South Dakota News Watch

As part of its ongoing “Small Towns, Big Challenges” series of articles, South Dakota News Watch has visited four small towns across the state that are trying to chart a new course to prosperity.

While all four towns — Edgemont, Lake Andes, Lemmon and Webster — are unique, they face many of the same challenges to obtaining growth and prosperity.

The COVID-19 pandemic could not have come at a worse time for many of South Dakota’s small towns.

The deadly virus has further complicated the already herculean task of keeping cherished rural communities vibrant and reversing a historic downturn in population and economic stability.

Though mostly spared from major outbreaks, small towns that once served as the backbone of rural South Dakota have been stung by the indirect economic and emotional outcomes of the pandemic.

Abnormally dry conditions and a persistent risk of summer wildfires in the Black Hills of South Dakota make the fireworks display planned for July 3 at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial an unnecessary, potentially devastating and expensive event, according to one fire expert with intimate knowledge of the region.

The highway checkpoints implemented by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in north-central South Dakota have been all over the news as Governor Kristi Noem has threatened legal action unless the tribe removes them. But the roadblocks are only a small part of the efforts by the tribute to protect its people from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The stalemate between the governor and the Cheyenne River and Oglala Lakota Sioux tribes remains, with checkpoints on state and federal highways still in place and Noem seeking but not yet finding a resolution to the conflict.

Millions of American schoolchildren, including tens of thousands in South Dakota, are suffering a loss of learning and reduced exposure to instructional rigor now that schools across the country have closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Loss of advertising and circulation revenues due to the COVID-19 pandemic are putting some South Dakota weekly newspapers on the brink of closure. Here is South Dakota News Watch reporter Bart Pfankuch with a report.

The financial crisis for the state’s roughly 110 weekly newspapers hit home in April when the owner of the papers in De Smet and Lake Preston decided to close them after nearly 140 years in operation.