International Rural School Leadership Project

Dr. Jerry Johnson, Kansas State University: There are lots of technical definitions for rural schools, and those definitions are useful, but they don't really capture the essence of what it means to be a rural community. I would define a rural school using something that you can't really measure. The two essential elements of a rural school are, one, an attachment to place. The school's identity and its purpose are attached and informed by the physical location where it is. 

The second defining characteristic of a rural school for me is the synergistic relationship between the school and the community. One of the things that we know from research on rural schools is that it's very difficult to improve a rural school without engaging the community in that effort. And it's very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a revitalized rural community without strengthening the schools and having them as part of that process. 

Dr. Simone White, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia: Collaboration in education. If you think about teaching education, it's a team sport. It's not an individual exercise. So I think that particularly for rural leaders, rural schools, rural communities, it's really important to collaborate. And I think the stories that are in this project demonstrate how important it is to collaborate when you're working in a rural community. 

Dr. Hobart Harmon, Appalachia Intermediate Unit 8, Altoona, Pennsylvania: The collaboration effort of this project began with going to Queensland, Australia and presenting at their National Rural Ed Convention. And then I was fortunate that the president of SPERA took me on a week tour of rural schools. That's the beginning of what we now know as this collaborative leadership project. 

Dr. Jerry Johnson: Rural schools in different geographic locations sometimes have more in common with each other than they do with non-rural schools and their own geographic locations. And so we saw an opportunity this past summer to bring together rural school leaders from three different contexts from Kansas and Pennsylvania, in the US and from Queensland in Australia, so that they could share with each other their successes and their challenges and the innovative approaches that they took to meeting the needs of their students and their families in their communities. 

Words onscreen: Over two sessions facilitated as collaborative leadership forums in July 2020, rural leaders from Australia and the US came together to introduce their school communities and reflect together on their initial leadership response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adrian Hooper, Deputy Principal and Head of the Secondary Sector, Kuranda, Queensland, Australia: Kuranda is a small town by comparison, it's only got three thousand people, and it sits atop the Kuranda Range in the rainforest about 30 kilometres west of Cairns. It's been home for 10000 years for the local indigenous Djabugay people who still live here and was also settled by Europeans that came in the eighteen hundreds and opened the area up to farming. Students are made up of the local Djabugay  people, farming families and families that came in the alternative lifestyle wave in the 60s and 70s and then people that are involved in the tourism industry. 

So our little school is a prep to grade 12 school. It became a college about 12 years ago and as a result of that, we currently have three hundred and seventy students from five year-olds to 18 year-olds. 47 percent of students are indigenous. And we have two indigenous communities, those of Mantega and Corowa, that our school services. 

Karen Hyde, Principal, Blackall, Queensland, Australia: We have from prep to year 12, I have one hundred and five students in the school, so it's fairly small. It's basically 50-50 in the primary schools in the high school, but a lot of challenges at the school because I'm the eighth principal in two years seeing lots of changes. But it is an awesome little place. And the kids are just good country kids that like to have lots of fun and learn along the way. 

Terri Byrne, Principal, Mornington Island, Queensland, Australia: Mornington Island is a small island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It's got a population of about twelve hundred. The only way to get to the island is on flights. There's a barge that comes once a week that brings out supplies that go to the local store. School has two hundred and seventy students from kindie to year 10. 

Felicity Ditchburn, Principal, Inglewood, Queensland, Australia: I'm in a P-10 school about one hundred and seventy students in a town of about less than a thousand people.

Amy Flinn, Principal, West Elementary School, Wamego, Kansas: A little bit about Wamego. We serve primarily a white population in this community. We do have a growing number of Hispanic families and we do have other races represented, but not a large population of minority students. We do have many professional parents who work both within our community as well as neighboring communities as we do live between our state's capital of Topeka and Manhattan, Kansas, home of Kansas State University. 

Kevin Suther, Principal, Chapman High School, Chapman, Kansas: Chapman High School is considered a 4a school. And we have kind of a unique variety of students that are from the farm and from the rural area and come from raising cattle, raising pigs and crops. And then we have those who come from the military who have just been all over the world. 

Nicole Dice, Principal and Superintendent, Turkeyfoot Valley Area School District, Confluence, Pennsylvania: Turkeyfoot Valley is a very small school. We actually have one campus. So our building actually houses our prekindergarten and then kindergarten all the way up through 12th grade. 

Joseph Renzi, Principal and Superintendent, Salisbury - Elk Lick School District, Salisbury, Pennsylvania: We are the second smallest school in the state. So based on our student population, Summerset County, which we are in the southern part, is a very rural county in itself. We have very few businesses. We have mostly small businesses if we have them. Most people who live here work elsewhere. They don't have a lot of places in the community think the school would be either the business that employs the most. If it's not, it's a close second. 

Karen Hyde: So when the coronavirus hit, it was a little surreal, for us in outback Queensland, as there were no reported cases and the people are pretty much caring about their daily lives, as per usual. 

Terri Byrne: We have had no cases of the virus in our area, but the impacts are still huge in terms of our school. 

One of the biggest things which is still affecting us is around student attendance and teachers because we're so isolated. It's really difficult for teachers in these situations because they're a long way from their families. Being able to get off the island and go back to the mainland and back to their communities was a big thing. 

Adrian Hooper: The closure of the tourism industry was massive for Cairns and Kuranda. Kuranda runs on tourism and that had an immediate detrimental effect on our community. We obviously had significant health concerns for our indigenous community. Became apparent very quickly that the indigenous communities in the Northern Territory and far north Queensland would be highly susceptible if there was a COVID-19 outbreak. 

Amy Flinn: When this all unraveled was around our spring break time, we were on spring break and the governor came out and said, we are closing Kansas school buildings, we're not quitting school, but we're going to change school as we know it. 

Kevin Suther: And all of a sudden, we had heard that a local college of K-state was going to go to online education, and we were just kind of in limbo, like what's going to happen at this point. That led into a series of just the unknown.

Amy Flinn: With all the discussion of schools possibly being closed, discussions with intermediate units, we had to actually ask our teachers two weeks prior to closing to start getting some materials ready just in case we closed.

Joseph Renzi: On March 13th when the school buildings were closed. We had a lot of families without Internet, without the means to connect on, say, Google classroom or whatever platform you might be using. So just to deliver instruction, being rural, I think that challenge hit you right away is that you don't have everybody capable to get online or get on the Internet and get the delivery of instruction. 

Randy Watson, Commissioner of Education, Kansas State Department of Education, Topeka, Kansas: And since there is no universal, this is what's going to happen. Those decisions were left to one hundred and five counties. Everyone had a different idea of that. So you're planning with different assumptions that continue to change even today and then planning for an unknown. And that's almost an impossibility. And so within that environment, what we're seeing today, school people with trauma-like symptoms thirty days into it, where they can't sustain the model we're in. If that's in person, in person makes sense for parents. 

But the educators are like, I, I can't do this because we're being quarantined. Every other day I come to school, I don't know if I'm going to be teaching or not. And so this anxiety of how do you sustain that long in an environment that no one likes and everyone wants to go back to normal? And then how do you, how do you deal with the anxiety both on the parents' side and the school side? 

Amy Flinn: As we are getting ready to prepare for this next phase and going back to on site learning, these people are coming back because they love children and they love what they do. But there's fear. I have students who suffer from anxiety and depression. I have staff members who deal with some of those. But now I'm seeing even staff or students that I never would have considered having those kinds of emotions or feelings that's coming out. 

Kevin Suther: The great thing about Kansas and what they did was they actually brought a task force together and made a continuous learning plan. They brought educators together. They brought teachers together and really gave us a strong focus of where we needed to go. How much time did we need to be online with kids? And the governor stepped up and decided we were going to go online. And by doing that, it gave us a window there to be able to really make plans, step into what it was going to look like for us for the next nine weeks. 

Joseph Renzi: Moving to virtual, we worked with families, creating a hot spot here on the campus so families could come, you know, technology and the devices. It's been a challenge. 

Nicole Dice: We found out the school was closing on a Friday afternoon. So what we did was we utilized Summit Learning that our fifth through 10th grade students utilize and then the other grade levels utilized Zoom as well as Google Classroom. Living rurally, we have some students who don't have Internet. So we also offer paper pencil options as well for the students. 

Woman's voice: At school our initial reaction to the prospect of school closing was to find out what access our students currently had to online learning. And so surveys were sent home to parents to gather data around what devices they had at home that students could work on. Teachers then decided that primarily learning packs would be paper-based. 

Adrian Hooper: Communication was obviously key with both staff and with our community. We had to be very student and family-focused in our responses. There were times when we would think, oh, well, we'll roll out a delivery of curriculum like this or we'll put all of this particular stuff online. And then we realized that that wasn't necessarily going to work for some families. So we had to adapt on that. 

Peter Kelly, Deputy Director-General, State Schools, Queensland Department of Education, Brisbane, Australia: One of the things we realized, we had to move into an online in some shape or form. We don't have the same exact set up for every school. We don't have the same community support for every school. So what we had to do was look at an agile approach to allow schools to make local decisions that would support the community. What was really exciting was we looked at the high level of what would a school need and what would a community need moving into the space of delivering at for unspecified period of time. 

So what we did was we have developed a rollout or two weeks units of good news from the Australian people. Next thing we did was we set up partnerships with various television stations. We had three partnerships we developed where we reached an agreement around a cofounding approach. We were able to get air-time for two hours a day, for three days a week for the Australian curriculum delivery. We were able to actually create a television station that could be broadcast to every student in Queensland. We did all of that in five weeks. 

Dr. Thomas Butler, Executive Director, Appalachia intermediate Unit 8, Altoona, Pennsylvania: The State Department of Education, so Pennsylvania Department of Education, they devised a system where there are twenty-nine intermediate units, so they are an intermediary between the State Department of Education here and the five hundred school districts down here. Pennsylvania Department of Education funnels, if they need work done in the school districts, it goes through us. We create our own programs and services that are for the districts within our region that are assigned to us, as well as to school districts all over the state. 

I think the significant shift in our work happened when the schools closed, the Pennsylvania Department of Education became very reliant on us to get the word out to the field on what is occurring and what's coming down the road as far as how do you teach online? Fortunately, we have a lot of experience in that because we have programs that are based for online learning. So we did a significant amount of webinars and official training for the school personnel, teachers, principals and superintendents about how you teach online, how do you supervise teachers online ,and how do you set up an effective online school. 

So just as an indication there are about , teachers in our intermediate unit eight region. And over the last two months, we have trained almost 900 teachers just on how to teach online. 

Simone White: Pandemic has impacted, I think, every single person right around the world in many different ways. For our schools in particular, it meant a very rapid response. It has been amazing throughout all of Australia and also the stories I'm hearing from colleagues in the U.S., rural communities, they've been very mindful about building relationships and maintaining relationships through a very stressful time. 

Felicity Ditchburn: What I rely on most is relationships and building trust in times of crisis, in times of critical incidents. It is so important that you have that currency to rely on, just like a teacher. You can't teach anyone if you don't have a relationship with them. 

Peter Kelly: There is a classic story of a little tiny school where there is no capability in their community for any online learning approach, where teachers recognize that the maths part is really causing grief for the parents. So the staff sat on one side of the school fence on a chair and across the other side were the kids and the parents, and they did the maths lesson, across of the fence so that the kids and the parents were part of the learning journey. And finally, that school has reported back to me that the relationship between the parents and teachers has never been stronger. 

Amy Flinn: One of the things that has always been critical to me and critical to help our staff understand, is that relationships and building positive relationships with families has to come first and with students. That relationship building that we worked so hard on made a huge difference, I feel like, in the transition. It is so critical in my mind that the social-emotional health of our students and their families and our staff are always a priority. 

Kevin Suther: When you're dealing with a pandemic or you're dealing with online, and it becomes more of a gap between the socioeconomic levels with students. A lot of learning comes from interaction. Sometimes the teacher is the number one person that they can lean on, and that's not the case sometimes that their home life, they want to be at school. 

Nicole Dice: What we work for is for kids, that is the absolute focus of people in education, especially those of us in leadership. Sometimes it can be a thankless job. But when you see that that decision you made positively impacts the child, there's nothing more rewarding. 

Adrian Hooper: Teachers, by the nature of our profession, we thrive on regular interactions with the young people that we teach and schools and really strange places when kids aren't there, and you've got to look after teachers when kids aren't there because we thrive on that interaction of teaching young people. We had to use our well-being team and now head of Department of Student Services to focus on the well-being of our students and balance the well-being of students with obviously the need for the continuation of learning. 

We had to be responsive and adaptive and alter the method, the mode, and the quantity of learning that we were rolling out because we realized quite quickly, we weren't experts in online learning. We got some good advice fairly early on, basically playing what you want to do, then chop it in half, because as teachers, we tend to do a lot more in class face to face than we can do in the online realm. 

Terri Byrne: We need to have our eyes on our kids, and we weren't having our eyes on our kids all the time. So we set up what we called a sunset mob, which we set up a fishing thing where the kids could come down in the evening, they could fish for a while, and we could provide them some food to go home. So at least we could touch base with those kids that we weren't seeing. And that was something that the kids like to do so they would come down to the beach.

Kevin Suther: Taking care of kids when it comes to their basic needs. We were one of the very first schools in Kansas to provide food. Besides just the education, they come to our school to be able to get food. And when you're now at home and you have three, four or five kids at home, you have to feed them. And how are you going to even do anything without that? And so we really got a drive-through for parents to come in and would hand off to them meals. So on a Monday and Wednesday, we would hand them off two days of meals to be able to use. And not only could we hand off food, but if we needed to hand off something educationally to them, that was a way of also doing that for a drive through. 

About three years ago, we decided to go one to one with the Chromebook. Thank goodness we did. I still remember a student that was using his phone to get on Zoom to be able to hear what was going on. And so now that they're home, the parent needed some help. And so they were farming and they were out on the tractor and you could just see it sitting there but be able to actually see what was going on in that class and kind of participate and do a little bit of both at the same time. So life still does go on for a farming community. 

Amy Flinn: A local telecommunications company immediately stepped in and said, we will provide free access to high speed Internet to every family that's without, and then we identified those families who were outside of our service area and the district said we will provide a hot spot so that you are able to connect. 

Hobart Harmon: The good news for the role of technology during the pandemic is where those schools were already positioned with laptops, Internet access among the student body, they were able to advance quickly. The bad news is those places that did not have quality Internet access or students in circumstances where they didn't have the possibility of the online delivery opportunities, they were placed at a tremendous disadvantage. 

Simone White: We need to start thinking about how to best prepare future rural leaders, so I think this project will help us start to identify what are some of the particular skills and attributes that we need to foster and nourish to build into our pre-service teacher education programs. 

Dr. Debbie Mercer, Dean, College of Education, Kansas State University: Change is inevitable and it's happening faster than we ever imagined it could happen. Our teacher and leader preparation programs have to change so that emerging educators have the knowledge, the skill sets and the awareness to meet the future needs of their students. We must prepare educators different because reality is different, and the future is ever changing. 

It is important to acknowledge the role of the school leader. One thing the pandemic has done is been to really force us to think outside the typical educational structure that we ourselves created. Often rural schools lead the way in being nimble and flexible. They've had to do this through necessity. Rural leaders are committed not only to their school community, but to the greater community in which they reside. 

Hobart Harmon: From our perspective, the growth of the leaders during the COVID experience has been directly tied to their ability to adapt to the challenges that be presented. In other words, they've become much more resilient. They've become much more engaging with families and with staff. 

Thomas Butler: In leadership what we do is look at this as an opportunity and decide what we're going to discard from the way we used to do things and what are we going to keep for the future of what we're doing now. And I thought that that probably encapsulates what I have seen and take away from this COVID crisis. 

Jerry Johnson: One of the most important aspects of leadership, especially when you're thinking about rural schools, is the idea that leadership is not a job title. Leadership is an activity, and it's something that everyone within the organization can and should contribute to. One of the things that we learn from this experience is that people across these organizations, from teachers to principals to superintendents, stepped up and provided leadership to keep their schools going through this difficult time to support their families and communities during this difficult time. 

And so one of the takeaways from this experience for someone who studies leadership, is it really reinforces that importance of collaboration and of sharing leadership responsibility and involving people and providing the leadership that's needed. 

Brian O'Neill, Principal, Calen District State College, Calen, Queensland, Australia: Peter Kelly, he said the COVID-19 epitomizes what school leaders do best. They get on with the job and they do what they do best. And that's leading these schools. COVID-19 has meant that those informed decisions have had to be made very quickly. Also, with our school leaders, they have discovered a lot about themselves, about their own skill set and how they can manage in an emergency situation. School leaders have grown enormously as a result of the pandemic. 

Nicole Dice: The thing that stuck out the most for me was the importance of building capacity within your team as a leader. My role is to delegate and to be an example. But at the same time, the two, I need to make sure that those of my team have the ability to take care of tasks when I'm not there. To see the capacity that my staff had, from teachers to my principal ability of all of them to work together and step up and the skills they had, really instilled in me that, of course, is continuing to build that capacity, because it was so essential for us with the school closure.

Adrian Hooper: It became evident pretty quickly that you still have to have faith in the leadership team, that we know what we're doing. It wasn't always coming from the leadership team. We had to rely on the fact that some of our teachers were experts in these areas as well. 

Felicity Ditchburn: Leaders are one of the people, especially in schools, that are the loneliest job. I do believe that as a group of principals, we have a lot to give each other in supporting each other, to make the right decisions and be better leaders. And whether it's in our own backyard or across the, you know, the ocean, every leader has the ability to share something that someone else might be able to take away. 

Joseph Renzi: It's amazing how whether you're in Kansas or Australia, that some of the challenges we were all sharing were very similar, that really generates, you know, you're hearing a good idea that all this school did this. So that's a great idea. You know, we could do something similar. So I think that that sharing just is a spark. 

Jerry Johnson: I know for a fact that there are school leaders and one country who learned ideas from someone in another country, that they've been able to apply in their own settings, and so that that sharing of ideas just broadens the scope and scale in which the collaboration occurs. 

Peter Kelly: The big takeaway for us was that real collaborative practice, particularly when we found ourselves planning for the shutdown of schools or the partial shutdown of schools where teachers found themselves working together in teams to prepare for lessons over a very different time. They had to actively make decisions around the curriculum that they were going to deliver and how they were going to deliver. With the feedback that I got from principals with that fail was that that opportunity, that week, was some of the best professional collaboration I've ever had in the schools and school communities because there was a shared moral purpose. We had it online. We all knew that there was something to be done here. 

Karen Hyde: You know, at the end of the day, our parents have got to spend a whole lot more time with their kids that they would not have had. And the conversations and the relationships built around that I think are positive impact as well. 

Dr. Allen Pratt, Executive Director, National Rural Education Association, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga: We will be so much better as rural communities and rural schools by going through this and seeing our areas of need and being more focused in on, how do we correct and fix so we know where they were. We know we had issues, but even now we kind of see where the priorities need to be. It also means we really need to support our rural leaders because they're by themselves. What they overcame in the spring, what they're doing now, how they're doing, whatever it takes to reach our rural students. To me, it's an amazing story. I hope, coming out of this, that the rest of our country in the urban suburban areas realize, you know, rural communities are vital to the success of our country and we have to support them. If we can take away barriers like connectivity or other areas that cause inequities. Think about how, if we level that off, how much better things could be for our country, in our regions, that we grow up in and work in. 

Peter Kelly: I think at the end of the day, I'm really proud of the reality that the team and state school solve every single problem that came our way. Collaboration across the divisions and across the branches of government, the other agencies required really, really significant decisions to be made that required us to actually get on board and put skin in the game straight away, not hide behind a policy or procedure itself. That's not possible. But instead, say, let's put that aside, let's make something work. 

Brian O'Neill: I think even though COVID-19 had such severe consequences for our country, it's also brought to the forefront possibility of such a professional learning community that they can do it online.