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Attracting and retaining quality teachers poses a huge problem to Arizona’s rural schools, and there seems to be no easy fix in sight.

While urban areas have no problem filling teacher slots, rural areas often have to settle for mediocre candidates, and so far the Arizona Department of Education seems to have done little to fix this, rural educators say.

Attracting teachers to rural areas is a multi problem issue, said Bill Blong, the executive director of the Arizona Rural School Association, which aims to improve instruction in rural schools.

For one, it is a huge lifestyle change, he said.

In addition to living in rural areas, teachers are often also paid less than those in urban areas, Blong said.

Compared to urban districts, rural schools are neglected not only in Arizona, but on a nationwide level, Blong said.

State lawmakers often apply a principle of one-size fits all when it comes to fixing problems in rural areas, but that just doesn’t work, he added.

The Arizona Department of Education is putting on career fairs to get the word out about rural schools and their need for teachers, but those don’t help at all, said Mohave Valley School District Superintendant Whitney Crow.

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University of Arizona Junior Nick Small sits in his Marketing 361 class at Eller College of Management’s McClelland Hall listening to his professor lecture about marketing concepts for the upcoming exam.

Small, like many other university students in Arizona, is used to this traditional classroom experience: face-to-face instruction from a professor lecture, the raising of hands to ask questions and occasional in-class group work with peers.

“I guess I’m just old school, in the sense that I think there’s something to be gained by having a class full of people who come there for a reason,” said Jim McLean a marketing professor at UA. “They interact with one another and interact with me, I can read a frown of ‘I don’t understand’ or of disagreement that might be a source for discussion.”

Small and his classmates are also a part of a student population that is more involved with online education and Internet classes to either fulfill general education degree requirements or entirely complete a degree.

 

Telemedicine Changing Rural Healthcare in Arizona Patients in rural Arizona are facing the challenge of limited healthcare options and lack of specialists in the rural areas. However, Jill Bullock of the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, said that telemedicine and critical access hospitals are two examples of how urban healthcare providers are…