In rural Marion County, South Carolina, classrooms needed more caring, capable adults than an overstretched district could provide. The answer is GUIDE — Guiding Unique Individuals toward Dreams & Excellence — a partnership between the Marion County School District and RGI that recruits and trains part-time community members, many of them retired educators, to support both students and teachers.
An Appalachian blueprint
GUIDE adapts the holistic, child-centered model that advisory board member Dr. Adam Cheeseman used to lift Doddridge County, West Virginia from 53rd to among the top districts in the state — a turnaround that earned him 2023–2024 West Virginia Superintendent of the Year. RGI delivered the program's brand, recruitment website, training curriculum, and four pillars: high-impact small-group instruction, holistic child-centered learning, data-driven decision-making, and teacher–Guide collaboration.
A cross-disciplinary edge
Standing up GUIDE meant finding the right people fast. So RGI did something most education consultants can't — it ran a modern recruitment campaign, applying the same targeted digital-marketing playbook built for Cheraw's remote-worker initiative. On roughly $1,500 of advertising, the campaign reached more than 50,000 people and brought six retired educators into the program in under three weeks.
It's a vivid example of how RGI connects the dots across rural challenges: the lessons learned attracting remote workers to one town became the engine for staffing classrooms in another.
