Commentary on Classic Articles from Issue One of RSEQ's 30-Year Retrospective:

While my association with ACRES does not span the entire 30 years (I attended my first ACRES conference as a graduate student in 2002), my association with rural education began when I entered kindergarten in a K-6 elementary school with a grand total of seven classrooms. At some point during my elementary years they added a special education classroom. I clearly remember some of the students in that classroom because even though there was no inclusion, or even mainstreaming for any classes, we all had lunch and recess together. Based on what I now know, the students in this classroom had moderate and severe disabilities, and the interactions we had at lunch and recess likely had some influence on my future career decisions. After elementary school, we joined with neighboring towns for middle and high school, resulting in my graduating class having 96 students. After college, I taught in rural communities for several years. When I taught special education in Moab, UT, the occupational therapist traveled from Grand Junction, CO (115 miles, one-way), so she provided services only once/month. Clearly, we used a different model than I used when I taught in a larger district and the occupational therapist was in my building every day to help with lunch. Currently, I work with student teachers in an alternate route to certification program, and most of these students are in rural school districts in Kentucky. Given this long association (from various perspectives) with rural education, I enjoyed reading the Classic RSEQ Articles. Issues addressed in these articles include attracting and retaining teachers in rural areas, preservice and inservice training for teachers in rural schools, and the use of technology in these endeavors. Most of these issues are still pressing, but not to have resolved them is not to say we have not made progress. Filling special education positions continues to be a challenge in rural schools, with 27% of rural schools reporting that filling such positions is very difficult and 4% reporting that they could not fill special education vacancies ( Provasnik et al., 2007). While these statistics are troubling, they are reflective of the field in general, with city, suburban, and town districts reporting similar difficulty with special education positions. As noted by the authors of these Classic Articles, however, even when the issues are the same, effective strategies for addressing them may vary across rural, suburban, and urban districts. In the case of filling special education positions in rural areas, programs that incorporate distant education to train individuals who already live in these areas and wish to remain in them, may resolve the issue. Our Alternate Certificate in Moderate-Severe Disabilities (MSD) program at the University of Kentucky almost exclusively trains teachers in rural areas. Part of the requirement of this 3-year program is that the students obtain employment as a teacher in a classroom for students with MSD. Thus, by the end of the program, these individuals have been employed for three years in their school (in many cases, in the town in which they have lived for some time); this connection to the community may make it more likely they will stay. …