The U.S. Department of Education’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Rural Outreach John White will discuss "Strengthen and Elevate the Teaching Profession and Implications for Rural Education" at the National Center for Research on Rural Education's national conference on Wednesday, April 3 in Omaha, Neb. National Teaching Ambassador Fellow Adam Bredencamp, a math teacher at Westsihttp://www.ed.gov/teaching/national-conversationde High School Career Center in Omaha, will join White for the conversation and to solicit feedback on the Department's RESPECT campaign to elevate the teaching profession.

The conference, entitled "Connect-Inform-Advance," is sponsored by the National Center for Research on Rural Education (R2Ed), which is funded by the Department’s Institute of Education Sciences and housed in the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

On Thursday, White will visit Chantry Elementary School in Malvern, Iowa to see the center’s Project READERS initiative. The initiative is designed to implement and examine the impact of professional development in Response-to-Intervention and early reading supports for K-3 grade students in rural schools. The session will use technology to connect a teacher and students to a R2Ed coach in Nebraska.