Considering the Needs, Challenges, and Assets of School Systems in Rural Meatpacking Communities During COVID-19: The Roles of Schools as Vehicles of Community

Authors

Edmund T. Hamann, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Amanda R. Morales, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Ricardo Martinez, Pennsylvania State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2022

Citation

Unpublished manuscript, 2022

Research paper crafted as part of the Chronicling the Impact of COVID-19 in Diverse Nebraska effort funded by the Center for Great Plains Studies, Lincoln, Nebraska

Made available open access March 2025

Comments

Copyright 2022, the authors. Open access

Abstract

For more than 40 years, the relocation of meatpacking from urban to rural communities and the related change of who works in these high-risk, modestly compensated positions has brought Spanish-speaking and African and Asian refugee populations to communities like the seven focal Nebraska communities we consider here. These seven, five rural and two part of multi-county metropolitan areas, all have majority Latinx school enrollments and they all have been particularly hard hit by both the first and third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were each also foci of a special new course we co-taught in December 2020 called: “Pandemics, Schools, and Helping Meatpacking Communities Recover from COVID19.” Drawing from Dewey’s notions of ‘school as community center’ and multiple scholars’ emphases on decolonizing research, our course and this chapter pose the questions: (1) How can schools be part of the recovery from both the ravages of the pandemic and ongoing but pre-pandemic dynamics like high mobility, family negotiation of workplace injury, vulnerability to immigration enforcement, and the challenges of different language and education backgrounds than the system expects or rewards? And (2) what are possible roles of university-based teacher education programs in supporting school-site and other efforts that, in turn, help these communities negotiate these challenges. Our chapter describes our critical, place-based educational engagement with the seven communities, including our efforts at crafting grant proposals that would support community partnerships, translational research, and new programs. It also explains the broader framing of how these multilingual, multicultural locales typify a type of rural American community that school and university structures have not well served historically, but that can be robust, stable, inclusive, and pluralistic microcosms with the right balance of acknowledging local assets and challenges and non-didactically bringing in external partners.