(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
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Retaining Talent in Rural Lawrence County [1]
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Date: 2023-09
For a rural region in the hills of southern Indiana, Lawrence County has had an outsized impact on the built world. The limestone from its quarries has sheathed the Empire State Building, the Pentagon and the National Cathedral. It has provided the building blocks for state’s county courthouses, the historic buildings of Indiana University and the dome of the Jefferson Memorial.
This abundant export has been a key driver of Lawrence County’s economy since the turn of the 20th Century, and it has remained vital even as modern buildings increasingly favor structures of metal and glass.
But there is a more important export that Lawrence County is working to not ship out: its people. The county wants to keep its 46,000 residents from leaving the region for opportunities elsewhere. Doing so means better educating and training them for the jobs that exist now, and preparing them for the jobs the county hopes to attract in the future. (The county’s population has declined by two percent in the last decade.)
It’s a tall order. Years after the heyday of the limestone quarries, there is a stark disconnect between the demands of Lawrence County employers (and hoped-for employers) and the skills the potential workforce currently has to offer. Lawrence is one of the few Indiana counties in which high school attainment has actually dropped. Fluctuating in recent years, it fell from 88.8 in 2014 to 82.2 in 2018, and has been as low as 79.9 (in 2011). In 2021, the graduation rate was 87.4. “There are 2,500 people in Lawrence County who don’t even have a high school diploma,” says Joe Timbrook, director of career development for the Lawrence County Economic Growth Council.
Postsecondary attainment is also below the norm: Just 16 percent of the county’s residents have higher education degrees, and only 9 percent of those are bachelor’s degrees -- 10 percent below the national average. Those who do have such degrees the county has trouble keeping. For instance, the county takes in a slice of Naval Support Activity Crane, a large U.S. Navy facility that employs many skilled, college-educated workers, but most of Crane’s 3,300 employees live elsewhere.
It’s a frustrating picture given the “help wanted” signs popping up all over. Beyond the perennial retail openings, jobs are also going begging in the higher-paying manufacturing sector that largely drives the local economy. Among them is an 800-employee General Motors plant and many smaller manufacturers. The limestone business is still important, but since hand-carving has given way to machines, it employs fewer people than it once did.
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[1] Url:
https://www.rurallearningsystems.org/media/retaining-talent-in-rural-lawrence-county?utm_source=mile-markers.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=3-lessons-about-rural-higher-ed
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