How Educators in Rural Schools Met the Challenge of the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Gregory Massara

Background & Overview 

In rural communities, the shift in education during the pandemic involved an “entirely different experience” in learning and teaching for students, teachers, school leaders, and parents. While rural communities and their schools are not monolithic, research on these communities reveals several characteristics that may have made them particularly vulnerable for negative impacts during COVID-19. 

Many rural communities and schools, for instance, have limited access to high-speed internet services which posed a challenge in the height of the pandemic. Without sufficient internet access, parents could not telecommute and often risked exposure to COVID-19 while working in person, and students could not attend school remotely. In addition, rural communities have lower rates of charitable, work-related, and civic community organizations. Such organizations and networks helped buffer the challenges created by the disruptions of the pandemic. With fewer organizations and networks, rural students and their parents and guardians may have faced increased hardship in accessing valuable resources.  

Adaptations and Innovations in New York’s Rural Schools 

These unique challenges raise the question: What strategies did rural schools use to innovate how they provided education during the COVID-19 pandemic? To address this question, this blog examines three rural schools in New York State that took part in NYKids’ latest study, Opportunities and Challenges to Adapt and Innovate: How Educators Confronted the COVID-19 Pandemic. The schools in this study were chosen for this study because educators reported lower stress levels on a survey compared to respondents in other schools serving similar populations. 

NYKids’ research revealed that rural districts relied on several adaptive strategies to educate students during the COVID-19 pandemic. These included:  

(1) leveraging intra-school relationships,
(2) maintaining positive school-community ties, and
(3) adapting technology for students and families.   

Findings 

1. Leveraging Intra-School Relationships

Many respondents highlighted the importance of collaboration in helping them to adapt to pandemic-related mandates and other emergent challenges in their community. For instance, one eighth-grade social studies teacher explained: 

We decided to meet every day. … it was a great opportunity, actually, to be able to talk to … teachers who never in 20 years have ever been able to be in on one of my meetings … we have an aligned team meeting every single day, where all the teachers who teach and across a grade level get together.  

Existing school networks also helped teachers adapt. One teacher explained, “I really relied on my co-workers to help me get through it and to give me advice and help with the academics and the management and all of that.” By leveraging collaborative relationships, including existing teams before the pandemic and new ones that emerged in response to the pandemic, teachers learned from each other and adopted new practices.  

These collaborations often involved shared decision-making practices at their schools that involved stakeholders’ perspectives, including teachers and parents, in leadership decisions. One school leader explained, “We have a lot of shared decision-making teams. We, at a district-level, teachers are encouraged to be on our strategic planning teams that set district wide goals.” Similarly, an administrative assistant expressed, “there were a lot of different opinions, but the district really took the time to listen to everyone and make those decisions.”  

2. Maintaining Positive School-Community Ties

Educators described how they fostered positive relationships between their school and the surrounding community even amid the challenges of the pandemic. Some of these platforms for close school-community ties were already established during the pandemic and helped adapt educational routines during the pandemic. As one principal recalled: 

We do an annual survey of our parents, it’s open ended, and we continue to do that so we use the survey every year to help drive our goal-setting for the year at cabinet. And so people had a voice, an opportunity to share their thinking there. 

This, and other similar strategies in other schools in this study, gave parents and guardians a platform for participating in the educational changes in their students’ education.  

In addition to strategies to promote positive school-parent relationships, interviewees frequently cited times when school staff would visit students’ houses. One school counselor explained: 

And there’s no issue with me driving to that house if I have a concern. There’s no issue with me getting hands on, and the families expect it and they are open to it. So you don’t get that closed off feeling that you might get from, like a bigger school business type feeling. 

3. Adapting Technology for Students and Families

Lastly, educators in this study explained the adaptations they made to ensure students were given access to the technology needed to participate in online learning. For instance, students were sent home with laptops and provided access to wireless internet during the pandemic. In some cases, internet service providers provided limited free access to the internet, while other schools created mobile hotspots for students to use. In addition, families were supported with resources and instruction from school staff to assist them during the transition to remote instruction. One school counselor explained what this process looked like at their school: 

If I had a parent fill out one of those help ticket forms, they got called the next day. I was like, someone will call you I promise. And it was true. They had a phone call and they had someone who was willing to all of a sudden drive this hotspot over. 

Summing Up 

As discussed above, the strategies used by educators in this study involved leveraging relationships between teachers, school leaders, parents, and students to address the challenges of the pandemic. Intra-school relationships provided a foundation for responding to issues, as in the case of teachers collaborating on strategies they found successful. In other cases, existing connections were strengthened, or new relationships were forged. For example, many teachers explained their efforts to engage families during the pandemic. These strategies were complemented by educators’ participatory approach to decision-making which included the voices and perspectives of multiple stakeholders. 

While all rural communities have unique qualities, which must be taken into account when discussing positive adaptations and innovations, these findings provide useful insights into how educators at rural schools mitigated the challenges they faced during the pandemic.  

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