Dakotafire Get your spark here.
All three levels of government—federal, state, and local—contribute to education funding. Read More »
INFOGRAPHIC: Where do K-12 schools get their money?
Blog Archives
Students invest 20 percent, yield big returns
This spring, students in a Lyons, Neb., government class learned an important government lesson: How to be good citizens. Read More »
Beefing up buildings
The talk in many areas of rural education is of declining enrollments and strained resources—maybe not where you’d expect to see capital improvement projects. But some schools in the Dakotas are building. With enrollments no better than the typical Dakota school, they’ve found the resources to invest through community generosity and local ingenuity. Read More »
Making school matter
On a Tuesday afternoon in July, when some of their colleagues were probably enjoying a deserved break from the intensity of the last school year, about 60 teachers were in Wolsey, S.D., working on plans for the next one. Read More »
COLUMN: The cost of believing ‘bigger is better’
The loss of small farms and the loss of small schools in this country are indisputably connected. At the most obvious level, the disappearance of small farmers meant the disappearance of farm children and, thus, the disappearance of small rural schools. But the connection is deeper than that. Read More »
Teacher shortages: The crisis is here
As parents filled their shopping carts with pencils and notebooks to prepare their children for the new school year, superintendents across the state were dealing with some daunting back-to-school lists of their own. Read More »
Candidates give their take on rural issues
We asked North and South Dakota candidates for federal or statewide positions to tell how they would serve rural places. Here are the responses from those who answered our request. Read More »
Local food challenge can build skills, spark connections
As the harvest season begins, Dakotafire Media is challenging people in the Dakotas to go local. Read More »
An outsider’s love affair with the Jim River
When a professor of photography stumbled upon a couple albums of photographs in the display cases of an antique mall, he felt a tug at his heartstrings. These two albums were pieces of a previous lifetime. Haunting and elusive, they clung to his memory like the dust of time. Read More »
Infographic: Number of S.D. public districts, 1919-2014; History of District Reorganization for N.D. Schools, 1990–present
Infographic: Number of S.D. public districts, 1919-2014; History of District Reorganization for N.D. Schools, 1990–present Read More »