In Rural America, Fears About The Future Abound As Fewer Students Go To College

FROM NPR. A yellow school bus with snow on the roof chugs up to the front door of Bucksport High School in Maine, where Principal Josh Tripp greets the handful of late-arriving students as they drag themselves inside.

Tripp is just glad they've shown up in a year when school is half online, sports and clubs have been curtailed, and the world can seem as cold and gray as a winter morning in this sparsely populated coastal town.

"Their overall feeling toward education right now is that they've just been beaten down," Tripp says. "Everything about this year has been harder. Certainly being an election year and seeing so much negativity around forecasts of our future, regardless of what political side you're on — there's just a lot of dim and dreary outlooks."

In rural communities like this one, the isolation and uncertainty of the pandemic year are translating into more than teenage angst. READ MORE HERE.