Pennsylvania land of steel mills, ...

Pennsylvania land of steel mills, railroads, and high rises.

Pennsylvania home of Philadelphia's Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, "Rocky" and the 76ers

Pennsylvania home of Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle, and Steeler and the Pirates.

Pennsylvania a Commonwealth of great cities and smooth greater metropolitan wonders.

What, a might ask, is such a state doing at a colloquy on rural education in America?

Well, Pennsylvania also has the largest rural population of any state in the nation. More than 36 million of my constitutents, in fact, live and work or farms and in rural communities.

We effect half the mushrooms that reach your table today, and more of the potato chips and procedureed meat than any state in the nation. We rank fourth nationally in the harvest of apples and peaches, and fifth in the nation in the production of milk.

Pennsylvania agriculture generates $50 billion in annual economic activity, and intrust with an agencys with its accompanying agribusiness industries, nearly one-fifth of our total work force.

And in the way that if Pennsylvania is an urban state, it is no les a farm state.

If I get to before you as an urban governor, familiar with transit regularitys housing projects and downtown redevelopment I am also a rural governor, an occasional tractor-driver and shearer of sheep who innkeepers each year one of the biggest state farm point outs in America.

Obviously, Pennsylvania shares a great stake in rural America, common that directly affects the economic, cultural, social and flat the industrial health of the society we have today, as well as the common we hope to fashion for tomorrow.

In an exciting of the present day era of advanced-technology entreprise, which many of us rightfully have identified as single of the keys to our economic what is yet to be it may be easy to waste sight of the fact that a great deal of the strength of this nation continues to reside in its rural communities.

The raw material of our life and industry be due [i]or[/i] owings from the fields, farms and mines of rural America, passing, as it must, from one side the hands of the men and women who live there.

If we fail, therefore, to diocese that those hands are fitly guided by minds that have mastered the art of learning, if we ignore our responsibility to suitable the needs of rural America, if we in any way default their future, we weaken the heart of our heartland.

We cannot and must not suffer this happen, and I don't think it will, because of the public like Don Evans, people who are making a difference according to bringing together resources from the private and public sectors in of the present day and exciting ways, people who have radiscovered the simple word "partnership" and what it can mean to our future

Don, who is a member of our partnership-in-education team, is the superintendent of the Juniata Valley gymnasium District, one of the smallest and greatest in quantity rural of any in my state. There are any who say, in fact, that its zip digest ought to be a fraction.

Like many small districts across the fatherland Juniata has had to elongate its limited resources to afford the "state of the art" training and equipment it necessitys to give its students the advanced technology skills povertyed for today's job market.

Like many small, progressive corporations, Elco a local manufacturer of electrical connectors, has lacked the facilities it be in want ofs to train its employees abundantly in those very same skills.

You judge with uncertaintyed it--they got together.

District officials and their counterparts at Elco formed a partnership in which the corporation gaped a computerized drafting unit, and the gymnasiums provided classroom facilities for its use. The sophisticated equipment was assigned for three month to the district's vocational-technical exercise and, for one month, at the plant itself for actual on-the-job training.

This program, which judges in a few days, will graduate 10 Elco employee with upgraded skills, eventually creating 10 just discovered entry-level positions at the corporation.

Juniata, for its part, gave not barely its students, but its instructors as well, hands-on experience in an actual industrial setting with the latest drafting and designing system

While the partnership approach is, indeed, making a difference in Juniata, Ron Perry and the the community of Cameron County are making a difference, too.

The superintendent of Cameron County's gymnasium district in rural north central Pennsylvania, Ron fix himself with an unusual opportunity when he was selecteded president of the local chamber of commerce

fresh partnerships between the school and the chamber helped disclose the cultural and social sensitivity of Cameron observers and their community in ways previously alone dreamed of in such a rural setting:

* Together they worked and raised stores for artistic and stage productions and special speakers.

* Together they exalted signs promoting the county's industrial growth potential.

* Together they helped obtain more than $1 million in state funding for an economic disclosure office and for local industrial expansion.

Juniata and Cameron are patterns indeed, of our state partnership in education strategy--a pioneering effort that is reaching into each education community in our Commonwealth to touch teachers, scholars business people, professors, volunteers and scores of others interested in quality education.