Giving Compass' Take:

• Arielle Dreher shares the stories of schools working to end rural brain drain that leaves communities without their best and brightest members. 

• How can funders help scale existing brain drain solutions? Are these solutions scalable across communities and regions? 

• Learn how communities are fighting brain drain. 

Anna McDaniel seemed destined to be a teacher. In elementary school, she would use her homework assignments to teach her bedroom-turned-classroom of stuffed animals what she learned in school.

Now a high school senior at Scottsbluff High School in Nebraska, the 17-year-old McDaniel had to pick one of six career academies offered as part of the required curriculum for juniors and seniors. The high school started an academy hybrid model in 2016, and so far, students are graduating with college credits, job offers, and, in some cases, even associate’s degrees.

McDaniel rides the bus with other students to Western Nebraska Community College two days a week to take college courses on campus. She is currently enrolled in “Introduction to Professional Education.”

In only its third year, the program is too new to produce data on outcomes. But SHS assistant principal Justin Shaddick has personal testimony that the model is working. He also believes the model is replicable in other rural districts and can be scaled down to tailor to local industry needs and the teacher workforce.

Rural America is losing young people to “brain drain,” the term used by scholars and politicians alike to describe the effect created by young people, particularly millennials, who leave communities in droves for more urban areas. A fear of this phenomenon also causes many rural families to be hesitant about sending their children off to college — because those students tend not to return. College, once a path toward opportunity, is now increasingly “a ticket out of Nowheresville” for rural students.

Read the full article about rural brain drain by Arielle Dreher at The 74.