News from rural America.

Bidding begins soon for Wyoming's elk antlers, Southeastern states gained population in the past year, small rural energy projects are losing out to bigger proposals, and a rural arts cooperative is filling the gap for schools in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

TRANSCRIPT

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

The Southeast saw rural population growth last year, while West Coast counties had declines.

Analyzing the 2023 census, Daily Yonder data reporter, Sarah Mallott, found 90 percent of the 100,000 folks who packed their belongings went to Southeastern states.

She says growth in the rural South came from people moving into rural counties, not from births.

This is kind of surprising, considering that we had more deaths than births at the same time, but we still had population growth because a significant number of people moved to those states.

Mallott says rural counties with tourism, outdoor recreation, hiking or skiing, saw the largest increases in population.

Grants and loans from the Rural Energy for America program, or REAP, are boosting renewables and energy efficiency.

But as Anya Slepian explains, there's been a shift in the size of projects receiving funds.

Small-scale projects like solar panels for independent farms have often benefited from federal funding, says Andy Olson with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

In terms of providing broad benefit across the rural sector, it's best if we can have a healthy range of project sizes.

But after an influx of funding from the Inflation Reduction Act last year, nearly half of REAP's grant money went to large-scale energy projects.

Olson says while all rural undertakings are beneficial, small-scale projects should not be overlooked.

When we're looking at solar, they can produce power and save on power purchases or even sell power back to the grid.

And that's good for rural economic development.

I'm Anya Slepian.

Kids thrive when schools offer arts programs, proven to boost everything from test scores to social and emotional connections.

But education officials have prioritized math and reading in recent years.

Many of the art programs have been canceled because of budget or they don't have rigor.

Carmel Nickens founded the Rural Arts Collaborative to fill the gap for rural schools in Southwestern Pennsylvania and Northern West Virginia.

She says for the last 12 years, they've used grants to supplement the number of artists teaching in schools.

What we wanted to do was work with teachers who themselves are very creative and work with a professional artist to give the kids a really unique art experience.

The decline of arts education has been felt most severely in low-performing, low-income schools, where administrators must prioritize meeting standardized test benchmarks.

A distinctly different kind of art, elk antlers will be auctioned off in Jackson, Wyoming on May 18th at the annual Elk Fest.

Elks shed their antlers each spring, sending hunters and gatherers into the wild looking for the biggest and best.

Auction money raised will go to the National Elk Refuge and local Boy Scouts.

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

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.