The Rural Innovation & Impact Showcase is a new program celebrating the bold ideas emerging from rural communities across the nation. Selected from nearly 50 submissions nationwide, these five finalists will present live at the 2026 National Forum to Advance Rural Education (NFARE) in San Antonio, TX.
Learn more about these innovative solutions that are transforming student learning, strengthening communities, and tackling some of rural education’s most pressing challenges, and join us this fall at NFARE for the live competition!
From Screens to Soil: How a 33-Student Missouri District Turned Its Roots Into a Classroom
Moniteau County R-V School, Latham, Missouri
Every morning at Moniteau County R-V School, the students say a chant: “I am Bold. Respectful. Accountable. Valued. Empathetic. Successful…Together we are Braves.” It is a small ritual with a big belief behind it, one that Superintendent Tracey Bieri puts plainly: “No matter where life takes our students, if they learn to be respectful, responsible and have a good work ethic, those qualities will take them farther than anything else.”
Holding onto that belief in a district of 33 students, kindergarten through eighth grade, takes some creativity. A couple of years ago, the school district sat down with a short list of what they wanted to improve: student engagement, science achievement that their state MAP scores had flagged, social and emotional development, and character. Their students were spending too much time behind screens, and they wanted learning that was hands-on, meaningful, and tied to the world their kids live in. Rather than import a program, they looked out the window at the farming community around them.
“Our community is so small, and there are not too many businesses left here,” Bieri said. “We asked, how can we strengthen and build our community back up? Why not build on the strengths that are already here. Not bring a totally new concept in, but build upon it, and bring the community back together.”
That spring, they started pouring concrete. With volunteers, grant funding Laura helped secure, and support from the school board and local businesses, they built a greenhouse and a barn over the summer. By fall, the kids were out there, and From Screens to Soil was alive.
What a strong day looks like depends on the season. Animal care comes first, always. Students let the animals out, clean the stalls, and feed them before anything else. In winter, classes plan their gardens and choose their seeds. Each grade gets its own four-by-eight raised bed, and mapping out what fits where, how much room a tomato plant needs, is how math slips into the morning. Last year, the sixth-grade class settled on a rainbow garden and planted rainbow carrots, tomatoes, and peppers. After consulting with the local health department, the district brought its harvest directly into the school cafeteria, creating a farm-to-table experience for students.
The learning does not stop at the garden gate. For a school carnival, students turned their harvest into seasoning blends, named the product, built a brand, set a budget, and sold it as a fundraiser. When Bieri asked the students what they had taken from it, the answer was pure real world: “We learned it’s not all profit!”
The heart of the model, though, is what happens to students whose strengths may not always be reflected in a traditional classroom setting. Laura gets emotional talking about it. “The students who may not always excel academically in a traditional classroom are my leaders out there,” she said. “That’s what drives me—giving them the confidence that they may not always have in the classroom.” Even the animals do double duty. Instead of stuffed reading buddies, students grab a hammock, head outside, and read to the school’s mini pigs and mini ponies.
None of it runs on a big budget. It runs on donation letters the students write themselves, grants, a farmstead brand the kids designed, and a community that shows up. Neighbors have come and disced up the ground for a larger in-ground garden. Another community member is building and donating a produce stand, so that this fall the school can set out surplus vegetables free for anyone to take, and especially over the summer when students are not there to eat what they grow.
For young people who are often told that the best opportunities exist somewhere else, Bieri sees the lesson take root in a different way. “It shows them that they don’t have to go somewhere else to find opportunity. They can find it right here in our small school. They learn that there is a whole world beyond the walls and screens, and that they can do something meaningful wherever life takes them.”
Her advice to other rural districts has the same shape as the model itself. Start with your own community’s strengths, then build toward the areas you want to improve. Do not skip community involvement, because it is the whole foundation. And do not let fear or the unknowns hold you back. “I’m a gardener, but I did not know anything about the greenhouse,” Laura said. “It’s been a lot of trial and error. Let the students see that.” What they see most, she says, is the joy: kids walking out laughing, saying I love this, getting attached to the animals, looking forward to coming to school.
From 33 students, that is a lot of light. Latham may be small, but the possibilities are anything but small. It began with a simple decision: to stop treating rural and small as limitations and start embracing them as the foundation for something extraordinary.
Tables Turned, Futures Earned: How Kentucky Put Students With Disabilities in the Driver’s Seat
Kentucky Educational Development Corporation (KEDC)
At a traditional career fair, the student does the walking, moving from booth to booth, hoping to be noticed, hoping to find the words. For a student with a disability, that loud, crowded, high-pressure room can become a place to endure rather than shine. A team at the Kentucky Educational Development Corporation looked at that dynamic and asked a simple question: what if we flipped it?
Their answer is the Reverse Career Fair. Instead of students approaching employers, graduating seniors set up their own stations to showcase their vocational skills, their resumes, and their portfolios. Then the employers come to them, and the employers do the interviewing. The students lead. In the team’s own framing, it puts young people in the driver’s seat and turns years of classroom transition instruction into a genuine roots-and-wings moment, the point where a student stops being prepared for life after high school and starts showing that they are ready for it.
“We flipped the career fair to strengthen our students’ post-school outcomes and create meaningful pathways to employment,” said Jenny Hogg, a special education consultant at KEDC. “We also wanted to honor the investment families, educators, employers, and community members make in the lives of students with disabilities by creating opportunities for that hard work to pay off. Rather than asking students to fit into a traditional career-fair model, we redesigned the experience so they could showcase their strengths, connect with employers, and take meaningful steps toward their future.”
The barriers the model addresses are the ones rural families know by heart. Students with disabilities face what the team calls a perfect storm: limited public transportation, long distances to job sites, and little exposure to the range of careers that exist. The stakes are not abstract. In Kentucky, roughly 37.9 percent of working-age adults with disabilities are employed, compared to 78.2 percent of those without, a gap of about 40 percentage points. Closing even part of it means changing what young people believe is possible, and giving employers a reason to look again.
Geography shapes the whole design. The program serves seniors across 16 counties, many of them entirely rural, and hosts each event on a regional community college campus. That single choice does several things at once: it shortens the travel for students and employers alike, it puts students on a college campus many have never set foot on, and it connects local businesses directly to the local talent pool they so often overlook. Rather than asking students to travel toward opportunity, the model brings opportunity to a place they can already reach.
The results, over a three-year pilot, moved in the direction that matters most. Each event has led to multiple students receiving job offers on the spot. Just as telling is the shift in confidence: students who once struggled to say their goals out loud are now leading professional interviews and networking with peers from across the region. Employers describe their own change of mind, coming to read what might once have been filed away as a diagnosis-related struggle as evidence of resilience and resourcefulness instead. In the language of special education, the model turns Indicator 13, the requirement to plan for a student’s transition, into measurable Indicator 14 outcomes: real employment, real engagement, real momentum after graduation.
“One of our students left the Reverse Career Fair with more than practice or encouraging feedback. He connected with an employer who ultimately offered him a job at a local business,” said Hogg. “That was when we knew this was more than an event and that our dreams were becoming a reality. By changing who hosted the conversation, we gave an employer the chance to see something in this student that a résumé or a traditional career fair might never have revealed.”
None of it depends on a big budget, which is what makes it fit rural country. The team describes the approach as low-intensity but high-yield. A year-round Transition Cadre, a collaborative network of educators, shares resources and trains one another so the knowledge never lives with a single person. To grow, they use what they call a divide-and-host approach, splitting large regions into smaller clusters anchored by community college partners to keep travel costs down on every side. And because the model leans on assets already in the community, from the local Chamber of Commerce to the technical college down the road, it does not wait on outside funding to begin. Any rural region willing to convene its own employers and campuses can run one.
For districts that want the blueprint, the team has built one: a Reverse Career Fair strategy guide with a three-phase timeline and role-based checklists, student elevator-pitch templates, a career-cluster navigation system, and employer conversation starters designed to spark the kind of exchange that changes minds.
The through-line is a quiet act of trust. Trust that students with disabilities have something to show when the room is finally built for them to lead it, and trust that a rural community already holds the employers, the campuses, and the relationships those students need. The Reverse Career Fair simply turns everyone to face the same direction: toward the young person at the front of the room, telling their own story.
“Building” Career Pathways: Workforce, Culture, and Nation Building in Rural Wisconsin
College of Menominee Nation and the National Indian Education Association
The Menominee Tribe manages one of the largest forested areas in the country, yet it lacked the workforce for its own infrastructure repair, building, and contract labor, a gap that hit hard amid housing shortages and an aging skilled workforce. As Debra Downs of the College of Menominee Nation put it, the goal became to build an internal workforce for the reservation and surrounding areas, filling the “big blank space in the middle” opening up as one generation nears retirement.
“Building” Career Pathways grew out of that need. When Core Learning Exchange reached out to the National Indian Education Association with an idea for digital career exploration, NIEA said yes. Through the Catalyze Challenge, the partners weighed healthcare against construction trades, and construction won: it fit what the college could deliver and aligned with the tribe’s forestry economy. As Casie Wise, senior program director at NIEA, explained, “the ability to build and repair your own housing is essential to growth and sustainability.”
Their signature piece rolls on wheels. Rather than build tiny homes to sell, the team built a mobile classroom: a trailer with a pop-up awning that extends into a platform, outfitted with tools and TVs by the CTE instructors at the college and Bowler School District. It solved a practical problem, since the two campuses sit about 30 minutes apart, and it made the work visible. Students set up at powwows, where kids could stop by and build a birdhouse, pulling virtual reality career simulations out of the classroom and into the open air. “How are you visible,” Wise asked, “but also equipped to do this work well?”
If the trailer is the vehicle, relationships are the engine. Downs describes the partnership as one of the beauties of a rural community: a first meeting quickly drew in the college, the superintendent, tribal enterprise, a local contractor, and a construction company that had worked on the college grounds. “We just all fell into the places that we fit,” Downs said. “It was almost like magic.” Wise credits the setting, saying, “It’s rural, it’s that small town, somebody knows somebody who knows somebody.” These were people already passionate about the work, she said, who “did not need to be trained up.”
But the team is clear that this is bigger than an innovative rural program. At its heart is nation building. “Native communities are all built on family,” Downs said, “and to stay here and give back to their family.” Through service learning, students carried that value into the community, building more than 60 Leopold benches placed across tribal lands and the college campus. Wise draws the line from a single student to the health of a whole nation. When young people leave, small towns struggle and sometimes die out; for a tribal nation, the stakes include the language itself. “When you finally understand tribal sovereignty,” she said, “the health of a tribal nation is very dependent on the young people wanting to stay and build.” A student who stays, earns a living wage, learns the language, and one day steps into tribal leadership represents “sustainability for generations to come.” Sovereignty, she adds, “isn’t just a concept, it is a viable economic business. Sustaining a nation is a business.”
Speaking to that legacy of stewardship and the desire to shepherd a sustainable, eternal practice, CMN Registrar Richard Oshkeshequoam shared his thoughts. “Others talk about seven generations forward, and seven generations back. It is good to think that far, but in my opinion, it’s difficult to comprehend when looking at limited and finite resources. To me, the seven generations are the three that precede you, and the three that will come after you. With yourself being the connection between.
“In the end, sustainability is in our ways and in the ancestral connections that guide us forward. The Menominee word for reservation is eskōnekan, meaning something that is set aside or apart. It is something that was set apart for us, and for our future. Menominees always worked to set things aside for the future. So when you ask how it drives our work, I would say that it is who we are and how we do things, so we know no difference.”
That belief shapes how the program defines success, by the human being rather than the salary. In the summer Opportunity Youth project, the recruitment coordinator became, within weeks, case manager, transporter, and advocate, meeting barriers that arrived fast: an unexpected pregnancy, a lost home, missing meals and diapers. The funders agreed that “anything that is impeding their ability to get a job or go to school, let’s take care of it.” Students still earned credentials; Downs broke the three-credit NCCER Core Curriculum into three one-credit high school courses, each carrying a $1,000 award at graduation, “building wisdom, building self-assurance.” One young man, in a recorded reflection, was blunt: “Until this happened, I didn’t think that I was going to have another day.” As Downs put it, “if you touch one child, maybe that’s all I need to do. How do you measure a place and a purpose?”
The model is already drawing interest, from Fort Peck Community College in Montana to Wolf River Habitat for Humanity. Scaling it, Wise says, starts not with money but with people: “at its core, it is about alignment and relationships.” Her biggest realization points to where the future runs: tribal colleges are, and should be, the workforce hub for their nations, growing the next generation of leaders while growing their own instructors. Asked what a leader should take from the story, Downs started with one word. “Perseverance,” followed by, “passion,nd then the thought underneath it all: “Don’t let people settle. You’re trying to build worth.”
Drawing on Kinship: How Eastern Kentucky Made Computing Its Own
Digital Promise and Eastern Kentucky School Partners
In the hills of Eastern Kentucky, people have always made things, fixing what breaks, building what they need, solving problems with whatever is on hand. “We are from makers,” said Rebecca Morrison of Floyd County Schools, “but they didn’t know they were makers. They just had to survive.” Drawing on Kinship began with a conviction that this ingenuity is not a charming relic but a foundation, and that computing belongs on top of it rather than in place of it.
The work started in Eastern Kentucky before the researchers ever arrived. District leaders in Floyd County and Pikeville Independent had been asking how to deepen learning in their region, and a visit to a mentor district near Pittsburgh, a place that had weathered the collapse of steel much as Appalachia weathered the decline of coal, showed them what technology could do for students’ confidence. That connection brought in Digital Promise and, with it, a National Science Foundation research-practice partnership. But one phrase was there in the very first grant proposal: Appalachian ingenuity. For researcher Emi Iwatani of Digital Promise, it framed everything. “I didn’t want it to replace it,” she said of the region’s heritage, “and if it was going to replace it, I didn’t want that project.”
So the team studied the question head-on. Each morning of their Summer Institute opens with a local innovator’s talk, and researchers analyzed those talks against the skills of computational thinking. What they found became the heart of the model. “They’re not the same, but they are complementary,” said Merijke Coenraad of Digital Promise. To treat them as identical would risk erasing something precious. Instead they landed on a metaphor: students arrive already carrying a toolkit of Appalachian resourcefulness, and computing is simply a new tool to add to it, a way to engage the technology in their lives through a lens that celebrates their heritage rather than replacing it. As Iwatani put it, borrowing a line from a local entrepreneur, “Appalachia is a solution to be found and not a problem to be fixed.”
The name carries the same idea. Kinship, in Appalachia, means more than blood. “It’s your tribe, it’s your people,” Morrison said. “Everybody is everybody’s brother, uncle, cousin. Even if you have no relation, you have that bond.” That instinct to figure out who is connected to whom, and to draw on the network to solve a problem, is how the region has always worked, and it became the engine of the partnership itself. The team now claims kin to its Digital Promise researchers, who live states away.
For students, kinship is where the abstraction falls away. When Michelle Scott’s students realized that “as Appalachians, engineering is at our core,” they could suddenly see themselves in roles they had been told existed only somewhere else. Kids who had not thrived in math or science found a passion and a toolset of their own, often rooted in what their families already did. “It’s truly transformational,” Scott said. After catastrophic flooding hit the region, one teacher scrapped her plans and let students problem-solve the disaster, carrying ideas to the community for how to prevent, clean up, and recover. Instead of feeling helpless, Morrison said, “they felt like they were useful and valuable in a time of tragedy.”
What makes the model last is that Eastern Kentucky educators now run it. What began seven years ago with outside trainers and nightly redesign sessions has become teacher-led: this year, every Summer Institute session was led by a local educator, often two or three partnering together. Year by year the momentum built, until teachers were presenting their own projects to one another. It lands differently, Coenraad said, coming “from each other rather than some person from Digital Promise who lives in Maryland.” The result, in Morrison’s words, is “a sustainable infrastructure” that can outlast the grant, and the team itself. Neil Arnett of Pikeville Independent calls it critical mass: even if no one from the founding team were in the room, the teachers could lead it.
That is also why the work can travel without being copied. This summer, educators from Native American communities and a rural Alaskan fishing village spent a week at the Institute, not to import Appalachian kinship but to uncover the cultural wealth in their own places through an exercise the team calls civic imagination. The framework holds anywhere heritage and place are valued; the content has to be local. What would be lost, Arnett suggests, is the whole point, if a district simply lifted Kinship out of Eastern Kentucky and expected the same words to fit.
Ask what comes next, and the answer is more kin: supporting the new friends in Alaska and Arizona, the two new Kentucky districts, and the teachers still catching the spark. It is a dream Arnett named seven years ago, and it has, he said, “been fun to watch come to life.”
Building Capacity from Within: How Lee County Grew Its Own Teachers
CarolinaCAP at the University of South Carolina and Lee County School District
For twelve years, Shawnta McKenzie has watched the same cycle. As director of human resources for Lee County School District, a rural district of about 400 high school students in one of South Carolina’s smallest counties, she would recruit a teacher, watch them stay a year, sometimes only six months, and then start over. “In December, they were gone,” she said. “By January, we were looking for another teacher.” This year, for the first time in those twelve years, the district opened the school year with no vacancies.
That turnaround has a name: CarolinaCAP, the Carolina Collaborative for Alternative Preparation, an alternative certification pathway housed at the University of South Carolina. But the people who built it in Lee County describe less a program than a decision to stop recruiting away from the problem and start growing out of it.
The logic is retention from the start. About 70 percent of CarolinaCAP’s candidates come from the districts they will teach in. “Tapping into those people who live in and are invested in the community is a retention strategy on its own,” said Dr. Tria Grant, the program’s director. For a small district “wedged around” larger, higher-paying neighbors always pulling its people away, as Principal Kevin Wilson of Lee Central High School put it, that mattered. Wilson arrived years ago to a staffing shortage and a superintendent, Mr. McDaniel, who believed that building the capacity of your teachers builds the classroom. “To build your own,” Wilson said, “builds a strong connection with them amongst our community.” This year, he noted, “all my positions are full.”
The partnership started with a phone call. About seven years ago, Grant called personally, surprising McKenzie that anyone reached out to a district her size. “We’re a small rural district, and nobody really reached out to us,” she said. Lee County said yes, first to the main pathway, then to the state-funded residency, and used both to fill the vacancies that had chased them for years.
What makes it work is coaching. Every candidate in the main pathway has a coach for three full years. Coaches are trained in co-teaching, participate in monthly virtual learning communities, and receive training and support informed by the tenets of cognitive coaching. In the residency, candidates spend the year beside a teacher of record. On a given day, that might mean a new special education teacher splitting time between a resource setting and an inclusion classroom, watching in real time how a lesson gets adjusted when the data says students have not yet learned it. Wilson contrasts it with his own preparation. “We got it, but it was over a four-year period in university or college. They’re getting it on the job,” he said. “That really gives them a confidence.”
The pairings are deliberate. Dr. Deanna Taylor, who coordinates recruitment, said the district does not hand the role to the most senior teacher or the one who could use the extra pay. “They choose the people who truly have a heart for teaching.” And the support wraps around the whole person, not just the certification exam; as Taylor put it, they think about the teacher who has the will but maybe not “the gas to get there.”
The staffing wins matter for students. Grant points to the growth data Lee County has sent back: 1.5 grade levels of reading growth, 1.4 in math, and 3.5 points in writing at the high school, with gains at the middle and elementary levels too. As classrooms gained more hands and more strategies, engagement climbed and discipline fell. “That’s why we’re here,” Grant said. “So that students grow and they learn.”
Sustaining a university-district partnership is hard. “No single entity drives the partnership,” Grant said. “We bring our collective expertise and experience to the work as true collaborators.” That means no cookie-cutter model, a lot of listening, a district Theory of Action revisited each year, and quarterly site visits. The written agreement is deliberately a memorandum of understanding rather than a contract, reflecting a two-way commitment; each year, the district revisits its Theory of Action and the team tailors support based on what districts and candidates need.
McKenzie can mark the moment it clicked. “Year two, we figured it out,” she said. “Year three, we’re on the money.” Asked what comes next, each answers from a different seat: Grant, districts that have made it work becoming ambassadors for others, plus recurring funding; Taylor, champion teams in each district so the work outlives any one person; McKenzie, a higher bar for mentor teachers and a wider coaching pool; Wilson, always coaching up the next leader so a departure never leaves the district behind. Underneath it is a refusal to accept the story rural places are so often handed. Wilson bristles at the assumption that a small district, the kind of district outsiders write off, has less to offer its students. Lee County built says otherwise. “This is just the beginning,” Wilson said. “We’re just tapping into where we’re going.”
