Unrest continues at Alaskan school

Two weeks after classes resumed in Kivalina, Alaska, the problems at McQueen School still aren’t over.

Kivalina, an Inupiat community of 375, is located on the Chukchi Sea coast, about 100 kilometres northwest of Kotzebue, Alaska.

On Feb. 27, local school board officials shut McQueen School down when half the teaching staff decided to leave the community following a series of violent incidents. The school reopened March 18.

“Last week the students seemed somewhat quiet for the first few days,” principal Betty Wallace wrote district officials and community leaders. “But they have been normal since then.”

Normalcy means fights, vandalism and harassment by students have flared up again. Someone also stole the hard drive from the school computer lab’s network server.

The recent spate of troubles at McQueen School apparently began last year. The Anchorage Daily News reported how the principal had sent a memo in October describing children lighting fires beneath and around the school and teacher housing, destroying property and tormenting school staffers.

“We have also discovered small children dipping wooden sticks and rolled-up plastic tubes into the gas tanks of four-wheelers and setting the sticks and tubes on fire,” Betty Wallace wrote. “They say they like to see the flames whoosh up.”

She said the school’s cable television wires were destroyed, so most students couldn’t watch coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Kivalina has no resident police or village public safety officer.

A second memo, released on Jan. 17, had announced that no McQueen students had passed the high school graduation qualifying exam and that most had failed other state-required tests.

But the school’s 135 students all graduated to the next grade when the academic year ended.

“Unfortunately, social promotion has been rampant for so many years at McQueen School, it will be a real challenge to stop it,” Wallace wrote. She called the entire situation “totally unacceptable.”

A report for Alaska’s education department that was released earlier this week called the Feb. 27 shutdown “the result of a long and complex chain of events in a dysfunctional school in a dysfunctional community” and said “little has changed as a result of the school closure.”

It said Kivalina has low educational expectations coupled with a “pervasive community tolerance of student misbehavior” that is rationalized and supported by some parents.

But it also said test scores are a sign of ineffective teaching and show there’s a gap between what’s taught in the classroom and daily life and culture.

The report recommends the Northwest Arctic Borough School District form a team of community and regional leaders and parents develop a “school improvement plan,” help improve student test scores, and boost student and community involvement.