where ice fishers brave below- ….

where ice fishers brave below- zero wind chills in the winter.

“It kind of almost looks like a ghost town,” Daniels said. “You wonder who all lives here.”

With no clear academic guidance as a student, Daniels hoped to escape to Rapid City, South Dakota, where she could train to become a flight attendant and travel the world. She graduated high school, got as far as Bismarck, North Dakota, and then returned home to care for her sickly grandmother. Daniels’ own diagnosis with an autoimmune disease kept her in Poplar even longer. She took temp jobs as a teacher’s aide in special education and early childhood classrooms to pay the bills. And then, in 2015, Daniels noticed an opening to teach special education. The elementary school principal, however, wondered if she’d rather lead her own kindergarten classroom.

Daniels went for it.

“I never thought I’d become a teacher,” Daniels said. “It was never a calling or anything like that.” She soon earned a degree in elementary education from Rocky Mountain College in Billings. At first reluctant to take the kindergarten job — “I honestly wondered, ‘Am I capable?’ ” — Daniels realized the importance that kindergarten would play in the lives of children in her community.

“It’s such a strong foundation of what these kids will learn forever,” she said. “I want to give them the encouragement I never got.” For school leaders in rural areas, finding people like Daniels more than once in a great while is no small task. That’s why some states and districts have started thinking about how to nudge homegrown talent into the classroom and how to create more reasons for imported teachers to stay.

It’s still unclear how much the pandemic will increase the rural teacher shortage, and there’s a sense among some advocates that no one cares.

“We send a lot of our least prepared teachers to rural places, and then once they get that experience, they move on,” said Veronica Womack, executive director of the Rural Studies Institute at Georgia College & State University. “And for the teachers already there, the mental toll of having to deal with COVID, the lack of broadband internet at home and then your pay still is not the best … it’s not like everyone will walk away, but enough of them probably will.”

Low pay is part of the problem in Montana, according to Ann Ewbank, director of accreditation and operations for the Department of Education at Montana State University. She noted the average starting salary for teachers falls just below $31,500. Better salaries can help. In neighboring North Dakota, which reported a teacher shortage of just under 4 percent, recent graduates can start their teaching careers earning almost 20 percent more than in Montana. And in Wyoming, which issued emergency waivers for fewer than 2 percent of all teachers, starting pay tops $45,000.

In January, newly elected Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, unveiled a two-year budget that called for $2.5 million in incentives for schools to raise new teacher pay. Although the National Education Association ranked Montana No. 45 in average teacher salaries in 2018-19, Gianforte has said his state had the absolute lowest starting pay.

“It makes it hard to recruit starting teachers,” he said in announcing his budget. “The salary forces teachers to leave. We must do better.”

Some rural teachers have had to stretch their low pay even further this year — to cover out-of-pocket purchases of personal protective equipment, cleaning supplies and other pandemic essentials. The pandemic also has heightened the solitude of working in isolated settings, making it harder to build a sense of community and belonging.

Yoon, with Education Northwest, and her colleague Ashley Pierson have studied teacher turnover in four Western states — Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Washington. They found higher turnover rates in rural schools in Alaska and Montana, with some rural districts losing teachers to urban and suburban neighbors. Turnover was especially high among Alaska teachers trained out of state.

“Both short- and long-term ideas might help, but it can be challenging to invest in all of these at once,” Pierson said.

The pandemic upended many of the long-term solutions that federal and state policymakers had begun to invest in. Some of the federally funded partnerships crumbled due to budget cuts in local school districts. New teacher residency programs, specifically designed to help rural schools, scaled back or delayed their plans to train future educators as most instruction went remote. Principals have barely been able to find enough substitutes to fill classroom vacancies and in some cases, simply closed their schools after too many teachers entered quarantine at once.

Vikki Howard, a professor of special education at the University of Montana Western, found that the pandemic affected even her plans to expand a successful “growyour- own” teacher program from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation along the state’s northern border with Canada to the Crow Reservation in south-central Montana. Since 2016, more than 90% of tribal members recruited in the Blackfeet program’s inaugural group have continued teaching in local schools, she said.

But a shoestring budget and courses shutting down due to unreliable internet on the reservation hampered the expansion of the program to the Crow community. While Howard initially hoped it would take just five years for the share of locally recruited teachers who are Indigenous to match student demographics, she has readjusted her goal to 10 years due to the pandemic. “The teacher shortage may be especially intractable in the near future,” she said. “Teachers have already left in droves and many more are likely to leave after this year. This is particularly the case in tribal communities, which have experienced great loss of life and significant disruption in schools.”

Most of those residing on The Fort Peck Reservation are either Assiniboine or Sioux. About 96 percent of students who attend the neighboring Poplar school district are Native American.

Although participants have filled over 60 teaching positions since Howard’s program first began, “the demand remains significant,” she said.

Back in Poplar, school superintendent Dan Schmidt has tried many ways to attract and keep teachers in his community. The district offers a $1,500 signing bonus. It also starts new hires at a thirdyear salary level and even owns 16 housing units to keep rents low for transplants.

The most successful effort in Schmidt’s estimation, however, is a different version of a grow-your-own program that allows prospective teachers to study at the local Fort Peck Community College before transferring to Montana State University-Northern and earning their classroom experience in Poplar.

“You have to be really from the area to want to come back,” said Schmidt. “I’ve given up going to recruiting fairs in Bozeman and Missoula just because there’s no interest from teachers unless they’re from here. And if they are, I probably already know them.”

As for Daniels, her tenure in the school district may have an expiration date. She soon will start studying to earn her master’s degree in early education, but ultimately wants to become an instructor at Fort Peck Community College. And while Daniels acknowledged her own departure from the elementary school will contribute to the rural teacher turnover, she remains committed to helping her hometown schools.

“I could maybe end up teaching my own replacement,” she said. For her work to make a difference in the rural teacher shortage, she’ll need to train more than just one new teacher. She thinks she can, especially if she and other leaders work on better getting the message to local, Native young people that they are capable of being great teachers.

“We don’t help them see the strong points in their life and how they can contribute to a community that’s so desolate and so far from everything,” she said of Poplar students. “We have to offer a future for students who can’t or won’t go away.”

(Photo submitted)