To fight chronically short supply of teachers, rural schools recruit local students for future slots

This from the Rural Blog:

In the face of state and federal mandates to turn around struggling rural schools, districts are turning to programs designed to hand-pick candidates for rural teaching slots that will soon open and train them to thrive in a geographically isolated environment. "Rural schools have long struggled to recruit talent, researchers say, especially small, remote schools and low-performing schools in high-poverty communities," Mary Schulken of Education Week reports. "Amid high stakes for rural districts as part of a national push to turn around low-performing schools, initiatives aimed at high-quality homegrown talent have emerged across the country."

Examples of such programs include one in the Ozarks where "a teacher corps under the auspices of a regional nonprofit offers scholarships to rural Missouri college students who will return to their hometowns as teachers and school leaders," Schulken writes. The University of South Dakota has redesigned its teacher-preparation program to include a rural-teaching track, and North Carolina State University has created a leadership academy, which "targets veteran teachers in a corridor of low-performing school districts and prepares them to serve as principals who can turn around that record," Schulken writes...