News from rural America.

Rural Wyoming needs more vocational teachers to sustain its workforce pipeline, Ohio environmental advocates fear harm from a proposal to open 40-thousand forest acres to fracking and rural communities build bike trail systems to promote nature, boost the economy.

TRANSCRIPT

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For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, this is the news from rural America.

The cowboy state is running out of vocational teachers.

Olivia Weeks reports on Wyoming's innovative efforts to fill the jobs.

About half of the state's career and technical educators will hit retirement age in the next decade.

And Jenna Shim with the University of Wyoming's College of Education says vacancies are already a major problem.

Many high school's CTE programs are closing because they simply cannot find enough CTE teachers.

Rob Hill with SkillsUSA Wyoming says construction, nursing and auto repair programs at rural high schools, crucial to the workforce, could be at risk.

Doesn't seem as big a deal as you don't have one teacher, but that one teacher in a town of 2000 people that teaches welding, where you have a huge industry, it has a extremely large impact.

The state's eight community colleges are including teacher training in their technical education programs.

Building a pipeline to train the folks who build the pipelines.

I'm Olivia Weeks.

Ohio environmental advocates are alarmed by a state proposal to open 40,000 acres in the Wayne National Forest to fracking.

Roxanne Groff with Athens County's Future Action Network says the huge industrial drilling sites destroy wildlife habitats.

They also use huge amounts of surface water, which she says could pollute the rest of it.

We've got impacts to streams from water withdrawals or possible contamination with spills.

Randy Pocladnik with Save Ohio Parks says the gas drilling causes air pollution, putting local folks at risk for asthma and other respiratory issues.

People that live in areas we know from peer reviewed studies that are impacted by fracking have higher levels of rain on in their basement.

The Bureau of Land Management is taking public comments on the proposal until May 6th.

Mountain bikers seek the trail less traveled and rural communities across the country are putting money, time and effort into building them trail systems.

Jessie Powers with the Outdoor Recreation Council of Appalachia points to one 88 mile Ohio network built in 2016.

And it's to help Southeast Ohio and Appalachian Ohio really understand the opportunity that outdoor recreation provides rural communities.

Ohio's Athens Mountain Biking Club started in the seventies by hand building trails across two state parks and city property.

Since then, Powers says outdoor recreation has emerged as a significant driver of jobs and income in a rural area.

Those are economic opportunities.

Being able to open up a business to build local wealth long-term, offer more jobs that are entry level in smaller communities.

From 2021 to 2022, the outdoor recreation industry grew two and a half times faster than the rest of the economy.

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, I'm Roz Brown.

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.