Kelsey Cowger

One of the biggest challenges for rural and low-income schools has historically been finding employees who are willing to walk in the door in the first place. Due to a combination of high demands, lower-than-average pay and sometimes unique geographic challenges, rural and low-income schools have had a particularly hard time recruiting and retaining skilled principals.  The principals who do agree to serve in higher needs schools face real daily challenges, and in 2020, close to half of school principals nationwide were considering leaving their positions. Those numbers were significantly higher in rural and low-income schools. 

In recent years, several programs stepped in to help fill those gaps and make it more attractive for principals and teachers to work at high needs schools. The Biden Administration took steps to expand, streamline, and expedite the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which made it more feasible for teachers with student loans to take positions in rural and low-income school: lower pay with the expectation of forgiven loans in ten years.  In partnership with states, the federal government also created grant programs like SEED and Teacher Quality Partnerships (TQP)  to help train principals, teachers and staff and to help fill compensation gaps between poorer schools and wealthier nearby districts. These grants were hugely effective and successfully helped fill principal and teacher vacancies in rural and low-income schools. In Virginia, our Department of Education created a homegrown principal mentoring program on the SEED model that significantly improved the rural principal shortage in just two years. 

Unsurprisingly, all of these successful programs have been either shuttered or are on the chopping block in the first 100 days of the Trump administration. The SEED and TQP grants have been eliminated, in part because grantors recruited at HBCUs and engaged in anti-bias training as part of the curriculum. Trump’s Department of Education has cut the PSLF loan forgiveness program and threatens to eliminate more as it hints at a sweeping reevaluation of how it treats non-profits for tax purposes. Funding cuts to Title I schools will also worsen the shortages as already underfunded schools grapple with huge budget cuts. Cuts to programs haven’t removed the problem those programs were trying to solve, of course, and without the programs, the problems will likely get significantly worse over the next few years. 

“Yet again we see the federal government blaming diversity, equity, and inclusion for their own failures, their own lack of curiosity about how our systems work, and their own ignorance of crucial national problems,,” said LaTwyla Mathias, Executive Director at Progress Virginia. “If our schools can’t attract and retain competent leadership and committed teachers, our communities will suffer, and the first to feel it will be the most vulnerable members: our kids. We call on local leadership to look at the evidence-based best practice programs that have helped us bring talented educators into our system, and figure out ways of restoring those funding streams until the federal government stops abnegating its responsibility to our students and their schools.”