This story was originally published in Education Week, as part of the 2019 Gregory M. Chronister Journalism Fellowship.

At the headwaters of Kachemak Bay and past the terminus of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula road system sits the village of Kachemak Selo. There’s technically no road to Selo—as locals call it—just a steep switchback dirt trail taking vehicles with four-wheel drive 800 feet down to the rocky beach where the community sits.

The community’s remoteness is one of the reasons Selo has been struggling for nearly a decade to get a new school. Kachemak Selo School—a set of three buildings built in the 1980s and 90s by local residents—is “deteriorated beyond useful capacity,” according to the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District. The community has little hope that a replacement school will come anytime soon for the school’s 39 K-12 students.

While rural districts across the U.S. struggle to pay to maintain adequate school buildings, Selo’s challenges are particularly complicated, compounded by the community’s distinct desire to maintain cultural independence, a patchwork of school finance regulations, deteriorating state support, and the high cost of construction in a roadless and remote community.

The sole community enterprise, the Village of Kachemak Selo Water Company Inc., owns the two buildings that house the central office and the elementary school. The building housing the middle and high school is owned by a private citizen and has more visible damage than the others, with cracks in the corners, crooked door frames, and floors so uneven that the furniture must be reinforced to stay in place. Books stacked under table legs keep the surfaces level.

The schools are among 42 operated by the borough school district, which serves nearly 8,500 students in an area the size of West Virginia. The territory includes some urban schools, rural schools, three other Russian Old Believer schools, and a few Alaska Native Village schools.

In 2011, Selo petitioned its borough government for a new school. The borough then petitioned the state, which responded five years later, appropriating $10 million to build it. To take advantage of those funds, however, the borough had to provide a $5.5 million match. (The price tag reflects the difficulty of carting construction materials to the village.) Borough voters rejected the bond petition for the matching funds in October 2018. And, although the state extended its offer to June 2021, Kachemak Selo Principal Michael Wojciak said voter approval for a second-round vote will be “a tough sell.”

“I get it,” said Wojciak. “We’re in an economic hardship, whether it’s the borough or the state. For people to vote for higher taxes—it’s not a great time to do that.” According to the borough, that bond would equate to $4.95 per $100,000 of assessed real or personal property values.

Long History of Isolation
Old Believers are Eastern Orthodox Christians who fled Russia in the 17th century in order to worship free of persecution or outside influences. Selo is one of four such villages established on the southern Kenai Peninsula in the 1960s. There are no stores here, just a school and a few dozen homes. The women wear long dresses they make themselves, and the men wear traditional tunics with special collars and a thin belt cinched at the waist. Russian, in addition to English, is spoken throughout the community and taught in school. The Kenai Peninsula school district gives Old Believer schools control of their calendars to accommodate time off for holy days.

Drivers who brave the precipitous switchback trail to Selo can see the village entrance about a quarter mile down the beach, where a handful of no trespassing signs are posted on trees. Like other Old Believer communities, Selo embraces its privacy and isolation.

That desire for cultural independence may be one reason the school bond caused controversy within the village.

“Nobody wants the borough coming down,” said Andy Rothenberger, a teacher in Kachemak Selo’s middle and high school. “The town wants their anonymity, and they’re willing to put up with it.”

Rothenberger left the community to teach across the peninsula in the town of Seward, but missed Selo and returned, thinking he could help continue the fight for an adequate school. Now, he said, some members of the community have grown frustrated and apathetic.

“You definitely heard it after the bond failed from the kids,” Rothenberger said. “They were really disappointed and involved in the effort.”

Kachemak Selo student Susanna Reutov, 16, exemplified that view. “Our school is really crappy,” she said. “I didn’t mean to use that word. But there are always earthquakes, and every time there’s an earthquake there’s a bunch of cracks in the wall. You wonder if there’s ever going to be a big earthquake where the whole school would just fall apart.” (The community has experienced tremors from other earthquakes in that part of the state in recent years.)

Susanna and her brother Kelsey, 14, don’t expect to get a new school until after they graduate—but they hope it will be in time for their 8-year-old brother to benefit.

Some residents also worry about the potential income loss if a new, borough-owned school is built, Wojciak said. The community collects rent from the borough on two of the buildings, which helps maintain the utility company and the trail in and out of Selo. The middle-high school building is privately owned.

A Common Concern
Kachemak Selo School isn’t the only one in the district outliving its useful life. In 2018, the district said a quarter of its schools were 50 years old or older, and 80 percent were more than 30 years old. Pegge Erkeneff, the district’s communications director, said Selo is unusual among other district schools because the district doesn’t own the building and thus can only provide limited maintenance.

The problem of deteriorating school buildings is one that plagues the state—and the nation. The United States faces a $46 billion annual shortfall in funds to keep school buildings healthy, safe, and conducive to learning, according to the 2016 report, “State of Our Schools,” by the 21st Century School Fund, the National Council on School Facilities, and the Center for Green Schools.

In some ways, though, Alaska may be more generous than some other states in sharing the cost of new school buildings. Twelve states provide no direct funding or reimbursements to school districts for capital spending, according to the report.

The 49th state offers grants and debt reimbursement for projects that cost $50,000 or more. The Alaska legislature uses state-created priority lists to determine appropriations for school infrastructure, which vary from year to year and come in the form of a grant that requires the district to match 2 percent to 35 percent of the project’s total cost.

On average, the state shoulders 37 percent of the cost of capital construction for schools, as compared with the national average of 18 percent, according to the State of Our Schools study.

The study projects Alaska will need to spend about $1.10 billion in new school construction by 2024 to address its aging school infrastructure—a price tag that could grow as natural disasters and climate events grow in frequency.

Heidi Teshner, the director of finance and support services for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, said funding for the grant and debt reimbursement programs has not changed in 20 years, even as availability varies annually.

But in the Kenai Peninsula, borough finance director Brenda Ahlberg said the amount the state provides for school construction and debt service has been diminishing.

How the state plans to address school infrastructure issues in Selo and other communities is unclear. Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a former educator elected in 2018, ran on a platform to shrink the size and cost of government and close a state budget deficit created by dwindling oil revenues. In his first year as governor, Dunleavy made deep budget cuts in departments across the state, including education.

Dunleavy said in a March 2019 interview that the state could explore ways to educate children outside of a traditional brick-and-mortar school building, potentially through distance learning.

“Sometimes we get hung up on buildings in schooling, and less so on educational outcomes,” he said.

And while the federal government provided funding that helped build the state’s education infrastructure during the 1930s and after World War II, there is almost no such support now, according to the State of Our Schools analysis. A Congressional proposal to appropriate $100 billion nationwide for school repairs and rebuilding has languished in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Facilities’ Link to Learning
However, studies show school infrastructure can impact educational outcomes. Air ventilation, adequate lighting, and acoustics have all been shown to help students remain alert and ready to learn, the State of Schools study says. Poor facilities are also linked to student truancy and higher rates of suspension, according to the report.

In Selo, Principal Wojciak said a new school could help with student absenteeism.

“We have a plenty big enough problem with students skipping school and absences,” Wojciak said. “If they had a beautiful building to go to everyday it might be a little more of an incentive.”

There are no estimates of how much longer the community school buildings can be used. If the school is shut down, the district says, it will ensure that students have “a continuity of operations in an alternative learning environment.” That might mean placement in the district’s homeschool program, online distance learning options or “space at the closest area school for students.”

The next closest school would likely be another Old Believer School, either in Voznesenka or Razdolna, both of which sit atop mountains behind the community. Getting there would mean driving a school bus on the beach, then up the switchback trail.

In the meantime, local leaders are reconsidering their push. While Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce said he isn’t interested in introducing another bond proposition, a smaller, less expensive building may be within means. The school district is working on a $30 million bond package proposal that would help pay for repairs in schools across the district and build a new school in Selo, superintendent John O’Brien announced this month. The package includes 19 deferred maintenance projects and the $5.3 million in matching funds needed to take up the state grant offer.

Wojciak, for one, hasn’t lost hope.

“At some point there’s a legal responsibility to give kids an adequate space,” he said. “At some point, somebody is on the hook. I don’t know what or when it is, but in time, something will change.”

Vol. 39, Issue 21, Pages 1, 16-19

This story was originally published in Education Week, as part of the 2019 Gregory M. Chronister Journalism Fellowship.

As summer was waning in Alaska’s largest city, Hoonah City schools Superintendent Ralph Watkins was among a dozen or so other school officials from around the state spending a precious sunny day recruiting teachers at a job fair in a hotel conference room. Fewer than 30 prospective teachers attended the fair, and the competition for their services was intense.

Watkins was offering a $1,000 signing bonus to fill vacancies in his small district, which sits in a Tlingit village 500 miles away on the island of Chichagof on Alaska’s southeast panhandle. Other districts in the room offered signing bonuses of up to $3,000, a free laptop, free and subsidized housing, free airfare to their remote village if hired, and more.

“It’s tough,” said Watkins, who has lived in Hoonah for over four years. “I don’t want to be here right now—trying to hire. It’s hard and heartbreaking for me, but it is my job, and I’m going to make it work.”

Recruiting and retaining good teachers is difficult in many communities across the United States—especially rural ones—but in rural Alaska and its Native Villages, it can be even tougher. That’s because schools rely heavily on out-of-state teachers to staff classrooms, and many of the teachers the rural schools hire struggle to adapt to the harsh weather, isolation, high cost, and cultural differences that come with living in remote Alaska.

The problem is about to get worse. In January, the education school at the University of Alaska-Anchorage—the state’s largest teacher-preparation program—lost its accreditation. The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, one of two national bodies that accredit teacher training programs, revoked accreditation for all seven of the teacher-preparation programs at UAA, due to the school’s failure to meet four out of five standards set by the group.

The school graduated its last accredited class of education majors in May. And the state’s current budget crisis suggests new or improved teacher-preparation programs are not coming anytime soon. That leaves the university’s remaining education majors with the choice of transferring to the state’s other two teacher-preparation programs—at the University of Alaska Fairbanks or the University of Alaska Southeast—or changing their academic focus altogether.

Home-Grown Versus Out-of-State
Teacher staffing has been a longstanding problem in the 49th state. Annually, districts hire about 1,000 teachers, with over half hired at the five largest districts. In-state universities typically graduate a total of 200 teachers every year, far short of what schools need.

So in rural Alaska, most teachers come from out of state. In fact, teachers who are prepared in-state account for only about 15 percent of newly hired educators working in Alaska in any given year, according to the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska, and that share is likely to shrink in the wake of the education school’s closing.

In Scammon Bay, a small Native Village on the Bering Sea at the edge of western Alaska, a quarter of the Scammon Bay School’s teaching positions are held by people who were raised in the community. The school’s vice principal, Harley Sundown, who was born and raised there, said it’s important for students to have at least some locally grown teachers they can look up to.

“Up here, we have our local educators who do many things [other than] teaching—they also are involved with cutting fish in the summertime and doing traditional activities from Yup’ik dancing,” Sundown said. “We need people to understand what the communities are like to get the best out of every student, every year.”

The challenge with the out-of-state teachers, especially those who are new to the profession, is that they don’t tend to stay as long as their in-state peers. Many are drawn to the state in search of adventure, only to return a few years, even months, later to their home states, defeated by the weather, the isolation, or a culture with which they struggle to connect. About 80 percent of the state’s Native Alaskan students live in the rural districts.

The Hoonah district is among those experiencing high turnover this year. The rural district has 120 students and 13 teachers right now. Superintendent Watkins wanted to find eight more teachers at the job fair, which was run by Alaska Teacher Placement, a 41-year-old partnership between school districts and the University of Alaska that works yearlong to connect prospective teachers and districts.

In summer, Hoonah’s year-round population of 850 explodes to more than 3,000 as tourists come to fish, boat, and hike. What little housing is available is rented to tourists, pushing housing costs out of reach for teachers who want to continue renting from May to August. Watkins said the Hoonah Indian Association, the federally recognized governing body of the tribal members of Hoonah, is seeking grants and raising money to build teacher housing, but it will be several years before the units will be available.

“How do you make relationships with people in the community if every summer you have to leave?” Watkins said. “Hoonah is beautiful, and in summer you want to stay there, but you have no place to live.”

Seeking a Good ‘Fit’
As a result of the perennial shortage, rural superintendents spend much of their time on teacher recruitment and turnover, said Dayna DeFeo, the director of ISER’s Center for Alaska Education Policy Research, who has studied the struggles that rural Alaska superintendents experience in recruiting and retaining teachers.

She found superintendents are more interested in candidates who were a good fit, as opposed to those with exceptional credentials on their resumes. And, in initial orientations and trainings, immersing new teachers in the community is as important as any of their other educator trainings—a departure from many teacher onboarding practices in the Lower 48.

School administrators’ orientation toward community “fit” is a matter of necessity. DeFeo said teachers are more likely to leave when they’re working with students who are different from them, either ethnically or culturally.

Diane Hirshberg, a professor of education policy at ISER, agreed. The educators from the outside who’ve had the most success stayed in their rural communities in summer and participated in local pastimes, like hunting or berry picking, she noted. “They’re not the people who say ‘I can’t wait until the year ends so I can go back to fill-in-the-blank.’”

One adventure-seeking teacher from the Lower 48 who stuck around is Mary Cook, a science teacher in Scammon Bay. After retiring from a 30-year teaching career in Arkansas, Cook wasn’t ready to leave the classroom. She heard about the opportunity to teach in Alaska.

“I knew a couple teachers who filled me in on the difficulties,” Cook said. “The more difficult it sounded, the more I wanted to try it.”

Cook said the first year was tough, and she had to learn to adapt to teaching in a small community and an even smaller classroom. Now she’s been teaching in Scammon Bay for five years, and students respond differently when they see her come back year after year.

Ultimately, though, Cook said her time in rural Alaska will depend on the availability of health care.

“I’ve always said because I love it here, and I love my students, the thing that would cause me to leave would be lack of health care,” Cook said. “We don’t have any doctors or nurses and situations have developed where if you were dealing with life-threatening conditions and the weather is bad, there are just no flights.”

Teachers’ pension issues also hinder recruiting, according to teachers at the Anchorage job fair this summer. Alaska, like many other states, changed its teacher retirement system from a pension fund to a 401K arrangement nearly 15 years ago, and the teachers’ unions have expressed concern that the newer system may not yield sufficient retirement savings for teachers joining it now.

To keep teachers in the classroom, Hirshberg said, it’s also important for districts to recognize that the teachers they hire are adults and professionals, and to set up conditions for them to feel valued and lead independent lives within these communities.

At the same token, she cautioned, outsiders should not expect to walk into schools and dictate how kids should learn in rural Alaska. She said communities need to feel like they own their schools, especially so in Native Villages.

Recognizing the historical context of the state’s formation is a critical piece of that. From 1867, when the Russians were colonizing Alaska, until the mid-1900s, long after the Americans had purchased the territory, generations of students in rural Alaska were forced into missionary and boarding schools that sought to strip students of their Native culture. The multigenerational trauma of those experiences is still present, Hirshberg said.

“For some, walking into a school building brings up pain. They may not even realize it because it may not be their pain, but it may be the pain of their parents or grandparents,” she said.

“If an educator can’t see a way to reach the kids and have them be successful, [he or she] is not going to stay. We need to transform what happens in those schools and then equip teachers with the support they need, so they can thrive and the children in their classes can thrive,” Hirshberg said.

The consequences of teacher turnover and shortages can be costly in terms of both student achievement and money. ISER found it costs the state $20,431 for every teacher turnover, or roughly $20 million a year. Hirshberg, an author of the cost study, found that low teacher retention and high teacher turnover impact student learning outcomes for the worse.

Even if the state university system were able to prepare more teachers, though, it might not stem the shortages in rural areas, Hirshberg said.

The educators coming through the state’s university system tend to flock to Alaska’s largest, urban districts upon graduation.

“They don’t want to go to rural districts because a lot of our students are place-based,” Hirshberg said. “They’re older and already have families, and there are limited opportunities if you have a spouse. … There are a number of reasons why it can be difficult if you’re a more mature student to go out and teach in rural Alaska versus if you’re 22 and kind of looking for that first exciting adventure.”

Meanwhile, at the job fair, school and district administrators soldier on, even as the turnout seems to them to have dwindled over the years.

The Northwest Arctic Borough school district—which serves 11 small Alaska Native Villages in the state’s far northwest corner—was offering prospective educators $1,500 for moving costs, health, dental, and vision insurance for an entire family for $90 a month, low rent, free utilities in teacher housing, and a starting salary of $55,550. The district’s retention rate veers from 20 percent to 25 percent, leading the 1,800-student district to hire 40 to 60 new teachers annually.

Accentuate the Positive
Assistant human resources director Amie Gardner—who moved to the village of Kotzebue in the district seven years ago with a single duffle bag and $300 to her name—last year prepared welcome bags for new hires. She filled a waterproof bag with snacks, a one-pound bag of coffee and tea, stress balls, stickers with the district’s logo, an iPad holder, an eye mask to help block out the midnight sun, candies, cold and hot packs, and other goodies.

“I thought it would help with retention, as a way to welcome them to our district with open arms,” Gardner said. “We do this because our teachers are important to us and the future of our children.”

Mike Hanley, the superintendent of the 100-student Chugach school district in Alaska’s southwest coast, bordering Prince William Sound, said his district manages to retain 90 percent of teachers from year to year, more than most. The district accomplishes that by empowering teachers to be a part of district decisions, he said.

DeFeo said it was striking to find in her research that superintendents, despite their recruitment struggles, weren’t suggesting communities in rural Alaska were worse off in some way than other communities. Indeed, the administrators at the job fair said they accentuate the positive aspects of living in rural Alaska—the serenity, quiet, and beauty of living in a village seemingly on the edge of the world, the sense of community.

“Pretty much everything that happens in the communities happen in the schools—weddings, funerals, potlucks, you name it,” said recruiter Jim Hickerson, a retired school employee of Bering Strait school district, a remote community where the schools are nearer to Russia than Anchorage. “If you’re looking for shopping centers, movie theaters and restaurants and vehicles, that’s not us.”

Cook, the Arkansas teacher transplant, said her years in Scammon Bay have given her a greater sense of fulfilling her mission as a teacher than she had before. “I feel like I am able to make a difference and [that’s] a positive thing for them, and it’s positive for me,” she said. “I think I made a difference in Arkansas, too, but I think there is more need here because there is less opportunity.”

Vol. 39, Issue 4, Pages 1, 12-13

This story originally published in the Peninsula Clarion.

Facing potential state, local and district budget reductions, many non-tenured teachers are considering employment elsewhere.

To date, 86 certified staff and administrators resigned or retired, the highest number in the years the district has been tracking the data, Pegge Erkeneff, communications liaison for the district, said in an email.

Thirty seven out of those 86 have served the district for 15 years or more, 24 served 20 or more years.

“A disturbing development we noticed this year is a rise in the number of resignations from our staff, in part due to the fiscal uncertainty state budgeting caused to the school district this year,” Erkeneff said.

For the last four years, an average of 72 teachers resigned or retired from the district annually.

At the beginning of the new semester Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposed deep cuts to education, worrying some residents, especially school districts, across the state. This spring, borough assembly and school board meetings were dominated by residents, teachers, principals, school board members and even students who pleaded for education funding support to give non-tenured teachers more certainty.

Days before the school year ended, May 16, the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Board of Education approved contracts for 62 non-tenured teachers. Due to budgetary reasons, nine non-tenured teachers were not able to retained, Erkeneff said.

“Throughout the spring, our non-tenured teachers did experience uncertainty, and we were happy to issue 62 contracts and receive approval from the school board during a special meeting May 16, a few days before school was done for the year,” Erkeneff said.

Erkeneff said some employees leaving the district are leaving the state, too.

“In contrast to anticipated retirements, several of our valued staff noted that the fiscal instability of our state and subsequently in our district is a reason why they are leaving now,” she said. “They are not leaving our district for other districts in so much as they are leaving the state to go elsewhere.”

At an April school board meeting, James Harris, an English teacher at Soldotna High School and the 2017 Alaska Teacher of the Year, offered public comment regarding his recent resignation and departure from Alaska.

Harris said he felt he didn’t really have a choice.

“With the mayor’s proposed cuts and the governor’s proposed cuts, we would be hurting and we would lose our home,” Harris said. “On top of that, there has been seemingly very little support from the community.”

Teachers leaving the district can cause ripple effects with the district’s projected enrollment. Erkeneff said many of the district’s younger staff have children in local schools. Lower enrollment could mean even less funding from the state next year. In the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, a loss of 50 to 100 students might be spread over 15 to 20 schools, from the 42 schools across the district.

“If we experience a decline to projected enrollment that drove staffing decisions this spring, we potentially end up over-staffed, and experience a decrease in state funding based on the 20 day count in October that determines state funding, which is also linked to the local or Borough contribution to education funding,” Erkeneff said.

Despite uncertainty with the state budget heading into the summer, state statute requires school districts to let their staff know in May whether or not they have employment for the next year.

“All of our teachers know whether or not they have a contract for the school year beginning in August,” Erkeneff said.

She said 10 teachers were not retained because they were hired after Oct. 10, which presents another state statute issue, Erkeneff said.

“We are in the process of starting to hire back some of those teachers who were laid off,” Erkeneff said.

While teacher resignations were highest this year, support staff employee retirements and resignations are lower this year, Erkeneff said.