This past weekend, from October 3rd to October 5th, my team along with other groups and faculty participating in this project got to visit Fayette County for our first site visit of the semester. There, we got to learn more about the local concerns of Uniontown and Connellsville, tour local sites and attractions, and speak to residents of Fayette County. We learned a lot more about the local assets of Uniontown and Connellsville. Along with this, my team and I got a good idea of the issues concerning this community and the change that people want to see in their hometown. We also got to get a clearer idea of our goals for this county and what issues to focus on as we work towards a stronger Fayette County. We’re very fortunate to be able to visit this region and learn firsthand the experiences of locals and their thoughts on political issues.
Our group, the political science group of this initiative, got to visit some really interesting sites and attractions in the area. We stayed at the Summit Inn Resort and spent a lot of our time at the Touchstone Center for Crafts. It was there at Touchstone where we would debrief about our experiences and what we learned at the end of our day. As for the sites we visited, we got to go to Uniontown and see the Fayette County Electoral Office, the local theatre, and the café, From Scratch. Additionally, in Connellsville, we got to see the Connellsville Canteen and the museum and train model inside. This has been a particular interest of ours since the Canteen was founded by the Fayette County Cultural Trust, an organization that we work closely with to help this community thrive. The mission of the Canteen is to keep Fayette County’s rich history alive and demonstrate the sacrifices and contributions made to this county. This museum contained many memorabilia from World War II and centered around this. I find this site fascinating and admirable. Fayette County does have a rich history, and I love that this site is one of Fayette County’s main assets. It truly shows the beauty of this region and its unique history. Along with the Canteen, we got to visit Fallingwater. This was the most interesting place by far and is becoming a major site of tourism in Fayette County. Fallingwater is a house that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935. It’s a very unique and beautiful attraction site and is a great asset to Fayette County. By looking at Fayette County’s assets and tourist sites, we learned just how beautiful this region is. An admirable quality of this region is the pride that they have in their hometown. People here genuinely love and care about where they live. There is a lot of potential in this area and I’m glad to have seen it.
This trip has been a great resource for our group as we work towards our goal of bridging the urban and rural divide. Often, people in rural communities feel left out or excluded. This is supported by our discussion with the Penn State Extension in Fayette County. This extension expressed a lot of frustration in regard to their financial well-being and how little support they’re getting. My group and I want to focus on this frustration and figure out ways to help connect this community to larger organizations and feel included and secure. This feels especially important given that this deals with education in rural communities. Education in particular is a main concern of mine. My fear is that the quality and access to education are not equally distributed throughout the state. Schools in urban and suburban communities have much more “prestige” and thus opportunity to give to their students, setting them up for future success. However, rural communities, like Fayette County, struggle for funding and attracting young students at local colleges. This makes education in these regions inherently unequal to education provided near main cities. Randy Miller, the Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Laurel Highlands School District who we brought in to speak with us spoke specifically on these issues in the community. He mentioned that enrollment at the Penn State branch in Fayette County has been going down, with many saying that they view this branch campus more as a community college. This is a huge concern since people are actively trying to move away from home in search of opportunities. Our goal that we want to work towards is how to get younger people moving into these regions and how we can help young people stay in Fayette County. As we prepare to conduct focus groups with our advising professor, we want to keep these goals in mind while also figuring out why there is such a divide and how to alleviate the frustrations of residents.
As the political science group of the ACRI project, we also observed the political concerns of this region. We found that there has been a lot more political activity in this county. Many more are registering to vote, volunteering to be a poll worker, and people are even changing parties for the upcoming election. More specifically, we learned that this election in particular is causing a stir in the community. Many more are voting and registering to vote because the upcoming election is a presidential election. Though this is an important and significant outcome, we were informed that the people in these communities are less informed of local politics and elections. The fact that this election is presidential is why people are going out to vote. This raises the question though, why do people have less efficacy when it comes to local elections? What makes the presidential election feel more important than local governing elections? I hope to find more information regarding this idea of reduced efficacy and the general local political climate.
My plan going forward with this project is to help gather participants and prepare questions for our upcoming focus groups. My group and I have met, and we’ve begun drafting our questions to ask participants. We plan on doing our focus groups on site since we believe that this will help promote participation and make our guests feel more comfortable speaking out with their thoughts on issues. Our main focus is going to be the urban/rural divide, but I also hope to ask and analyze concerns with education in rural communities. Education is a central aspect of development in any region. Improving educational quality and providing easier access to a diverse student population can have dramatic effects on the outlook of the community. If there’s an increase in local opportunity, this may help with the “brain drain” issue as well. For these reasons, I’m excited to learn more about these topics and how locals feel about these issues. To help achieve this, I hope to reach out to local school districts within Fayette County to gain an inside perspective on their individual districts and the problems they face.
Overall, I am very happy to have had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in this county. This site visit has been very informative to both me and my group members. We got to have some clarity in our goals for this community. From our experience, we know that there are actually many tourist sites that people visit all the time. The main issue is having people stay and attracting a younger population. For this reason, I want to focus on the main attraction targeted towards the younger generation: education. I think that if we take a deeper look into the issues affecting local education institutions, we can make a real difference in the system. Additionally, targeting the urban/rural divide can help make residents feel less frustrated and connect the community, making the region less polarized. I think it might also be interesting to examine the political climate of Fayette County a bit more closely. Though there’s been a lot of recent interest in the upcoming presidential election, it may be beneficial to try to increase interest in local elections. This may be an issue of a lack of efficacy or feeling like they have any real effect on their local government, and if that’s the case, I’d want to see why exactly this issue seems to spread throughout Fayette County and how we can promote efficacy and encourage residents to vote in these elections. Our next mission is the focus group and here we can learn a lot more about these issues and how best to approach them. I’m excited to hear from folks in Fayette County and how they see these issues. Additionally, I’d love to conduct future interviews with key figures in the region, especially in education.