Education Key to a Sustainable Rural Future
by Jason T. Kessler
Parents raising children in rural areas across the United States do not need a study of job opportunities close to home to tell them that employment prospects for their children are bleak. Unless systematic changes in rural economic development take place, the next generation will be forced to move away or face little chance of finding jobs that provide wages high enough to sustain a comfortable lifestyle.
These parents have lived through dramatic changes in the economic fabric of rural America during the past twenty years. They’ve seen firsthand how global competition in manufacturing and the flight of the brightest minds to metropolitan areas have combined to devastate their communities, leaving behind low-skilled, low-paying jobs and a thirst for talented entrepreneurs whose skills could possibly create new industry to revitalize the sagging economies. The rural life of earlier decades is no longer sustainable.
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Jason T. Kessler is director of community development for NC New Schools/Breakthrough Learning. He has worked in community engagement and advocacy for 16 years, in addition to spending ten years as a social studies teacher in Ohio and North Carolina. Kessler holds a graduate degree in public administration and resides in rural eastern North Carolina with his wife and daughter.
