We had the pleasure last week of attending Daughter #1′s college graduation from Roanoke College in Salem, VA. It was a lovely day, not too warm by Virginia standards but sunny enough to put a slight burn on my pasty post-winter New Hampshire skin.
After a quick vacation in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, Daughter #1 plans to return to the Granite State and will go to UNH for a Masters in School Counseling in the fall.
I was surprised at first by her choice of career. #1 has always sought exotic adventure–travelling abroad as a People to People Student Ambassador when she was 11; going to England as an au pair at 14; studying in Mexico the summer before she turned 16; and being an exchange student to Chile while at Roanoke.
She wants to return to New Hampshire, specifically rural New Hampshire, as a school guidance counselor with a particular interest in at-risk youth. As she has explained her calling, I have come to understand her choice. She has a real heart for people, and people of lesser means in rural states increasingly are falling behind.
Let me explain: If you live outside of town in our neck of the woods, your choices are limited. For instance, we live two miles from our general store where we pick up our mail and get convenience store items; other than that, we are seven miles from grocery and drug stores; filling stations, restaurants, health care, etc. With the rise in fuel prices, if you are under budget constraints, even a 14-mile round trip can make you pause. And if you are unlucky enough to have your vehicle break down, you’re out of luck.
(However, limited help is in sight. Carroll County Transit has just begun door-to-door service in our region, thanks to federal stimulus money. What will happen when fed money runs out?)
Here’s another problem, when we moved to our home 16 years ago, we were as modern as anyone else. We had dial-up Internet service and got our tv reception through the airwaves.
Now, high speed and broadband are ubiquitous–but not for us. We are one of the “pockets” the phone companies have not yet reached with broadband, and the cable company has not made it beyond the corner a quarter mile from our door. We get our Internet through a MiFi , but we pay more than $50/month for it…not a fee many would think of paying if they find it tough to put food on the table.
And then there’s last year’s changeover to digital broadcasting. If you can’t get cable, and don’t have a satellite dish (another item that can be prohibitively expensive when watching one’s pennies), you may have been left behind when the nation was supposedly leaping forward. Before the switchover, we got as few as 5 and as many as 7 channels–not all always perfectly clean and sharp, but able to be viewed and heard.
Now we are lucky to get one channel and frequently we receive none at all. On stormy days, we receive no news of what’s going on in the state, in the nation, in the world and we can feel downright cut off.
While the term ”at risk” usually conjures images of kids caught in crowded poverty in urban settings, rural “at risk” students can lack basic means of achieving cultural knowledge and broadening their worldview by simple virtue of their location and their family’s economic condition.
Daughter #1 sees a problem that’s real, yet hidden from the view of so many with romantic notions of rural life. I’m proud of her choice to be a school counselor to at risk students in rural New Hampshire.
