“We have been bombarded with phone calls, and overwhelmed with emails,” Alicia Andrews, the president of the Karluk Tribal Council, told The Washington Post. “For years, we have been trying to save our school and our community, and now it seems we have a solution.”
If the village succeeds in increasing its student population to 10, it will qualify for state funding by clearing a head count mandated by law in Alaska since 1998. This will allow the two students currently there, a brother and a sister who are 11 and 10 years old, to have peers and certified teachers, and it will prevent the Kodiak Island Borough from boarding up the school building or passing financial responsibility of keeping the facility open to the tribal council.
School buildings in rural Alaska serve as more than classrooms; they are gathering places for birthday parties, a space where travelers and locals can spend the night when homes can’t be heated, computer and internet hubs, and community centers.
The Karluk school building, which lost its state funding in 2018, lost funding from the borough last month, leaving the critical community structure’s fate in the hands of the tribal council.
For the council, it is economically more viable to support two families until they become self-sufficient than to run the school building on its own in the long term. The council received roughly 5,000 responses from families across the United States and other countries. These families will now receive application forms that the council hopes to process in the coming months.
If no families are up to the task of relocating to Karluk, the school building will be one more casualty in a state facing a crisis in education funding. Schools — both as education centers and cultural hubs — permanently shutting down are often the first signs of a struggling village in Alaska, education advocates said, adding that a school shutdown encourages those remaining in the village to leave. (...)
“I can’t fault anyone for trying an outside-the-box approach to improve outcomes for their kids,” said Dave Johnson, president of the Kodiak Island Borough School District Board of Education. “Our people are desperate for people to come up with creative solutions.”
Johnson said Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) appears “downright hostile to public education.” Dunleavy did not return a request for comment.
“The governor just vetoed over half of the increase in student funding that the legislature approved, which has cut our budget to the absolute bare minimum,” Johnson said. This contributed to the borough deciding to shut down the school building, he added.(...)
The biggest hurdle, however, will be in finding teachers willing and able to live and work in Karluk, which rests on the largest island in an archipelago stretching out from Alaska proper.
“That is what keeps me up at night, finding the teacher,” he said. “Educators may agree to come, but many don’t even last the school year in a remote, rural setting.” (...)
Since the Karluk school was shut down in 2018, teaching aide Joyce Jones has stayed on, teaching eight students at first, and now only two. When the school was shut down for seven years in the early 2000s because the student population dwindled below 10, it was Jones who taught the students by herself until the school reopened and the certified teachers returned, said Kathryn Reft, the secretary and treasurer for the council.
“The school is a big part of the community in Karluk,” Reft said. “It’s important for the morale of the village, for the two students who deserve to have peers and fully functional school, and it’s where we meet and gather.”
Johnson agrees that a village’s school serves as a symbol for the social health of the village itself.
“Once the school goes, it feels like the village is kind of on the brink,” he said. “Look at how much effort Karluk is putting in getting their school back. They don’t want to see their community fall apart.”
by Maham Javaid, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Alistair Gardiner/Kodiak Daily Mirror
