Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative Story Archives

Changing Course: 'Tiny House' Project Tackles Big Problems In Coal Country

The sound of power tools blends with teenage chatter as students clamber around, under, and over a trailer bed that they’re busy turning into a home. They’re part of a project called “Building It Forward,” which has vocational classes building tiny houses as a way of gaining practical skills and new confidence.

Just a few feet from the garage door at the back of the room, there’s a vertical rock face. It’s all coal from the ground up at least ten feet. Coal here can be a reminder of the past — of the time when this land that the school sits on was blasted flat by miners; of times when coal jobs were plentiful here in eastern Kentucky.

Letcher County Area Technology Center students install a tiny house’s floor.

Back inside, students are using hammers, drills, and saws. Educators hope that this class will help them to feel invested in their education, so that one day they might be able to rebuild the economy here in these once-famous coalfields.

Big Goals

The Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, or KVEC, is one of eight school district cooperatives in Kentucky, and it’s the one that covers the famed eastern Kentucky coalfields. The fifth congressional district, which contains the KVEC region, has an unemployment rate roughly double the national average, and the country’s lowest life expectancy.

Three years ago, the cooperative won a $30 million federal grant to fund innovation and personalized education in classrooms throughout eastern Kentucky.

“One of the groups that may not have benefited right away was the vocational school students,” KVEC Associate Director Dessie Bowling explained.

She described the tiny house project as an effort to fix that — a way of making sure that the cooperative’s schools offer classes that are interesting and valuable to students, whether or not they plan on going to college.

This past school year, the cooperative funded three eastern Kentucky vocational schools to design and build tiny homes. The project gives students experience with a wide range of construction skills such as plumbing, wiring, carpentry, design, budgeting, heating and cooling to name a few.

Each school received $15,000 from the cooperative’s grant. Combined with some community donations of materials, that enabled the schools to build some very thoughtfully designed and full-featured tiny houses. When the three houses were put up for an online auction, each one had multiple bidders and sold at a profit.

The program is designed to be financially self-sustaining. Money from the sales covers the costs of materials it takes to “build it forward” again the next year.

Bowling said KVEC wanted to avoid falling into the pattern of school programs that go away when funding expires. Designing the project with sustainability in mind has also modeled long-term planning for students. Bowling recalled hearing a high school senior say that he wants the program to keep going so that his children could have the chance to build a tiny home, too.

“For them to think like that, I think, is a really positive thing as well,”

Tiny Interior

Bowling showed visitors around a blue tiny house that sits in the parking lot behind KVEC’s offices in Hazard. The tiny house was built by high school students at the Knott County Area Technology Center, and bought by KVEC to serve as a model for the program.

When you walk into the house, you’re surrounded by a small but beautiful oak interior. A staircase on the left leads up to a loft that fits a queen-sized bed. To save space, the steps are narrower at the bottom, and each one has been fitted with a slightly angled drawer.

Tiny house built by students at Knott County Area Technology Center.

When this house was first completed and presented to a gathering of people at a KVEC summit, Knott County student Charles Collin Mosley beamed. “I took a lot of pride in those steps,” Mosley told the crowd. “They’re all custom, they’re real sturdy. I’m just really proud of it.”

Steve Richardson is a truant officer in Knott County. He said the tiny house project has made a big difference for some the students who in previous years had missed a lot of class, to the point where he’d had to make home visits.

“We’ve been able to get them involved in the learning process,” Richardson said.

Danny Vance is the the principal of Knott County’s vocational school, the Knott County Area Technology Center. He was also struck by how much time and care students put into building the tiny house.

“It’s just the best project I’ve ever been involved with,” Vance said.

Next Round

Three schools are building their second tiny house this year, and five other schools got funding from the cooperative to join the ranks. The vocational school in Letcher County is one of the sites building a tiny house for the first time.

As her classmates knocked the final floorboard into place, carpentry student Haley Hart explained the process.

“They’re just knocking it in with a piece of wood and drilling holes on the side of it,” she said. “Then they’re just going to screw it down, and that’s the floor laid.”

This is Haley Hart’s second year taking carpentry. She said she likes how much freedom students have in the class. “Most of the time in other classrooms when you have an idea, you’re not allowed to do it,” Hart said. “But in here you’re allowed to do anything that comes to your mind.”

Hart said she never would have imagined that she’d take part in building a tiny house. She said the experience has made her more confident and also given her communication skills that she expects to come in handy when she’s applying for colleges and jobs.

One of Hart’s classmates, Matthew Collier, said he thinks the tiny house project is especially important in small towns like his own, where shrinking industries have left communities struggling to imagine a new economy and a new identity.

“Everybody loves this class,” Collier said. “We do the best we can, and when we’re done, buddy, it’ll look like a million dollars.”

Eight schools in eastern Kentucky are now building tiny houses. Students have a deadline to finish construction by April, when the tiny homes will be exhibited and put up for auction to fund another round of construction.

You Can’t Outsource Housing

On the day that Dessie Bowling was showing off some of the student’s handiwork in Hazard, another of the tiny houses built by students at Phelps Area Technology Center in Pike County was being hauled away.

Charles Hawkins explained that one of his sons bought it to use as temporary housing.

“They discovered that they had a black mold,” Hawkins said. “So they’re going to get this to use until that’s finished and then they’re either going to sell this thing or take it out to the lake somewhere and park it.”

Hawkins said he not only likes the product, he supports the idea behind it.

“They need to concentrate more on vocational trades, because every kid that’s going to school’s not destined to become a lawyer or a doctor,” he said. “Somebody’s got to fix the plumbing. Somebody’s got to wire the house.”

That thinking is echoed by another of Hawkins’ sons, Jeff, who is KVEC’s executive director. Jeff Hawkins said vocational training has been an important part of the cooperative’s education strategy.

“We chose to focus on college and career ready,” he said. “And I emphasize ‘AND’.”

Hawkins said vocational skills like those students are learning in the “Building It Forward” program are integral to the “personalized learning” concept that KVEC schools have adopted.

“If you are really focused on personalized learning it needs to be connected to individual passion,” he said. “Draw a solid line between what they were doing in school and how that translates to what they would do after that.”

Scott McReynolds heads the Housing Development Alliance, based in Hazard. He said that a tiny house could be a good, affordable option for tourists, students, minimalists, and many other people.

McReynolds said that eastern Kentucky has a lot of housing needs, including a large amount of rundown and substandard housing.

He pointed out that construction and home repair are kinds of work that can’t be done by people who aren’t locally available, so it’s an area where there will definitely be local needs, and jobs are less likely to go away.

“What really excites me,” McReynolds said, “is the skills that students are learning … are really translatable to the rest of the solutions we need.”

This series is supported by the Solutions Journalism Network.

Changing Course: A School Cooperative Aims To Remake Coal Communities

Betsy Layne High School serves rural Floyd County in the eastern Kentucky town of Stanville, population 206. Students there produce a video program called “Bobcat Banter” where they usually talk about sports and student life. But early last year “Bobcat Banter” introduced some special guests.

“We’re here with Mr. and Mrs. Gates from the Gates Foundation,” the students said.

The world’s richest man and his partner in life and philanthropy, Melinda Gates, had dropped in for a chat.

Bill and Melinda Gates visit Betsy Layne High.

The students had questions, some just for fun.

“What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?”

“I like Cocoa Puffs,” Bill Gates said.

“You don’t eat breakfast!” Melinda Gates replied.

The big question, of course, was why this high-tech power couple had come to Betsy Layne High. You might expect that the Gateses had come to see coal country’s problems, or to explore what could be done about the failings of small-town schools.

No. They were there to see how other schools could achieve what Betsy Layne has.

Bill Gates praised the interactive classroom and enthusiastic teachers. He also noted that Floyd County has achieved a graduation rate well above the national average in a state that has long lagged behind.

“If I could pick up Betsy Layne and make every high school in the nation do what’s happening here,” Melinda Gates said, more schools would be meeting their goals.

Belfry High School students Shelby Bailey, Thomas Hager and Seth Whitt look on as Mark Zuckerberg plays a virtual reality game they designed.

And the Gateses aren’t the only tech billionaires-turned-education donors who have visited eastern Kentucky schools. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg visited a school laboratory in Hazard in September.

Zuckerberg and Gates are attracted by the progress and promise they see in the schools participating in a collective effort called the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, KVEC for short.

The 22 school districts in the cooperative serve some of the most rural, rugged country in Appalachia, towns and counties struggling with some of the country’s most profound economic and public health problems. But by working together, these schools found ways to innovate in classrooms, connect people with health care, and maybe help the region find a new path forward.

“We are really ambitious,” Jeff Hawkins said.

Hawkins joined KVEC 15 years ago and is now the executive director. The cooperative started with humble goals around 1970, he explained, as a way to provide driver’s education courses and purchase school supplies in bulk.

But over time the cooperative expanded to teacher training and a wholesale reinvention of the classroom experience. KVEC schools emphasize personalized learning, team projects, and an entrepreneurial attitude that Hawkins thinks can make a difference in a region in need of change.

“What we believe is that our K-through-12 classes can serve as catalytic drivers to reinvent communities where we live.”

Hope Amid Hardship

Dessie Bowling is the associate director for KVEC, but before she took that role, she was a teacher for 28 years. Bowling said there’s one excuse that she heard a lot from students.

“I would have kids say that they didn’t need to get an education because they could go into the coal mines and make more money than what I was making,” she said.

Bowling said that’s not something she hears much anymore. Coal jobs aren’t nearly as plentiful as they once were. Many students come from generations of coal miners, and now that those good-paying jobs are harder to find, there’s been a big impact on the community’s sense of what’s possible.

Bowling said she sees people losing hope. That’s something the cooperative wants to push back against, and in the last few years, they’ve had money to make a big effort.

“Our funding from the Race to the Top grant has enabled us to showcase that there are opportunities out there,” Bowling explained.

In 2013 the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $30 million federal grant to support the cooperative’s personalized education and career readiness work. A large part of the grant has funded specific programs created by teachers and students in the cooperative’s schools. Students across eastern Kentucky have been inventing new products, building and racing drones, coding software, and whole lot more.

In one hands-on technology classroom at Belfry High School in Pike County, students said the opportunities that KVEC has opened to them has made them feel empowered to define their own future.

“People would be surprised by this from what their stereotype for people around here is,” said freshman Jacob Bowman. “Literally, we’re proving their stereotypes wrong.”

Students use virtual reality and build drones to race.

Health Challenges

Stereotypes and a slow economy are not the only challenges that students in eastern Kentucky face. They’re also up against some extraordinary health issues. Many of the counties KVEC serves have some of the nation’s highest rates of chronic disease, such as diabetes, and unhealthy conditions including childhood obesity. More recently, the rampant opioid crisis added to disruption in communities and families and put the area at high risk of needle borne disease.

Children don’t learn well if they are sick or can’t concentrate because of turmoil at home. The cooperative has found that it must address health problems in and out of school.

Sandy Hogg leads KVEC’s health programs. Like Dessie Bowling, Hogg has been working in the area’s schools for decades. She knows that to teach the kids, you have to help them stay healthy and focused. The goal, Hogg said, is treating the whole child.

“We have mental health, we have physical health, we have programs where children are exercising so many minutes a day,” she said.

But even the mountains people here love can complicate access to basic health care.

“Well, the biggest problem that we have is the terrain that we live in,” she said. “What we see is that children just couldn’t get to the doctor like they should.”

Many families in the cooperative districts also lack a reliable means of transportation. Hogg recalled a night clinic that had to be halted because of safety concerns. A family of five, two adults and three children, drove to the clinic on a single four-wheel All-Terrain Vehicle.

Public transportation is rare and for struggling families the cost of a tank of gas can be out of reach.

“They can’t, they just don’t have that money,” Hogg said.

School-based Care

Hogg said the cooperative focuses on bringing health care to students and staff, not the other way around. Mountain Comprehensive Care, a local federally-funded health care provider, worked with KVEC to start health clinics in Letcher County schools. That has served as the model: Local health departments provide staff and school districts provide space.

Sandy Hogg leads the cooperative’s health programs.

Teachers can use the clinics during their planning periods. KVEC serves about 40,000 kids and about 2,000 staff. And those clinics have evolved beyond what Hogg said she could have imagined. Letcher County Central is a good example, she said.

“We have curtains, we have three bays there for those kids, it looks like you are going through an emergency room, it’s beautiful,” she said.

Tele-health is also available in eight districts, she said. With tele-health, a nurse practitioner or a doctor serves several schools from a remote location. A trained staff member at the school performs the routine physical checks, like taking temperatures. The health care provider uses a digital connection to diagnose the patient, recommend treatment, and send prescriptions to a local pharmacy.

Reliable internet can sometimes be a problem, Hogg said.

“If you live in the mountains you are going to have trouble with the internet,” she said with a laugh. She went to one school where students were all sitting on a staircase with their tablets. It was the only spot in the building where they could connect.

But so far, cooperation among the districts and support from the community health organizations have bolstered the health outreach.

Now the main challenge comes from the ravages of the opioid epidemic spilling over into the classroom.

“In some of our districts 50 percent — and this is astounding — of our children are being raised by their grandparent or someone other than their parents,” she said. “We have a terrible problem with opioid abuse. We have to find a solution.”

KVEC schools emphasize team projects and problem solving.

A Resource Curse

Chuck Fluharty directs the Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Iowa where he has worked with communities dealing with economic change, from Missouri farms to Minnesota’s iron ore range. Fluharty said eastern Kentucky’s situation is among the toughest.

“This is occurring in one of the most challenged regions in our nation,” he said.

The coal industry’s collapse in the face of a rapidly changing energy market pulled the economic rug from under a region that had long depended on a single extractive industry.

“It’s called the resource curse in economics,” Fluharty said. “When you have a company town, what tends to happen over time is you crowd out the potential of other industry to make a case for their future.”

Jobs in the mines and businesses supporting them took up most of the labor supply and capital, and little effort went into diversifying the economy or training the workforce for anything else.

In most regions that rely on resource extraction, Fluharty said, change comes gradually as an industry lessens over time and decision makers look at other options.

“In Kentucky this hit almost all at once,” he said.

That didn’t just bring a loss of jobs. The larger risk is a community-wide loss of hope.

Consider just a few statistics. The region has some of the country’s highest overdose death rates, leading a sharp surge in what health experts call diseases of despair. In some of the counties the KVEC school systems serve, life expectancy is years shorter than the national average. People in Bangladesh can expect longer lives than people in Breathitt County, Kentucky.

Students in South Floyd Middle School’s engineering team work on community problems.

But Fluharty, who has worked with KVEC, is optimistic.

“It is actually a revolution in how schools in that region view their role,” he said. “It’s about building total human and social capital, recognizing that the schools are at the center.”

Over the coming months this series will explore how the KVEC cooperative can help Appalachia’s coal country change course.

This series is supported by the Solutions Journalism Network.