Ensuring teachers feel effective and happy in the school community is critical—especially when it’s the only community for miles around.
That’s the case in Alaska’s largest rural school district, Lower Kuskokwim, which educates 4,100 K-12 students spread across an area the size of West Virginia. Most of its 29 schools are located in tiny, low-income villages, some only reachable by boat or airplane.
The challenges have contributed to chronic staffing problems, with 78 out of 350 teacher positions going unfilled in the 2022-23 school year.
Lower Kuskokwim’s efforts to build a foundation for teacher retention inform a new guide from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences that features the Alaska project. Its challenges were used to develop protocols that rural districts can use to evaluate and improve their own teacher retention.
Salary still tops Alaska teachers’ job considerations, according to state workforce surveys, but rural teachers are more likely than their urban peers to leave because of problems with working conditions rater than pay, according to researchers from the federal Regional Education Laboratory Northwest, who worked with Lower Kuskokwim.
Using staff mobility trends, exit and retention interviews, and surveys, REL Northwest researchers and district staff found that building more realistic expectations and support for incoming teachers—particularly around how to find housing and engage with the Yup’ik Eskimo communities, who make up a large share of students—could be among the most important levers to boost teacher retention.
The project found that before implementing any recruiting and retention initiative in a rural district, administrators and staff should:
- Review research in the context of local data;
- Talk to teachers to identify the root problems limiting better working conditions—such as a lack of housing for teachers who needed to live in their remote communities;
- Develop and prioritize strategies;
- Plan for how to collect evaluation data during implementation; and
- Continue to evaluate and adjust strategies as the teacher workforce needs change.
It’s important for administrators to consider the ways that common teacher recruiting and retention incentives, like mentoring or professional development, can play out differently in more isolated districts, said Amy Price Azano, the director of the Center for Rural Education at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, who was not part of the project.
For example, while mentoring is a common retention strategy for younger teachers, those who are entering more geographically isolated or tightly knit rural districts may need more intensive support.
“Context is everything. If someone is not from that community, they might be paired with a mentor, but this mentor might have taught at that school for 20 or 30 years,” Azano said. “It doesn’t really broker a lot of trust if [a new teacher] says ‘Oh gosh, I had this terrible situation with a kid,’ and they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s my neighbor.’”
