National Rural Education Association Official Podcast

In this episode of The Rural Voice, the official podcast of the National Rural Education Association, hosts Dr. Bill Chapman, Dr. Melissa Sadorf, and Dr. Christopher Silver welcome Brett Jennrich and Mark Gilmore of Apollo Health Insurance. Brett serves as Apollo’s Director of Affinity Partnerships, while Mark is the company’s Chief Operating Officer. The conversation introduces Apollo’s new partnership with NREA and examines what it will offer rural school districts, educators, and their families. Brett and Mark describe Apollo’s development as a family-owned insurance brokerage and explain how the company’s personal connections to education helped shape its work with rural schools. The guests discuss the escalating cost of employee health insurance, limited healthcare networks, rural hospital closures, prescription costs, and the challenges districts face when insurance pools or consortiums become unstable. They also explain how Apollo works with districts through individual consultations, employee education, claims advocacy, year-round support, and customized insurance strategies. The discussion highlights several emerging approaches, including direct primary care, level-funded plans, self-funded plans, Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements, and individual coverage options for spouses, children, substitute teachers, and other part-time employees. Brett and Mark share stories illustrating how personalized assistance can reduce family insurance costs, protect families during medical emergencies, and strengthen employee recruitment and retention. The episode concludes with information about Apollo and NREA’s upcoming educational opportunities, including monthly office hours, a September webinar, and Apollo’s participation in the National Forum to Advance Rural Education in San Antonio.

In this episode of The Rural Voice, Dr. Melissa Sadorf, Dr. Bill Chapman, and Dr. Christopher F. Silver speak with Dr. PJ Caposey, superintendent of Oregon Community Unit School District 220, best-selling author, and upcoming keynote speaker at the National Forum to Advance Rural Education. A nationally recognized public education leader and the most published sitting superintendent in the country, Dr. Caposey reflects on the experiences that transformed his understanding of effective school leadership. Dr. Caposey discusses becoming a rural principal at age 28 and the difficult early leadership experience that forced him to reconsider an approach driven primarily by ambition, authority, and work ethic. He explains how he came to understand that leadership is fundamentally human work centered on relationships, accountability, influence, and the development of others. The conversation explores the difference between school culture and climate, the importance of building systems that can operate independently of one charismatic leader, and why rural districts should prioritize retaining and developing the educators they already have. Dr. Caposey also discusses instructional rigor, the need to measure whether programs and processes actually improve student outcomes, and the value of returning to proven educational fundamentals rather than pursuing innovation for its own sake. Drawing from his experiences, Dr. Caposey offers a candid perspective on work, purpose, self-awareness, and personal growth. The episode concludes with a compelling argument that effective rural school leaders can change not only the trajectory of their schools, but also the educational and economic future of their communities.

In this episode of *The Rural Voice*, Dr. Christopher Silver is joined by Dr. Bill Chapman, Dr. Melissa Sadorf, and Hailey Winkleman for a conversation about the National Rural Education Association’s first-ever annual report and what it reveals about the organization's future. Together, they discuss how the report brings together data, storytelling, design, member engagement, and strategic planning to offer a clear picture of where NREA has been, where it is now, and where it is headed. Hailey shares how the report was developed as a more accessible and visually engaging way to tell NREA’s story, while Dr. Chapman and Dr. Sadorf reflect on the organization’s renewed mission, vision, and five-year strategic priorities. The conversation also highlights expanded membership benefits, state affiliate partnerships, strategic partners, research opportunities, *The Rural Educator*, the *Why Rural Matters* report, the NREA Foundation, and the upcoming National Forum to Advance Rural Education in San Antonio. This episode offers listeners a behind-the-scenes look at NREA’s work to strengthen rural schools and communities through advocacy, research, professional learning, and deeper national collaboration.

We interviewed Dr. Casey Jakubowski about teacher retention, policy, and practice. Dr. Jakubowski shared that Appalachia extends into New York State, and we reflected on how New York has large rural communities. Much of Dr. Jakubowski's work has focused on these communities and beyond (including West Virginia). We discuss the changing trends of job availability to applicants. We discuss burnout of new rural teachers and pay disparities between urban versus suburban teaching. The revolving door of teachers causes students not to have a permeance of personalities and connections with teachers. Interpersonal relationships between teachers and students are important to student success. We discussed some common issues facing rural education, including internet access and lack of amenities such as Starbucks as a cultural expectation of new teachers. One solution noted by Dr. Jakubowski is for rural districts to partner to address the unique challenges in rural education. We shift to discuss the rural funding in New York State. Dr. Jakubowski shares that given this perceived decrease in the number of kids in rural education states, such as New York, are starting to cut budgets for rural education. This has a direct impact on programs and teachers in these schools. We discuss how teachers hold significant responsibility for the welfare of their communities, families, and students to help students succeed. Finally, Dr. Jakubowski discusses place-based teaching as a solution to give resources to rural teaching. This helps facilitate partnerships between the teachers and the community to help students see how their education is connected to their community. These can be connected to science, history, math, and other topics. Further, he suggests we should celebrate other educational programs such as the Scouts of America, 4-H, and other programs that assist in preparing students for leadership and the workforce. Check out Dr. Jakubowski's book Getting to the Hearts of Teaching, as some of the topics discussed come from this book. Casey Jakubowski Phd founder of Dragontamer.us is the author of books on Rural Education and the teacher retention crisis. Thinking about Teaching, A cog in the machine, ang Getting to the Hearts of Teaching(EduMatch Publishing) are rural inspired and rural focused. He is the co author of Crush it from the start: 50 tips for new teachers (SchoolRubric) designed to help the educator retention crisis. A historian,,Casey wrote Rural Education history: state policy meets local implementation (Lexington) that delves into the failed school consolidation policies. His book, Minerva Conflict in the hills (Lexington) examines the history of the Post World War II centralization policy towards education. My Credential sponsors this episode at https://www.mycredential.com/

In the first episode of the new season of the Rural Voice, we talk about the research of place and process of rural education from a data-informed perspective. We discuss the role of Ground Truthing and connecting data within the domains of politics, culture, and fear of consolidation. Dr. Mitchell talks about somewhere (rural) and anywhere (urban and suburban). The politics of these are what many would expect. Somewhere, lean more conservative, and anywhere is more liberal. However, these trends in the data are not uniform. In some rural areas, some voters lean liberal, particularly for those people of color. More rural suburban locations vote more conservatively. These spaces include many small business owners. More diverse suburbs lean more liberal as well. Similarly, we are seeing a shift toward skills-based education in high schools, such as trade education (e.g., Information Technology). Thus, educational pathways should be more connected to local needs. We discussed the role of emotion and between-group conflict, such as city and rural tension, the reemergence of populism, women's rights, diversity, and others. These trends have a trickle-down influence on education. We discuss psychology's role in explaining the American shift toward being "groupy" and how it insulates us from perceived threats to our values and groups. We talk about access to resources such as money, natural resources, services, etc. This directly connects to educational offerings and how policy influences local schools, particularly concerning policy and law. From the cultural perspective, it relates to migration and the changing rural demographics. At the same time, we see a change in Hispanic populations in rural America, but African Americans also move to rural areas, including the Southeast United States. This can place a financial strain on these small communities as, in some cases, these communities are seeing an increase in migration, particularly for public schools. This will create new challenges for educators in rural education to meet the needs of these populations (e.g., ESL services). The final domain concerns the fear of consolidating small communities to merge services where rural communities may lose their identity. Dr. Mitchell suggests that these issues will play a role in rural education in the future. Much of the curriculum and policy will be related to places, resources, and job markets and how rural education changes to meet these challenges through the somewhere versus anywhere paradigm.

Mike Hines, representing business and industry, discussed new federal infrastructure funding for rural schools at the National Forum to Advance Rural Education conference. The Inflation Reduction Act's $369 billion tax credits allow non-taxable entities like schools to access cash to upgrade aging systems for energy efficiency. Hines explained how schools can leverage these funds as a down payment and use future energy savings to pay for complete infrastructure modernization without further straining budgets. The act also emphasizes job training so future workers can operate and maintain new technology. Hines invites listeners to contact the TRAIN organization to connect with him about the 48C ITC federal program supporting rural schools with major facility Michael Crosa helps people across the US to create, distribute, and monetize their podcasts. Learn more at Chattanooga Podcast Studios dot com. He is also the head of the PodNooga Network which can be found on Instagram and Facebook at PodNooga.