Rural Teachers' Burnout, Weil-Being, and COVID-19 Related Stress During the Pandemic

• Published in: The Rural educator (Fort Collins, Colo.) Vol. 44; no. 4; pp. 29 - 42
• Main Authors: Deaton, Jennifer D, Borders, L DiAnne, Morris, Carrie Wachter, McKinney, Jasmine L Garland, Fantahun, Saron, Smith, Alexandria N
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Norman National Rural Education Association 01-01-2023
• Subjects: Anxiety; Burnout; Career Change; Classroom Techniques; Classrooms; Community Relations; Coping; COVID-19; Depression (Psychology); Educational technology; Geographic Isolation; Health Needs; Health services; Internet access; Job satisfaction; Mental health care; Mental Health Programs; National Surveys; Pandemics; Professional Isolation; Researchers; Resilience (Psychology); Rural areas; Rural Education; Rural schools; Salaries; School districts; Science and Society; State Surveys; Stress; Students; Teacher Burnout; Teachers; Teaching; Urban Schools; Wages & salaries; Workloads; United States > US
• ISSN: 0273-446X; 2643-9662
• DOI: 10.55533/2643-9662.1336

Prolonged exposure to these stressors impacts teachers' physical (e.g., high blood pressure) and mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression) and can result in low job satisfaction, less classroom engagement, and a decision to leave the profession (Iancu et al., 2018; Madigan & Kim, 2021). [...]compared to teachers in urban schools nationally, teachers who left rural schools during the pandemic more often cited technology challenges as impacting their ability to deliver remote instruction (Diliberti et al., 2021). [...]teacher shortages are more severe in rural areas (Oyen & Schweinle, 2021), particularly in the South (Diliberti et al., 2021), contributing to the "rural school problem" (Tran et al., 2020). Given the limited access to mental health services in these communities, schools often are the "de facto provider" (Garbacz et al., 2022, p. 863) of mental health services, yet schools vary in their ability to hire enough mental health personnel to meet demands (Garbacz et al., 2022).