural areas. We really firmly believe that starts with attracting people from those areas because that’s home for them. And they have an affinity built in to wanting to serve their community, their families, and the places and people that they know and are comfortable with.”
One Kentucky family exemplifies that.
In 2007, J.P. Ball from Somerset, Kentucky, graduated as a member of the school’s inaugural Class of 2010 and received his white coat. Upon graduation, he joined his family’s independent pharmacy, Burgess Drugs, in Sterns, Kentucky. He saw then, and sees now, his position as more than just a druggist.
“Rural community pharmacists do fill Rxs, but most folks in small rural communities trust the pharmacist’s advice and professional opinion as much if not more than any other health-care practitioner in those rural communities,” Dr. Ball said in an email interview with the Daily Yonder.
“Rural community pharmacists are respected and appreciated so much that patients will adhere to what we say even when they’re skeptical about a new medication from their provider. We find ourselves reinforcing or backing up why they need that medication and why their doctor or the nurse practitioner started a new med, or added a new med, or changed meds.”
Last year, Ball watched as his son Kyhran walked across the stage at ETSU to receive his white coat, ETSU’s first legacy student pharmacist. Kyhran said he plans to focus on improving healthcare in rural and underserved communities as part of his career after he graduates, and to return to his home in Kentucky to work at the same pharmacy as his dad. The pharmacy has three locations now in Monticello, Whitley City, and Sterns, with plans to open a fourth near Somerset.
“Growing up in Whitley, I remember seeing the community interactions my dad had with people,” Kyhran Ball told the Daily Yonder. “Dad knows everybody and everybody knows him, and he genuinely cares for the people in his community. I’ve really looked up to him and wanted to continue caring for our communities.”
Being a community pharmacist means doing more than just selling prescriptions, he said — it’s an essential element of healthcare for those with limited access to doctors.
“Some people say a pharmacist is a more accessible healthcare provider,” Kyhran Ball said. “People come in and ask my dad for help, whether it’s for allergies or the flu or whatever, and he will treat them and send them on their way. … Calling a doctor can take so much more time. Sometimes, they’re booked up for weeks. But with a pharmacist, you can usually get in touch with them the same day.”
Ellis said helping other students find that rural connection is also key in helping pharmacies be successful in the future.
“In our rotation programs, we do have a lot of sites that are rural, based in southeast Kentucky, southwest Virginia, western North Carolina, certainly northeast Tennessee, so students are able to get exposure and see a lot of things that, quite honestly, are sort of ‘Aha!’ moments for them,” Ellis said.
“It’s eye-opening, because it’s not unusual for a student to enter pharmacy school with limited knowledge, based on a local drugstore dispensing medicine. But now, they’re really able to see a much broader role for pharmacists and pharmacies in all communities, but in particular within rural and underserved areas.”
Kyhran Ball said many of his classmates are dedicated to providing those services in small towns. While he wasn’t always keen to come back to his hometown, now that he’s seen a rural pharmacist’s impact, he’s up for the challenge.
“I know there are a lot of people in my class who are interested in rural and underserved communities,” he said. “At one point, I wanted to go to Nashville, but as I got older, I realized that wasn’t for me. When I did my 120 hours of pharmacist shadowing, I really got a sense of what a rural pharmacist does and how much they help people.”
Did climate change supercharge the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ storm pummeling the central US?
A major storm took hold across swaths of the central and southern United States on Wednesday unleashing extreme flooding and huge tornadoes from Arkansas up to Michigan. And conditions are expected to worsen on Friday as soils become saturated and water piles up: The National Weather Service is warning of a “life-threatening, catastrophic, and potentially historic flash flood event,” along with a risk of very large hail and more twisters. Eight people are so far confirmed dead, while 33 million are under flood watches across 11 states.
While scientists will need to do proper research to suss out exactly how much climate change is contributing to these storms, what’s known as an attribution study, they can say generally how planetary warming might worsen an event like this. It’s not necessarily that climate change created this storm — it could have happened independent of all the extra carbon that humanity has pumped into the atmosphere — but there are some clear trends making rainfall worse.
“In a world without the burning of fossil fuels, this event would happen once in a lifetime — that’s kind of what the National Weather Service is saying,” said Marc Alessi, a climate science fellow at the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “But with the burning of fossil fuels, with more heat-trapping emissions, with a warming planet, this event will become more frequent.”
Rainfall is changing because Earth sweats. When the sun evaporates water off Earth’s surface, that moisture rises into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls as rain. But greenhouse gases trap heat up there, so the planet sweats more in response. In other words, it strikes an energy balance.
A warmer atmosphere also gets “thirstier”: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the air can hold 6 to 7 percent more water. That means more moisture is available to fall as rain: This weekend, the slow-moving storm is forecasted to dump as much as 15 inches of rainfall in some areas. “The sponge, which is the atmosphere in this case, will become bigger, which allows the sponge to hold more water and carry it from oceans farther inland,” Alessi said. “That could be tied into this event here.”
The body of water in question here is the Gulf of Mexico. An outbreak of tornadoes and heavy rain is typical for this time of year as warming waters send moisture into the southern and central United States. And at the moment, the Gulf of Mexico is exceptionally warm. “There’s a lot more fuel for these rain-producing storms to lead to more flooding,” Alessi said. (The influence of climate change on tornadoes in the U.S., though, isn’t as clear.)
So a warmer Gulf of Mexico is not only producing more moisture, but the atmosphere is also able to soak up more of that moisture than it could before human-caused climate change. Indeed, the U.S. government’s own climate assessments warn that precipitation is already getting more extreme across the country, as are the economic damages from the resulting flooding. That’s projected to get worse with every bit of additional warming.
The problem is that American cities aren’t built to withstand this new atmospheric reality. Urban planners designed them for a different climate of yesteryear, with gutters and sewers that whisk away rainwater as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. With ever more extreme rainfall, that infrastructure can’t keep up, so water builds up and floods. And with storms that last for days, like those tearing through Arkansas and Kentucky right now, soils get saturated until they can hold no more water, exacerbating flooding even more. On Thursday, rescue crews in Nashville, Tennessee were scrambling to save people trapped by surging water levels.
Now scientists will have to pick through the data to figure out, for instance, how much additional rain the storm dropped because of the sponge effect and warming of the Gulf of Mexico. But the overall trend is abundantly clear: As the planet warms, it doesn’t always get drier, but wetter, too.
In Appalachia, a developer hopes to offer refuge to conservative Christians fleeing blue states
Whitleyville, Tenn. (RNS) — On a sunny morning in mid-February, Josh Abbotoy, who describes himself as a “conservative Christian who does land deals,” drove a 20-year-old Lexus LX470 around a former farm, crossing a creek, squeezing by a run-down barn and driving along one of the farm’s roads in hopes of showing off the view from one of the ridgetops.
But there had been too much rain and the road was muddy, so he parked and hopped out for a 10-minute walk up to the ridgetop, admiring the red cedars and Bois d’Arc trees that line the hillsides.
At the top of the ridge, Abbotoy surveyed the view of the green fields and rolling hills while painting a picture of a community filled with lovely homes and families, looking down over wide fields and a stately church.
A month earlier, RidgeRunner, a real estate company Abbotoy runs, announced it had bought the 448-acre farm, with hopes of developing it into an “agrihood” — with about 30 estate-style homes dotting the farm’s hillsides.
“The fields will be filled with livestock as God intended and as Jackson County remembers,” the RidgeRunner website read in announcing the purchase. “Our goal will be to preserve the sweeping views for those who build and live on the farm’s ridgetops.”
Abbotoy said it’s too early to tell how much lots on the farm will cost but said there will be a premium for ridgetop views. A similar RidgeRunner project in Kentucky, where land prices are lower, has lots priced from $35,000 to $329,000. While the Whitleyville farm has access to city water, high-speed internet and electricity, there’s still a lot of work to do on the property’s infrastructure.
But if all goes to plan, within a few years the former farm property will be filled with conservative Christians who have moved from blue states to this rural corner of the Bible Belt.
It’s the Big Sort as a business opportunity.
A former corporate lawyer turned entrepreneur and Christian publisher, Abbotoy is fond of quoting journalist Bill Bishop’s influential 2009 book about how Americans increasingly live in like-minded clusters.
That trend has accelerated in recent years, fueled by the work-from-anywhere revolution set off by the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s political polarization.
“It’s happening on all sides,” Abbotoy told Religion News Service during a recent visit to the farm in Whitleyville. “People want to live in communities where they have a better shot of having alignment on some really basic political issues.”
Rural Tennessee communities like Jackson County have begun to attract newcomers in recent years, according to data from the Boyd Center for Business & Economic Research at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, part of an overall pattern of population growth.
“We’ve seen more migration to rural counties so far this decade than in the entire previous decade,” said Matthew Harris, a professor of health economics who does population projection for the state of Tennessee. For example, in Jackson County, more people left than moved in from 2010 to 2020. That trend has begun to reverse.
“A couple hundred people have moved there this decade,” he said.
Abbotoy, who grew up on a small farm in Hartsville about 40 miles west of Whitleyville, sees RidgeRunner as a chance to become part of a conservative gentrification of central Appalachia, where economic decline and brain drain have left communities just waiting to be revitalized.
“If you’re considering a move out here — maybe you live in Silicon Valley and you want to move out to the country,” Ab0atoy said, “we’ll be your Sherpa.”
A graduate of Catholic University and Harvard Law School, Abb0toy lived for a few years in Boston before practicing corporate law in Houston and Dallas — then returning home. He’s now managing director of New Founding, which invests in “American ideals and a positive national vision” — of which RidgeRunner is a project — and the executive director of American Reformer, a digital publication that seeks to “promote a vigorous Christian approach to the cultural challenges of our day.”
As Forbes recently put it, New Founding is part of a growing movement of “anti-woke” venture capitalists hoping “to remake society with a largely MAGA, tech-driven, Christian worldview.”
Standing on one of the farm’s ridgetops, Abbotoy said he’s not a Christian nationalist, adding, “that’s not my project.” He also said he is not going to let anyone tell him who his friends or his customers ought to be.
“I’ve got customers that are more right-wing than me. I’m not going to talk bad about them,” he said. “I like them. They’re my friends. And I don’t screen their religious or political views any more than I would anybody else.”
Federal fair housing law prohibits that anyway, Abbotoy noted, but the presence of a church on the property will be a signal as to the kind of close-knit community he hopes to build here. Folks are also drawn to Jackson County, he said, because of its Bible Belt culture.
“Even if they’re not Christians, they like being in a community that feels like it’s culturally Christian,” he said.
The proposed church — or at least its pastor, Andrew Isker — has been a source of controversy among locals. Isker, a podcaster and author, relocated from Minnesota to Tennessee to start Whitleyville Reformation Church, which currently is meeting on an invite-only basis during its start-up phase. The congregation plans to build on the RidgeRunner property.
Isker, co-author of “Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations,” with Gab founder Andrew Torba, as well as the author of “The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation,” is known for promoting the idea that Christians should dominate American culture and for his criticism of Jews and other non-Christians.
In a podcast earlier this year with Texas pastor Joel Webbon, Isker rejected the idea of “Judeo-Christian religion” and blamed Jews for the rise of secularism.
“We have to be wary of them,” he said. “We have to not allow them to have power in our culture and destroy Christian culture.”
Isker, who did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, has described his move to Tennessee as a chance to live near friends and “laugh at each other’s jokes on our front porch.” But he has also characterized the move in political terms.
“If you were able to take even a few hundred people that all think the same way and have all the same ideas about common good and politics and so forth, and you can consolidate them in the same place, you can exercise far more political power, even with a few hundred or a few thousand people, than you can on your own, widely dispersed across the entire country,” he said in a video posted on social media by RidgeRunner.
C. Jay Engel, who co-hosts the “Contra Mundum” podcast with Isker, is a recent transplant to Tennessee from California who hopes to buy property from RidgeRunner.
“We love their understanding of how young American conservative families are finding new opportunities to live peaceably and productively among themselves, and I want to involve my family in this meta-trend,” said Engel, who has described the Civil Rights Act as government overreach.
Engel, who calls himself a “Heritage American” — which he has defined as affirming “the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life” — declined a request to discuss his political or social views with RNS.
When Nashville’s News Channel 5 reporter Phil Williams reported on Isker’s and Engel’s political views and their ties to the RidgeRunner project, some residents were outraged — rejecting the prospect of these outsiders taking over their community.
Sean Zearfoss is among those concerned about the RidgeRunner project. Zearfoss, a traveling musician, lives in a house he renovated just off the town square in nearby Gainesboro.
“I like the rural community,” said Zearfoss, who also has a place outside Atlanta. “It’s tight-knit. It’s a nice quiet town, right at the Cumberland River in a really beautiful area.”
Zearfoss, who grew up in a conservative evangelical home, said he is fine with the community’s Bible Belt culture, even though his politics lean more progressive.
But the type of Christian nationalism he sees Isker and Engel promoting is a different thing, said Zearfoss.
“I see it like a steamroller trying to roll into town and roll over these people who want to live quiet conservative lives,” he said.
After the backlash to the Channel 5 report, Travis Thomas, a local Church of Christ preacher, decided to host Engel on his call-in YouTube show, “Truth with Proof.” There Engel got an earful from residents who were upset by what they’d heard.
One caller in particular cited Engel’s call to repeal the Civil Rights Act, which brought an end to Jim Crow laws in the South, and asked if he wanted to return to segregation. Engel said matters of race should have been resolved by the states.
“But I’m not for segregation, and I think it’s very harmful to the soul of a nation to participate in those things,” Engel said.
Thomas, a bi-vocational pastor, said Jackson County is still shaped by the Bible Belt, though folks don’t go to church as much as they used to.
“I think it’s a good thing when people move in, especially if they are going to hold to more biblical principles and morals,” he said. “And from what I’ve seen of the individuals that are buying the land, at least they do hold to some kind of moral principles.”
That’s different, he said, than if a group of extremists were building a compound in the area. It’s not like David Koresh is moving to the community, he said.
Thomas said he has also invited Isker to appear on his YouTube channel to talk about religion — and he had some advice for the newcomer.
“He says some of the craziest stuff on his podcast,” Thomas said. “I’ve even told him, you can’t just get on here and say anything on a podcast, because people are watching you. It sounds ridiculous.”
While he appreciates Christian values, Thomas said you can’t force religion on people. And as far as politics goes, Thomas said it’s good to vote, but the church isn’t going to gain power by politics.
“Even in local politics, you can only do so much,” he said. “It’s not like they can come in and take away your freedom of religion.”
Abbotoy, for his part, worries about the decline of American civil religion. What will bind Americans together, he wonders, in the way that Protestant religion did?
“I think every society, if it’s going to stay together, needs to have one,” he said.
That has led some of his friends — and potential customers — to wonder if America was better off when Christianity was more prominent. There are trade-offs and downsides to that kind of arrangement, he said. But those trade-offs are better than what we have now, he added.
“I think you’re seeing a lot of people who are not personally Christian,” he said, “saying, the arrangement we had where Christianity was dominant public orthodoxy was better than what we have now.”
Abbotoy seems to let most of the criticism roll off his back. RidgeRunner, he said, hopes to sell property to people who want to be good neighbors and not try to impose outside views on the local culture. At the same time, new people will be coming, and that will bring change.
“Change is coming,” he said. “The question is, how do you want to direct that?”
(This story was reported with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation.
In Red States, Rural Voters Are Leading the Resistance to School Vouchers
Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend confronted a challenge all too common in small rural communities these days: a declining number of kids.
“I started looking into the causes of our declining enrollment and just trying to get better informed,” says Resar-Jaynes, 57, who grew up in this scenic corner of Wisconsin. “And this talk about vouchers kept coming up.”
Wisconsin is home to the oldest private school voucher program in the country—an experiment in which the state, starting in 1990, paid the private school tuition for 1,000 low-income children in Milwaukee. Today, the state spends more than $700 million toward the cost of private school education across the state, and communities like Resar-Jaynes’s are beginning to feel the effect.
During the 2023-24 school year, 11 students in the Kickapoo school district received a voucher to attend a religious school at a cost of $113,811 to local taxpayers, an increase of more than 400% from the previous year. Those numbers might not seem eye-popping, but in a pint-sized district with limited resources, the loss of a handful of students translates into program cuts for the remaining student body. And with vouchers in the state set to expand again next year, Resar-Jaynes says she fears for the viability of small rural districts like hers.
“In a little community like ours, the school is one of the few places we have left where we come together as a community,” says Resar-Jaynes. “We set aside our differences and we cheer on all our children in sports and in the arts. How can we allow that to be put in danger of being lost?”
Growing pains
That’s a question a growing number of rural communities face as private school voucher programs expand across the country. Sixteen states, beginning with Arizona in 2022, have now adopted so-called universal vouchers that allow virtually all families, no matter how wealthy, to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public schools. In February, Tennessee and Idaho became the latest to join the voucher club. Texas, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott has made enacting vouchers his signature political cause, is the likely next member.
The programs go by different names and embody different approaches. Tax credit scholarships reward wealthy donors and corporations for contributing to private school “scholarship” groups. Traditional voucher programs allow parents to spend public funds on private schooling. Education savings accounts, meanwhile, function more like an education debit card loaded with tax dollars, which parents can use on a variety of education-related expenses. Whatever the specifics of the program, the goal is the same: to move students away from public schools and into private religious schools and to subsidize parents whose kids already attend them.
The project comes with the backing of some of the richest people in the country, including former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and hedge fund billionaire Jeff Yass, who together have devoted tens of millions to the cause of voucher expansion. It’s also a top priority of Trump officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has urged parents to pull their children from public schools in favor of religious homeschooling or explicitly Christian education.
The swift expansion of vouchers through red states reflects a major shift in direction by the school choice movement, which for decades has sought to build bipartisan support for the cause using the language of civil rights. Sensing an opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic, voucher proponents embraced a sharply partisan strategy. In the name of “parents rights,” and with the aid of well-funded conservative groups including Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, they leaned into explosive school culture war issues. Support for vouchers was now redefined as a “litmus test” for Republicans. Their first targets: deep red states where rural Republicans have long cast deciding “no” votes against voucher expansion.
That strategic shift has proven wildly successful. In one state after another, anti-voucher Republicans, almost all rural, have been defeated in GOP primary elections, swept out of office by a tidal wave of money from deep-pocketed pro-voucher groups. But knocking out rural legislators in states like Iowa, Texas and Wyoming, is not the same as eliminating long-standing rural opposition to vouchers.
In 2024, rural voters in three states—Nebraska, Kentucky and Colorado—sent a loud reminder that when it comes to spending tax dollars on private religious schools, they remain deeply opposed, despite Donald Trump’s embrace of the issue. In Kentucky, for example, opponents of a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state to fund “non-public” school options, warned rural Kentuckians that vouchers could force public schools in rural communities to close. One hard-hitting ad reminded voters of the lifesaving role played by their schools in the aftermath of the floods that ravaged the state in 2022. “Public schools saved us. It’s where everyone could find food and shelter.”
Rural voters responded, as voters in the state rejected the amendment by more than 60%.
Such lopsided results reveal a major weakness in the voucher movement’s strategy of targeting rural legislators. Knocking out GOP holdouts is one thing; convincing rural voters to walk away from their local public schools, even in our era of hyper-partisanship, is something altogether different.
Fighting rural decline
Lance Groves, 34, is a fifth-generation Texan on his father’s side. He grew up in the west Central part of the state near Possum Kingdom Lake, and today runs the family’s mechanical contracting business with his brother. Groves is also a passionate advocate for economic redevelopment in a part of the state that has long suffered from population decline and “brain drain,” as young people leave these small rural communities for more opportunities elsewhere. Now, those efforts are imperiled.
“The consequences of a voucher system in Texas would just completely wreck everything we’re trying to accomplish out here,” says Groves, who, with his brother Corey, started a documentary series called Rural Route Revival that chronicles the duo’s work to bring struggling Texas towns back to life.
Lance Groves, right, on the set of Rural Route Revival, a docuseries following the Groves brothers, Lance and Corey, as they work to revive struggling Texas towns. Pictured on his left is John Charles Bullock, the former Young County Justice Of the Peace. (Courtesy of Lance Groves)
Groves’s concerns extend beyond the state’s proposal to provide families—no matter their income—with $10,000 in order to pay for private religious education. His former state representative, Glenn Rogers, a large animal veterinarian who initially ran for office in 2019 out of concern that rural Texas was underrepresented in the state legislature, was one of nine Republicans to get primaried last year for opposing school vouchers.
Rogers ended up losing his seat in a rematch with Mike Olcott in a wildly expensive campaign that often had nothing to do with vouchers but instead focused on Rogers’s alleged failure to support Gov. Abbott’s border policy. “The other thing he said about me was that I consistently voted with Democrats,” recalls Rogers. “That was a 100 percent lie.”
Two years previously Rogers narrowly defeated Olcott, thanks in part to support from Gov. Abbott. This time Rogers opposition to Abbott’s education savings account plan made him a target. Olcott—who firmly supports Abbott’s so-called parental bill of rights amendment to the Texas Constitution—racked up endorsements not only from the governor but from Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
As a result, this part of rural Texas no longer has an advocate for the public schools that serve as its anchor, says Groves.
“We lost a solid guy, a great rancher from a great family,” says Groves. “And for what?”
On the far western edge of the state, in the Panhandle community of Spearman, newspaper editor Suzanne Bellsnyder has been making the case to anyone who will listen that vouchers represent the latest round of disinvestment from rural Texas that has now been playing out for decades. In the competition for scarce resources, communities like Spearman (population 3,000) will inevitably come up short against their more powerful metro counterparts.
“There are not going to be enough resources to go around and our communities are going to be defunded,” says Suzanne Bellsnyder of school vouchers in Texas. Bellsnyder is a lifelong Republican who spent years working in state politics. (Courtesy of Suzanne Belsnyder)
“The state of Texas already cannot fund public schools appropriately. Now we’re going to try to find a completely second system of public schools that only certain students are going to have access to,” says Bellsnyder. “You can see what happens next. There are not going to be enough resources to go around and our communities are going to be defunded.”
The Spearman schools are currently considering moving to a four-day school week, in part to save money, a shift that many other school districts in the Panhandle have already made. Bellsnyder fears that the loss of further state funds to vouchers will mean program cuts, staff layoffs and, ultimately, the closure of schools.
Recent evidence from other states that have enacted universal school vouchers shows that she is right to worry. In Iowa and West Virginia expansive new voucher programs are exacerbating the fragile math of funding rural education.
In West Virginia, the education savings account program known as the Hope Scholarship provides $4,900 per student to be used for private schooling, homeschooling, microschools and a broad range of education-related expenses. But West Virginia’s shrinking population also means declining student enrollment. Now a policy that essentially incentivizes students to leave public schools is exacerbating the numbers problem, resulting in multiple rounds of school closures.
“Most towns die after a closure of a high school,” said Charles Goff, mayor of Hundred, a town of 242 in Wetzel County, West Virginia, in an emotional speech to state school board members last year. “[Towns] lose incorporated status, lose elected officials in town, and it leads to fire departments closing and town charters being revoked. That includes losing EMS. We are an hour away from the hospital, and fire and EMS are crucial in our community.”
It’s not hyperbole. In their massive, first-of-its-kind survey of rural political attitudes, scholars Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea found that rural schools play an outsized role in helping define the sense of place that is at the heart of contemporary rural identity. And decaying rural schools, trapped in the cycle of rising costs and diminishing revenues, can create a community death spiral. “A town’s demise can come in fits and starts over a long period,” they write, “but when the local school is boarded up, the death bells chime with a deafening resonance.”
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is A 50-year-old advocacy organization that rose to prominence during the farm crisis that rocked the state in the 1990s. These days, the group is sounding the alarm that threats to rural public schools are a threat to rural communities.
“Family farms and strong public schools were once the life blood of our rural communities in Iowa,” says Tim Glaza, special projects director for the group. But the state’s political leaders no longer seem to share that view.
Members of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement attend a lobby day at the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines to defend public schools. (Courtesy of Iowa CCI)
Nearly 30,000 students in Iowa now receive state funding to attend private schools, thanks to a two-year old state voucher program. According to state data, 16 public schools, many of them rural, have closed since the voucher program began, while 36 new private schools have opened. While the overwhelming majority of students in the program never attended public school, even the loss of a few students can quickly translate into agonizing budget choices for shrinking rural districts, especially those for whom raising property taxes is a political non-starter.
The full impact of Iowa’s program, meanwhile, has yet to be felt. In its first two years, participation was limited by income. This year, those limits come off, meaning that the state will soon pick up the private school tuition bill for even the wealthiest families.
“The refusal to adequately fund schools combined with a voucher program that funnels public money to private schools is going to mean more school consolidation and closures, and more flight from our small towns,” says Glaza.
Backlash brewing?
The first two months of the second Trump administration has considerably darkened the prognosis for the nation’s rural schools. In addition to the state-run universal voucher programs reshaping education in red states, Trump and his allies are pushing for a federal voucher plan. The Educational Choice for Children Act (H.R. 833), introduced into Congress in January, would incentivize wealthy donors and corporations to donate to so-called scholarship-granting organizations in exchange for unprecedented tax breaks. Education secretary Linda McMahon has indicated that expanding private school choice is among her top priorities.
The federal approach would move vouchers into blue states as well as circumventing opposition among Trump’s own base. The lead sponsor of the legislation that would create a federal voucher program, for example, represents rural Nebraska, where his own constituents voted overwhelmingly last November to repeal a similar program. As one voucher proponent put it, “Rural voters have ‘emotional’ connections to their local public schools that are difficult to dislodge.”
Trump’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the Department of Education will also fall heavily on rural schools and the students who attend them.
Rural schools are highly dependent on Title 1, the 50-year-old program created to ease the nation’s vast school funding disparities. As education writer and retired rural education Peter Greene observed, rural schools are likely to take a double hit if the administration repackages Title 1 funds as block grants, which states then convert into voucher funds.
“Those districts will see a loss of funding and will have limited ability to replace those funds by raising local taxes. At the same time, they are not attractive markets for any high-quality education-flavored businesses,” writes Greene. “Those communities are more likely to end up with a ‘school’ aisle in their local Dollar General.”
The slash-and-burn-style budget cutting that is a hallmark of our DOGE era is also hitting rural schools hard. The Agriculture Department recently axed two programs that gave schools and food banks money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, halting more than $1 billion in federal spending. Even Trump’s effort to unwind his predecessor’s commitment to green energy could take a toll on schools.
In Missouri, where one out of three school districts have adapted a four-day week, largely in response to economic pressures, the only rural districts that still provide five days of school rely on taxes paid by wind farms. “When Trump and his Republican allies take aim at green energy, this is what they’re talking about,” says Jessica Piper, executive director of Blue Missouri and the author of the newsletter, View from Rural Missouri.
But if the emerging policy landscape looks bleak for rural education, funding cuts and school closures are also deeply unpopular among rural voters, including Trump’s most ardent supporters. Liv Cook spent years as a special education teacher in rural southeastern Tennessee. These days she works as public education campaign organizer for SOCM (pronounced “sock-em”), the Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment, statewide membership group founded in 1972 to organize grassroots resistance to mining companies and in the coalfield communities of the Cumberland Mountains. The group’s organizing work has since expanded statewide, including their #PublicSchoolStrongTN campaign to counter attacks on public education.
A forum on “Federal Education Funding” hosted by the Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment, in Blount County, Tennessee. (Courtesy of SOCM)
When the Tennessee Republican-controlled legislature adopted a $447 million universal voucher program in January, it was over the opposition of many rural communities, including southeastern Tennessee, says Cook. “Vouchers are now seen as a conservative value but there’s a big disconnect with these rural folks. They love their home schools and their teachers.”
Last year, when Tennessee Republicans floated the idea of refusing more than $1 billion in federal education funding over objections to expanded student civil rights protections, Cook spent months going door to door talking to voters about what such cuts would mean for local schools.
“When people learned that their elected officials were talking about less money for local schools they were shocked,” recalls Cook. “Everyone could list off the things that their local schools and teachers desperately needed, and finding out that the plan is actually to privatize and make a few people even more money, was just infuriating to them.”
SOCM was part of a sprawling coalition that fended off vouchers in 2024; they weren’t so lucky this time around. Still, Cook remains convinced that the unique tie between rural voters and their public schools offers a vehicle for not just resisting bad policies, but demanding approaches that strengthen rural communities.
“We ask our neighbors what they want their schools and their kids and the answer is ‘everything,’ ” says Cook. “That’s a powerful place to start.”
After battering coastal towns, Hurricane Helene causes deadly flooding across five states
Dozens of people were killed across multiple states this week as Hurricane Helene swept across parts of the Southeastern United States, bringing heavy rains and a 15-foot storm surge.
Coastal towns and cities in Florida were devastated when the Category 4 hurricane made landfall, but communities inland bore a similar brunt as the storm carved a path through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.
At least 42 people have died from the storm. As of Friday, Florida reported seven deaths. Georgia, meanwhile, reported 15, and South Carolina, 17. In both of the latter states, most of the known fatalities were from falling trees and debris. North Carolina reported two deaths, including a car crash that killed a 4-year-old girl after a road flooded.
Atlanta received 11.12 inches of rain in 48 hours, breaking its previous record of 9.59 inches in the same time period from 1886, according to Bill Murphey, Georgia’s state climatologist. More than 1 million Georgia residents also lost power in the storm, particularly in southern and eastern parts of the state.
Floodwaters from Hurricane Helene surround a home near Peachtree Creek in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 27.
AP Photo/Jason Allen
In western North Carolina, officials sounded alarms and went door-to-door evacuating residents south of the Lake Lure Dam in Rutherford County after the National Weather Service warned that a dam failure was “imminent.” Emergency crews also conducted more than 50 swift water rescues across the region, with one sheriff’s department warning it could not respond to all of the 911 calls due to flooded roads. The North Carolina Department of Transportation warned on social media that “all roads in Western NC should be considered closed” due to flooding from Helene.
In Tennessee, more than 50 people were stranded on the roof of a hospital due to heavy flooding and had to be rescued by helicopter. Residents of Cocke County in Tennessee were also asked to evacuate after reports that a separate dam could fail, although officials later said the dam failure had been a false alarm. In South Carolina, the National Weather Service said the storm was “one of the most significant weather events… in the modern era.”
The hurricane’s widespread flooding was worsened by climate change, scientists told Grist. Hurricane Helene was an unusually large storm with an expansive reach. After forming in the Caribbean, it traveled over extremely warm ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico that enabled the storm to intensify more quickly than it may have otherwise. In fact, Helene went from a relatively weak tropical storm to a Category 4 in just two days. Warmer air also holds more moisture, supercharging the storm’s water content and leading to more rapid rainfall and intense flooding.
“When that enhanced moisture comes up and hits terrain like the Appalachian Mountains,” said University of Hawaiʻi meteorology professor Steve Businger,“it results in very, very high rainfall rates, exceptionally high rainfall rates and that unfortunately results in a lot of flash flooding.”
Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at the scientific group Climate Central, said research has shown that the Gulf’s current extra-warm ocean temperatures were made up to 500 times more likely with climate change. “One of the things that we’re seeing with these big storms, especially as they seem to become more frequent, is that they’re no longer natural disasters, but that they’re unnatural disasters,” Winkley said. “It’s not just a normal weather system anymore.”
A tree felled by Hurricane Helene leans on a home in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 27.
Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images
Hurricanes are naturally occuring, of course, but the conditions that led to Helene’s severity — its rapid intensification and heavy rainfall — were partially driven by warmer ocean and atmospheric temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels. “There is a fingerprint of climate change in that process,” Winkley said.
“This summer was record warm globally and there was a record amount of water vapor in the global atmosphere,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA. Both factors contributed to what the Southeastern U.S. experienced this week. “This is one of the more significant flood events in the U.S. in recent memory.”
Initial estimates for the storm’s damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure range between $15 billion and $26 billion, the New York Times reported. Busingersaid he expects the enormous loss to fuel more conversations about the precarity of the existing property insurance system. “The cost to society is becoming extravagant,” he said.
Scientists noted that the fact that the storm’s winds increased by 55 miles per hour in the 24 hours before it made landfall also made it deadlier.
“It was so strong and moving so fast it just didn’t have time to weaken very much before it made it far inland,” Swain said. Rapid intensification is particularly dangerous, he said, because people often make decisions on how to prepare for storms and whether or not to evacuate based on how bad they appear to be initially.
“It was one of the faster intensifying storms on record,” Swain said. “This is not a fluke. We should expect to see more rapidly intensifying hurricanes in a warming climate.”
Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend confronted a challenge all too common in small rural communities these days: a declining number of kids.
