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Colorado Center for Rural Education

Rural school districts throughout Colorado continue to experience significant difficulty finding qualified individuals to serve as classroom educators, school leaders, and/or special service providers within their individual school districts.

The Colorado Center for Rural Education was created to address these issues. Our center is not limited to the University of Northern Colorado community. We work with 22 Colorado Institutions of Higher Education to recruit, prepare, place, and support educators for rural communities to ensure every rural student has a quality learning experience.

Financial Support for Rural Educators

The Colorado Center for Rural Education provides a variety of stipends to pre-service and in-service educators who work with students in rural school districts. Interested? Learn more about the available stipends you can use while you teach the students who need you the most!

Impact

The rural teaching shortage: Financial incentives help!

In partnership with the Research Education Laboratory-Central at Marzano Research, the Center investigated how providing financial incentives effects rural recruitment and retention.

  • Undergraduates who receive a rural recruitment incentive are three times more likely to be hired by a rural/small rural school district than their non-incentivized peers.
  • Inservice teachers who received a rural retention incentive were 20% more likely to remain employed in a rural school district than individuals who did not.

Generation Schools Network: COVID-19 Resources FOR YOU!

What are we doing to improve rural education? 

The Center for Rural Education’s commitment to connect, convene and build the capacity of rural educators aims to improve rural student outcomes by strengthening the teacher pipeline.  

We support secondary students, teacher candidates, career changers and practicing teachers—to improve recruitment, collaborative preparation and retention in rural Colorado schools. We are committed to meeting Colorado’s need for rural teachers.  

“I never would have considered a rural district without the stipend. However, now that I am teaching in a rural school district, I love it! The students are fantastic and the district is very supportive.”—Stipend Recipient