For the last several months, KYUK’s Emily Schwing has been investigating why Alaska’s rural public schools are falling apart. This week we’ll hear some of the work she’s done in partnership with ProPublica and National Public Radio (NPR).
Schwing sat down with KYUK’s Sage Smiley to talk more about the project and what she has found.
Read a transcript of the conversation below.
KYUK (Sage Smiley): Thanks so much for joining me today on [“Coffee at KYUK”], Emily. First of all, can you tell us what made you take on this project?
Emily Schwing: So honestly, I got a phone call and a couple text messages from someone in Sleetmute. He was very persistent, and finally I picked up the phone and he explained what was going on with the building in Sleetmute and all of the structural damage that the school district was trying to mitigate.
KYUK: For those who haven’t interacted with KYUK’s previous reporting, with your previous reporting on Sleetmute school, what’s happening there?
Schwing: What is happening in the Sleetmute school is that the roof there has been leaking for almost two decades, and maybe even longer than that. It’s caused a ton of other damage in the building. The water has run down into some of the walls; there’s water damage in the ceiling. The wetness that has been left unchecked has caused a lot of black mold to develop in the building. And then the other thing that’s happening is at the structural studs in the walls, particularly in the school’s wood shop, which is at the back of the building. As that keeps rotting, the building’s becoming structurally unsound, to a point where architectural inspections and engineering reports say that the building, the back end of the building, at least, is just not safe for use.
KYUK: So it sounds like a really dire situation for Sleetmute school, but this project isn’t only focusing on Sleetmute. How did what you found in Sleetmute kind of carry you through to a bigger investigation in the state?
Schwing: I do a lot of my reporting from small communities in western Alaska and elsewhere, and I started noticing in the past few years, as I was staying in schools, that there were problems with infrastructure. There were problems with drinking water, and sewer lines, and how useful the bathrooms could be. I was in a school in Kivalina a few years ago, and the windows were wind blown to the point you couldn’t see out of them. I was smelling things in certain schools. I was in a school in Mertarvik last year where you could smell raw sewage, and then we actually found raw sewage. And I’ve been in schools where the power is unreliable. Up in Venetie, the phone doesn’t work in one part of the building. So I was just kind of noticing all of these problems with this public infrastructure, and then I started to really put those pieces together after I visited the Sleetmute school.
KYUK: So in this project, looking at school infrastructure, focusing on Western Alaska and other parts of the state, what did you find?
Schwing: Oh, I found all kinds of things, Sage. [laughter] I’m not laughing because it’s funny, I’m laughing because it’s overwhelming. In Venetie, I spent a lot of time – that school, it has a really strange layout. So there are three different attic spaces [and] I found uncovered electrical wiring. I found deteriorating insulation around pipes. I found a very persistent propylene glycol leak from the heating system. Let’s see, what else? You know, in Sleetmute, I had a little boy tell me that sometimes the ceiling tiles fall out of the ceiling while he’s sitting in his kindergarten classroom.
KYUK: So it sounds like there are a lot of pretty stark issues with schools throughout the state of Alaska. How did it get this bad?
Schwing: I’ll be really honest with you, Sage, I think it’s been this bad always, and the reason I say that is because when we gained statehood in 1959, lawmakers really wanted to establish a statewide public school system, and they really grappled with how to pay for it. They knew it was going to be expensive, but they also knew that there were a lot of places that either didn’t have schools, and if they did have schools they were schools that were operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and those schools were known to have a lot of issues, a lot of the same issues that I’m telling you about today. So there was a push to unify our school system, because lawmakers didn’t want to have two separate tracks that could diverge, but taking over BIA schools was going to be really expensive and lawmakers were really grappling with this into the 1970s. One thing that really stood out to me was a transcript that I found from a 1971 Congressional hearing where then [United States] Sen. Mike Gravel, a Democrat, he described the conditions inside BIA schools and he said that many Alaska children, “go to school in buildings that should be condemned as fire traps or unsafe dwellings.” When I was reading this transcript, I really felt like he was describing some of the schools that I have been inside of today.
KYUK: So where did it go from there, then? That’s the 1980s, there’s been a pretty large stretch of time in between then and now. What happened after the the 1971 Congressional hearing you just spoke about and then the state taking over those BIA schools in the 80s?
Schwing: The BIA finally relinquished its schools to the state by the end of the 1980s, I think 1989 was the last year that those schools were transferred. And then after that, there was also a lawsuit about the same time called – well, it’s known as Tobeluk v. Lind, but it’s also known as the Molly Hootch case, and that case centered around accessibility. Molly Hootch is from Emmonak, and she was part of this case where a bunch of students got together and sued because they had to do high school by correspondence, so they were getting their assignments by mail and then mailing them back. So the argument there was that we are supposed to have access for all children to public school, mandated in our state constitution, and correspondence didn’t allow for that access. The next case after that really – so the Molly Hootch case was decided in favor of Molly Hootch, and then 126 public schools were built throughout rural Alaska and villages after that. In the 1990s there was another case, it’s known as the Kasayulie case, and this case was really precedent-setting for public school infrastructure and how the state funds it. So parents of students got together and filed this suit against the state, arguing that the way public schools were funded was unfair to rural communities because rural communities don’t have a tax base, so they don’t have a local government that can levy taxes and then pull from that tax revenue to cover the cost of public school infrastructure. That case was settled with a consent decree in 2011 and the judge did, in fact, say, ‘Yes, the state needs to rework the way it funds public school infrastructure.’ And there [are] two orders in that case, and in those orders the judge also described a lot of the conditions that I’m telling you about today.
KYUK: And then that was, what now, 14,15 years ago, but you’re still seeing a lot of the same things. So whose responsibility is this now?
Schwing: This is really the crux of all of this reporting, for me, is finding the accountability piece of this. So I’ve gone through state documents from the [Alaska] Department of Education, all of the requests from urban and rural school districts for funding dating back to 1998. At the same time, I’ve also gone through all of the ownership documents that I can find for public school buildings in rural communities, and what I’m finding is that there are 128 rural public schools that are open and operating today in Alaska, and the state owns just under half of those schools. In the [Alaska] Department of Education’s own regulations, it says that school districts have to get use permits for the buildings that they don’t own and essentially be a good tenant, right? Just as a renter and a landlord would make an agreement, the tenant, the school district in this case, has to take care of the building and its everyday functions, but the state is still fully responsible for construction and maintenance of the buildings. Those regulations are legally binding. They’re as strong as state law. So state law basically says that in the case of the buildings that are owned by the state, the state is responsible for funding investment in construction and maintenance.
KYUK: But that hasn’t been happening?
Schwing: No. The simple answer is no. The more complicated answer is, why not? We don’t really know, other than there is this constant, seemingly annual battle in the [Alaska] Legislature every year over how to fund education. I did talk to [Alaska Department of] Education Commissioner Deena Bishop about this very thing, and she says it’s not as simple as the state just has to pay for it. She’s waiting for money that comes from the [Alaska] Legislature’s decision on how to fund the state budget. And then it just starts to get more and more complicated from there, because the governor’s office wants one thing, and certain lawmakers want another, and then other lawmakers want this, and the [Alaska] Department of Education needs that, and we’re talking about just one agency among many agencies that are asking lawmakers for money every year.
KYUK: In this back and forth in the state legislature, between the governor’s office, between all these state agencies, what’s the impact on the schools themselves?
Schwing: The impact on the schools themselves is that school suffers. The actual education suffers. And I think that the experience of students, teachers, and staff who use these buildings every day also suffer. The money that would otherwise go to pay for things like textbooks, curriculum, whiteboards or smart boards, or actual tools for learning and teaching eventually goes to pay for things like the lumber that is temporarily holding up the back end of Sleetmute’s woodshop right now, and so school administrators are then tasked with figuring out what to cut. And at this point, they’re starting to decide whether they should cut a teacher’s aide or a whole class, a whole art class or a whole second language class. And that’s really where the suffering starts to happen, I think. And the other thing is, you know, like in the case of Sleetmute, there’s 25 people who use that school every day that are all sharing a single bathroom because the boys’ bathroom is also now closed. The gymnasium is in the section of the building that is structurally unsound. So on days when it’s 30 below zero [Fahrenheit] in Sleetmute, in the wintertime, which is typical for that part of Alaska, kids are stuck inside for recess, where they can play quiet games inside, but they can’t get their wiggles out on the playground. And so I think those are the parts of the impact of what’s really happening in Alaska schools that are often forgotten.
KYUK: What surprised you in the process of reporting this story?
Schwing: What surprised me the most is just how none of this seems to matter to my fourth grade friends, Loretta and Edward in Sleetmute, who took me on a tour of their school, and showed me their playground, and told me about how they like to go on YouTube after school. So what surprises me about this is you could be sitting in a classroom with a ton of water damage in your ceiling and the ceiling tiles falling down around you, and you are still so eager to learn. And I found that really just very heartening. It made me proud of all these little kids who just go to school every day.
KYUK: So this week we’re going to be hearing a series of stories from your investigation. What can people expect to hear from this KYUK reporting?
Schwing: We’re going to talk a lot about the health impacts and what we know can happen from long term exposure to things like a bat infestation, or black mold, or raw sewage. You’re also going to hear about exactly how hard school districts work to ask the state for money and the upfront financial investment that rural school districts are making in the hope of securing funds from the lawmakers, and then that never comes to fruition. We’re seeing projects that have waited for, you know, five years or more, then 10 years to be funded and still haven’t been funded. So you’ll hear a lot about that, and then you’re also going to hear about the current discussion in the legislative session that’s happening in Juneau right now, and what lawmakers are talking about funding versus what constituents are telling lawmakers they really need.
KYUK: What do you hope to hear from people in KYUK’s listening region, from people in communities in these rural education attendance areas?
Schwing: I really am interested in the origins of some of these buildings, particularly the Molly Hootch-era schools. I want to know if there are people who remember going to school in these buildings. I want to know if there are people who helped build them. I really am very interested in the history of those older schools in particular, but honestly, I also really would love to hear from people about what the school as a building really means to the community, because we’re not always just talking about a place where kids go to class and teachers teach those classes. We’re talking about a place that serves the community in so many different ways, from community gatherings, to spring carnivals, to basketball tournaments, to funerals, potlatches, you name it, Cama’i, there’s so many ways that this school serves a community, and so I would love to hear from people about why it’s important to them. And I always love hearing a good story. So if somebody has, like, a memory, or just a really meaningful story to them about being in school, I want to hear about it.
KYUK: How can people get those stories to you?
Schwing: They can email me at emily@kyuk.org, and you can call me at 907-545-6228.
KYUK: Thank you so much for sharing about your reporting, Emily, we’re excited to listen to this first installment of your project.
Schwing: Thanks for having me, Sage. I’m excited for you to hear it.
This project is a partnership between KYUK and ProPublica investigating rural school infrastructure and spending in Alaska. Support for this reporting also comes from the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and its Fund for Reporting on Child Well-Being and the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.