by Wendy Royston, Dakotafire Media staff writer with reports by Doug Card, Sarah Gackle and Bill Krikac Editor’s note: This is the first story in a two-part series. See the second story here. A small-town post office serves as a…
Businesses in the rural Dakotas struggle to fill seasonal and temporary jobs with young employees, whose summers are filled with camps, clubs and athletics.
“This has been the grain bin year.”
Frankie Rollins, who has built grain bins for the past six years with Hart Steel, said the company has been busier than normal in 2014, and that more and more bidding competition is emerging in southeastern South Dakota.
“I hear of a lot of new crews starting up, so it sounds to me like this year has been the grain bin year,” he said.
Long bus rides can have a significant effect on the rest of a child’s day. Superintendents in the Dakotas say they do their best to keep the bus routes as short as possible, but open enrollment and school district reorganizations can make this challenging.
Despite the challenge of finding enough volunteers—or in some cases, because of that challenge—many rural ambulance services have come up with creative ways to serve their communities better.
As rural ambulance services struggle to find enough volunteers to maintain their services, it’s the moments of that crucial golden hour that tick away when help takes longer to arrive, or even fails to arrive.
Rural ambulance departments across the Dakotas, which have struggled for years to have enough volunteer EMTs, are hitting a tipping point: Some are not able to continue as they have for decades. Others will face decisions in the next few years. What’s changed? How will it affect rural communities? How are people thinking differently about how to treat medical emergencies in rural communities?
The first in a new series of events intended to spark community and regional conversations will be from noon to 2 p.m. Friday, March 28, at the Marshall County Community Building in Britton, S.D.
The event, called a Dakotafire Café, intends to get people talking about the topics presented in the latest issue of Dakotafire magazine, according to Dakotafire Editor Heidi Marttila-Losure.
“Most of our small towns have a place where locals gather to solve the world’s problems over a cup of coffee,” Marttila-Losure said. “These events are intended to bring that spirit of problem-solving conversations to the issues that affect our communities—which are the topics we try to address in the magazine.”
The continued draw on the national propane supply that started in October has hit local pocketbooks in the midst of an extended cold snap.
The percentage of snowbirds in Dakota communities is quite small, if an informal survey of Dakotafire participating newspapers is any indication: Only about 1 percent of subscribers to those newspapers change their addresses for the winter.