You Are Invited to Join the I Am a Rural Teacher Campaign!

Last week, we launched our new project, I Am a Rural Teacher. This narrative-focused national media campaign will feature ten diverse rural teacher voices. In these media pieces, we will highlight both the opportunities and challenges that passionate educators face in their positions. Additionally, we will place the teachers and schools in the context of their rural communities, to illustrate the critical role that rural schools play in their broader communities.

We will be featuring rural educators from the Ozarks, Midwest, Southwest, Southern Border, Appalachia, Northern California, Rocky Mountains, Upper Plains, New England, and Alabama's Black Belt.

In addition to our focused media campaign, we invite all of you to submit stories of the classroom. Throughout this campaign, we will be featuring a "Teacher Spotlight" on our media platforms every Friday, as well as compiling your stories on our new website.

These moments from your classrooms will live side by side with our deeper dive profiles of rural teachers. All of these stories will then be utilized by the National Rural Education Association, our partner in this work, to stress the importance of funding rural education to state and local policymakers.

We hope to spotlight the real aspects of the rural classroom: the challenging moments, the rewarding relationships, or just the fun little things that make being a rural teacher all worth it.

If you'd like to contribute to this campaign, please contact [email protected] to submit your school's stories. You can also join the I Am a Rural Teacher Facebook group, which currently has nearly 500 members, to continue the conversations started by this campaign.

If you'd like to follow along with this campaign, you can follow our social media accounts, follow @IAARTCampaign on Twitter, or stay tuned by signing up for email updates.

I Am a Rural Teacher is a collaboration between the Community Foundation of the Ozarks, Rural Schools Collaborative, National Rural Education Association, Alabama's Black Belt Teacher Corps, and Missouri's Ozarks Teacher Corps. The project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The "I Am a Rural Teacher" Campaign is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We want to thank them for providing a national platform for authentic rural teacher voices. Stay tuned!