A Right to Learn

<v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>[music plays] The Molly Hootch case was the largest educational settlement in history. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>The state of Alaska has spent close to 150 million dollars <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>putting schools in these villages. [music plays] <v Molly Hootch Hymes>The way I understood is they had to have a name for the case and so <v Molly Hootch Hymes>they supposedly put some names in a hat and <v Molly Hootch Hymes>picked out happened to pick out my name. [music plays] <v Dr. Marshall Lind>The Molly Hootch case was filed in 1972 <v Dr. Marshall Lind>by the Alaska Legal Services. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>A class action suit against the state regarding the provision of secondary <v Dr. Marshall Lind>educational programs in rural Alaska. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>Prior to that time, the youngsters residing in the <v Dr. Marshall Lind>rural areas of the state in many cases, in most cases did not have available to

<v Dr. Marshall Lind>them a residential or a local rather high school program. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>[music plays] <v Host>Tobeluk versus Lind. <v Host>Most Alaskans know the lawsuit as the Molly Hootch case. <v Host>In its final settlement in 1976, the state agreed to provide a high school <v Host>in virtually every Alaskan community. <v Host>Rural students who previously had to travel hundreds or thousands of miles from home to <v Host>boarding schools could now attend high school in their own villages. <v Host>By 1984, 126 rural communities had new high schools <v Host>at a cost of nearly $150 million. <v Host>The schools are small, many with fewer than 20 students. <v Host>Was it worth the cost? Can such small schools provide high quality education?

<v Host>To find out, the University of Alaska Center for Cross-Cultural Studies <v Host>conducted a yearlong study of small village schools. <v Host>The result is a report by Judith Kleinfeld, Bill McDiarmid, and David Hagstrom <v Host>called Alaska's Small Rural High Schools: Are They Working? <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>Now that the schools are built, now that all the all the <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>uh physical uh items necessary for education are in place, <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>people have got their attention on the academic program and improving that program. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>What our study was designed to find out was what are the needs <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>of these schools? What are they like? <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>What are the strategies that can make them work? <v Host>Situated on Alaska's windswept southwestern coast, Newtok is one of the most <v Host>traditional of Eskimo villages. <v Host>About 175 people live here. <v Host>Hunting and fishing for their food, as they always have. <v Host>Yupik is their primary language.

<v Host>In the high school, all projects, even the school newspaper, are written in both <v Host>English and Yupik. <v Teacher>So swiftly, quickly, speedly. <v Student>[student speaks in Yupik] <v Terry McCarthy>Of course, everybody wants to blend the student into the American culture, if we <v Terry McCarthy>do have one. <v Terry McCarthy>I don't know, I think I'd rather uh have the student learn how to adjust to the culture <v Terry McCarthy>that's coming at them rather than for them to go in and blend into that culture. <v Terry McCarthy>And for them to um realize that uh they have something to offer. <v Host>Five hundred miles northwest of Newtok, Dot Lake is a tiny community <v Host>on the Alaska Highway, halfway between Fairbanks and the Canadian border. <v Host>About 70 people live here. <v Host>10 high schoolers attend Dot Lake School. <v Gary Leighty>There is more similarity between Dot Lake and a school in South Carolina than there'd be <v Gary Leighty>between Dot Lake and Newtok, in our particular instance. <v Gary Leighty>?And? we're over 50 percent Caucasian, <v Gary Leighty>we have people who have come from all over the United States

<v Gary Leighty>settling in an area like this. Very quickly, I can think. <v Gary Leighty>Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Michigan, <v Gary Leighty>New Jersey. No school functions unless it meets and serves the needs of a community. <v Host>Russian Mission on the banks of the lower Yukon River, about 175 <v Host>Yup'ik Eskimos make their home here, where the hills meet the flats of the Yukon <v Host>Kuskokwim Delta. <v Host>Yupik is still spoken in the village, though mostly by the elders. <v Host>Those under 30 understand Yupik, but converse in English. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>Phil and I were hired to come to Russian Mission and we were told that there would be 48 <v Pat Evenson-Brady>kids K through 12. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>And that there would be 3 other teachers besides us, a full time special ed teacher and 2 <v Pat Evenson-Brady>other teachers. Well, when we arrived in Russian Mission, we discovered that 3 out of <v Pat Evenson-Brady>the 4 other teachers, not counting me, that they were going to teach high school. <v Host>Russian Mission's answer to this dilemma was innovative, if somewhat unorthodox.

<v Host>Teachers were assigned both high school and elementary school classes. <v Host>A limited staff has obvious drawbacks, but there are advantages as well. <v Host>Teachers get to know their students better, spending time with them individually. <v Host>They also can develop a common theme for the subjects they teach. <v Terry McCarthy>When I was put into a situation out here where I had to do all those different preps, <v Terry McCarthy>it finally came to me how everything really tied together and the students see that <v Terry McCarthy>very easily here. They can see that what they're doing in a shop class um <v Terry McCarthy>sprang out of something that happened in their English class or that what we're doing in <v Terry McCarthy>English can help them in their science and social studies. <v Terry McCarthy>So that's that's a real advantage also. <v Host>200 miles up the Yukon River from Russian Mission is Nulato, an <v Host>Athapasken Indian village.

<v Host>The homes of the town's 350 people are divided between an old site on the river <v Host>shore and a new site atop a nearby ridge. <v Host>Even though Nulato is isolated from the state's road system, many villagers own <v Host>cars and students are bused to school. <v Host>Originally, Catholic, Nulato's school was taken over by the state some years <v Host>before the Molly Hootch lawsuit. <v Host>As in most bush villages, people still rely heavily upon subsistence hunting <v Host>and fishing for their living. <v Host>Students are taught practical vocational skills at school, but a strong emphasis <v Host>is also placed on college preparation and the students have been very successful <v Host>in academic subjects. <v Glenn Olson>Well, Nulato students as a whole are average to above average <v Glenn Olson>in all the all the categories. <v Glenn Olson>And that's somewhat unusual for a rural rural school, especially <v Glenn Olson>in English. <v Host>Nulato is unique in this. <v Host>In most bush communities, standardized test scores are typically well below average.

<v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>Test scores in rural schools are very low and they have been low for <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>many years. Only a quarter of rural kids <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>are attaining uh achievement test scores at the 40th percentile <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>level or above. Most of them are far, far below <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>um their grade point, their grade average. <v Interviewer>What do you think of standardized tests? <v Terry McCarthy>[laughs] We just finished giving them today. I think they stink. <v Terry McCarthy>On the tests they took today, if I were to show you the English results when I got them <v Terry McCarthy>back, I really don't think that they would um <v Terry McCarthy>meet approval of many people, if they would look <v Terry McCarthy>at those scores. But if I were to take out the newspaper that our students <v Terry McCarthy>do, uh, the one I gave you today and hand that <v Terry McCarthy>to somebody, I know I'd get oohs and ahs and how do you <v Terry McCarthy>get your students to produce this?

<v Terry McCarthy>This is quality work. And that's that's a better way of measuring the kids <v Terry McCarthy>than the standardized tests. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>Standardized tests come with all kinds of inherent biases for <v Pat Evenson-Brady>rural kids. For example, one that we always come up with on SRA <v Pat Evenson-Brady>tests in about the fourth or the fifth grade tests. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>Kids are asked to deal with the word curb. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>Well, that's totally foreign to any experience any of them have had. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>I don't think the city of Bethel, which is the only place that most of them have ever <v Pat Evenson-Brady>have ever been has a curb in it. Russian mission certainly doesn't have a curb in it. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>Now, if we wanted to, we could teach kids what a curb is. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>And that probably would raise their test scores. On the other hand, the other thing we <v Pat Evenson-Brady>can do is just ignore it. Our kids start out behind. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>Our kids don't come to us with the same kind of skills that entering kindergartners <v Pat Evenson-Brady>outside have. And so we do play catch up. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>And because of that, you know, we we show more than 100 percent of national growth <v Pat Evenson-Brady>um over the last 4 years in in almost <v Pat Evenson-Brady>all grade levels and almost all subject areas.

<v Pat Evenson-Brady>So I feel like if we're if we're showing that kind of growth um that we're <v Pat Evenson-Brady>doing the kind of job that we need to be doing. <v Host>Some are concerned that rural students are not prepared socially for urban life. <v Katie Trotzke>There is no social life here. <v Katie Trotzke>There's there's nothing to do here at all. <v Katie Trotzke>There's. <v Katie Trotzke>You just end up going home all the time. <v Sam Trotzke>Miss a lot of the sports in a small school. <v Sam Trotzke>Well, we go every year. We go on a field trip. <v Sam Trotzke>And we go we play basketball tournaments in um <v Sam Trotzke>relatively close areas and we go skiing cross-country. <v Ruth Charles>I've heard people say, well, they miss out on the social life. <v Ruth Charles>But what is the social life? <v Ruth Charles>Drugs, alcohol, all of the things that go with it that you can pick up in a big <v Ruth Charles>city that you don't get in a small village or in a small rural school.

<v Ruth Charles>And here they have a lot of things. They have gyms where they can go and they can weight <v Ruth Charles>lift. They play basketball, all the different games. <v Ruth Charles>They have a community hall here with the videotapes and the movies and things. <v Ruth Charles>And this is enough for kids when they are going to school and they're going there to get <v Ruth Charles>an education, not to become social butterflies. <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>The kids have a very limited experience of the world. <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>They grow up in a in a uh small community. <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>Most of them. And then they go to a school and they interact with the same people <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>uh throughout their uh childhood and adolescence. <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>And they get very little experience of the world beyond that setting. <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>I'm from Sand Point and our high school back home <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>was real small. My graduating class was 8. <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>It the school itself was pretty close. <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>All the students were a close group.

<v Jocelyn Bjornstad>Um, in terms of preparing me, I was really lacking <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>in certain areas when I got here and I had a real hard time <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>adjusting academically. <v Alvin Williams>I'm from ?Ambler?, ?Ambler?, that's in the ?Nana? <v Alvin Williams>Region. <v Alvin Williams>Um, our school we didn't do, we didn't have any homework in all 4 of my high school <v Alvin Williams>years. <v Alvin Williams>Didn't have any skills that note taking in <v Alvin Williams>anything for preparating preparation for college. <v Alvin Williams>We just weren't taught anything that would help us in <v Alvin Williams>surviving in college life. <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>I just think it's real important for schools to have some sort of a counselor <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>that really starts to

<v Jocelyn Bjornstad>that'll start to motivate students and talk to them seriously about <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>plans after high school. <v Jocelyn Bjornstad>So that they know what's going on out there and that there are are more options. <v Glenn Olson>The studies we have done as far as kids succeeding from rural schools <v Glenn Olson>are not succeeding. Coming from a rural school to college have seemed to have shown that <v Glenn Olson>it's uh reasons that they haven't made it weren't necessarily academic <v Glenn Olson>preparation. The students we have interviewed and asked was it was more <v Glenn Olson>of a lack of urban survival skills and the and the the <v Glenn Olson>loneliness that they felt. <v Glenn Olson>Um, our district is, Yukon-?Koyukuk? <v Glenn Olson>district has acted to correct this. <v Glenn Olson>And that we have a man employed just to help these students with these problems. <v Glenn Olson>We have in our curriculum now urban, we're teaching urban survival skills. <v Interviewer>What do you what do you think of that? About leaving, leaving ?inaudible? and leaving to go to college? <v Jimmy Charles>I think I don't know. I think I'll be glad to leave in this place.

<v Jimmy Charles>Um, after living here for 18 years, it really gets to be boring. <v Terry McCarthy>Any time students travel, they the parents usually <v Terry McCarthy>refer to the old traditional saying if a student goes away from home, <v Terry McCarthy>two things will happen. They will either be hurt in an injury <v Terry McCarthy>or something like that, or they'll come back changed with bad habits <v Terry McCarthy>and a bad habit would be anything that's done differently than what is normally done <v Terry McCarthy>here. <v Speaker>We'd spent some time last year talking with the parents about their kids going out to <v Speaker>college because again, it was a big group of kids and it was the first time any of them <v Speaker>would have gone to Fairbanks. And everyone knows what a wicked and terrible city <v Speaker>Fairbanks is and so parents were concerned, trying to explain <v Speaker>to parents how it was going to be when the kids were in college. <v Sandra Kozenikoff>Boy, I had this feeling that I was losing my boy. <v Sandra Kozenikoff>I was losing my son. <v Sandra Kozenikoff>He confuses my mind so much.

<v Sandra Kozenikoff>He gets really homesick to come home. <v Sandra Kozenikoff>And then once he's here, he's saying, gee, I wonder what my friends are doing up at <v Sandra Kozenikoff>Fairbanks. <v Sandra Kozenikoff>Sandra Kozenikoff's son left the university before he completed his first <v Sandra Kozenikoff>year. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>The dropout rate at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks for rural kids <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>is roughly 60 percent after the first year. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>Uh, 60 percent of the kids from the small village high schools drop out. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>60 percent of the kids from other rural high schools drop out. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>60 percent of the kids from boarding schools dropout. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>The village high school kids aren't doing appreciably better or worse than <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>kids from other uh kinds of high schools. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>On the other hand, you have to look at things in perspective. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>If you go to Canada, they are amazed that we have a college dropout <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>problem. They can't get their Eskimo and Indian kids through high school. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>So sometimes you should be grateful for the problems you have. <v Teacher>OK, what do we do at this point?

<v Student>Cooler. <v Teacher>Cooler, OK. <v Teacher>Hung on to the sled. <v Teacher>There was one other thing. What else happened? <v Student>I got one. ?Conclusion? <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>We saw solid academic education going on and we saw schools <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>that would rival, some of the private progressive schools in Boston. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>At the same time, we saw some examples of horrid education. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>We saw village high schools that amounted to no more than a succession of worksheets <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>marching across the students' desks. <v Host>A small rural school's success depends in large part on its relationship with the <v Host>community. In schools that haven't worked well, there is little interaction between <v Host>the teachers and community members. <v Host>But in successful schools, teachers are involved in village life and welcome <v Host>direction from parents. <v Terry McCarthy>My basic philosophy is that um I'm the teacher. <v Terry McCarthy>I will teach the children what the parents want them to learn as <v Terry McCarthy>best that they can communicate that to me. <v Terry McCarthy>And if I can't do that, then I shouldn't be here. <v Larry Charles>?inaudible? The parents should have more say so in

<v Larry Charles>what their kids are learning in high school. <v Larry Charles>And they have uh a better understanding of uh the high schools <v Larry Charles>and high schoolers ?bill?. <v Larry Charles>And uh what they have to go through, what they're looking at right here <v Larry Charles>in the village. [kids playing] <v Ruth Charles>A few things that some of the parents say, uh we have a lot of deeply <v Ruth Charles>religious people in the area. <v Ruth Charles>And there's some things that they don't especially want, like evolution and things taught <v Ruth Charles>to the children. So the teachers do it very nicely. <v Ruth Charles>And there's no problem. There's no quarrel. <v Ruth Charles>With the parents or the teachers in the end, in this way, they all work together is what <v Ruth Charles>I'm trying to say. <v Paul Trotzke>Well, the basic curriculum, of course, is is put together by the professionals. <v Paul Trotzke>But if we have a real real problem with some parts of the content <v Paul Trotzke>uh we do, we we do uh contact uh or talk with uh the teachers <v Paul Trotzke>about it. And they've been very flexible, accommodating.

<v Paul Trotzke>We haven't had a teacher yet, they would say, well, I want to teach it whether you like <v Paul Trotzke>it or not, really, and stay by that. <v Gary Leighty>We don't intend to skew the offering <v Gary Leighty>away from mainstream America. <v Gary Leighty>If we teach biology, we simply are going to have to teach <v Gary Leighty>uh an entire course in biology. And that causes us to move forward <v Gary Leighty>and look at evolution as biological change <v Gary Leighty>and to give some consideration to Darwin and his theories. <v Gary Leighty>Again, no effort is being made to push a set of beliefs <v Gary Leighty>or scientific tenants forward as the last word. <v Gary Leighty>But in fairness to the children and to the parents, it's only right <v Gary Leighty>that we present the current status in a particular course. <v Student>4 C squared XP.

<v Teacher>OK. <v Host>Teacher turnover is a real problem in rural Alaska, only 45 percent <v Host>of rural teachers remain at any one school for 2 years or more. <v Host>At the end of the 1984 school year, all the teachers at Dot Lake left, <v Host>all the present staff started new the next fall. <v Host>In the months since work began on this program, Terry McCarthy left Newtok <v Host>and Pat Evensen-Brady, Russian Mission. <v Host>Ray and Yenti verg-in have left Russian Mission also. <v Host>Now they teach at Mount Edgecumbe High School in Sitka. <v Ray Verg-in>Basically, we felt that it was a chance to move ahead professionally <v Ray Verg-in>because actually income-wise we make less money than what we did out in the village <v Ray Verg-in>and we liked the village, it was home. <v Ray Verg-in>But uh we'd been there long enough that we are a long ways from your peer group <v Ray Verg-in>and we just felt that professionally it would be to our advantage and move ahead, <v Ray Verg-in>you know, in our field to move down here to Edgecumbe. <v Host>In the 1960s and 70s, Mount Edgecumbe was a boarding school for native Alaskans

<v Host>run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. <v Host>The federal government closed the school in 1983. <v Host>In the fall of 85, the state of Alaska reopened it as a boarding option <v Host>for students from across the state. <v Host>Priority goes to students without access to a local school. <v Host>For the 175 who are accepted, the state provides room and board <v Host>and pays for transportation to Sitka in the fall and home in the spring. <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>I think it's important to view Edgecumbe as an experiment in a way. <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>Nobody's ever tried to do this before. <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>When Edgecumbe was a BIA boarding school, it was a very different school than what it is <v Dr. Williamson McDiarmid>now. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>Mount Edgecumbe has had enormous effects in creating a strong and competent Native <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>leadership. The problem that the school faces now <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>is they are not enrolling the same kinds of kids. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>They have a very diverse student body. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>They take some kids who have family problems. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>Some kids who are social referrals.

<v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>Some kids who are academically talented. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>About a third of their enroll- enrollment is actually from urban areas rather than rural <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>areas. It's going to be a very difficult task to <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>meld that diverse student body into a school with a common <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>purpose and a sound educational program. <v Teacher>So tell me, ?Muska?, and you would say ?hi? <v Teacher>[speaking Japanese] I always eat! <v Host>One way Mount Edgecumbe is working to give students a common purpose is by structuring <v Host>classes around a common theme. <v Host>Pacific Rim Studies. <v Host>All students who start as freshmen must take at least one year of Japanese. <v Host>Chinese is also offered. <v Host>Science classes include Ocean Science and Physics of the Ocean. <v Bill Denkinger>The Pacific Rim is very important to us as it is to the state of Alaska, and <v Bill Denkinger>that's why it's an important part of our curriculum here. <v Bill Denkinger>We are gearing our classes to the future of Alaska

<v Bill Denkinger>and where we think we're going to be 10, 15 years from now and where these students will <v Bill Denkinger>be in those kind of skills that they will need. <v Bill Denkinger>[music plays] <v Host>Although they are closely supervised, dormitories are seldom a perfect substitute <v Host>for home. Still, students think it is worth it for the academic advantages <v Host>Mount Edgecumbe offers. <v Groovy Weaver>My name is Groovy Weaver and I'm from Pilot Station and I came to Mount Edgecumbe <v Groovy Weaver>because mainly for its educational benefits, because back home <v Groovy Weaver>we didn't have that many good classes to have, you know, like around here. <v Groovy Weaver>We didn't have much to choose from. <v Bob Thompson>This is a major step for me because I've been in a small village all my life. <v Berdi Outwater>Mount Edgecumbe offers a lot, not only academically, but, you know, socially, <v Berdi Outwater>too. And we become more independent and more responsible. <v Larrae Rocheleau>Juneau has an alternative high school.

<v Larrae Rocheleau>I believe Anchorage has 4 or 5 alternative high schools. <v Larrae Rocheleau>Fairbanks has a couple. Um, Ketchikan has one. <v Larrae Rocheleau>So you have alternative high schools for urban students. <v Larrae Rocheleau>Why shouldn't there be an alternative high school for rural students? <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>Our research showed that most of the parents and the principals we <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>interviewed wanted some type of boarding school option. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>They said that village high schools weren't the best place for everyone. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>The disagreement centered on what the boarding option should be. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>A small village high school simply cannot provide all <v Pat Evenson-Brady>of the options for kids. We can only offer 8 or 9 classes a year. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>The problem is, and and of course we're talking about Edgecumbe. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>Edgecomb is so unholy expensive and and <v Pat Evenson-Brady>there's only a limited amount of money. <v Pat Evenson-Brady>If Edgecumbe eats up a bunch of education dollars <v Pat Evenson-Brady>and if Edgecumbe in addition drains off my brightest students from Russian Mission, <v Pat Evenson-Brady>no, it's not going to have done the rest of my kids a real service

<v Pat Evenson-Brady>in any sense. <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>?That at? Mount Edgecumbe will never take money away. <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>Nobody can make that statement. You could always say that the 3 and a half or 4 million <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>dollars at Mount Edgecumbe would cost on an annual basis for the next several years <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>could have been added for distribution throughout the state. <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>So the argument is a reasonable argument that it may, <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>in fact, take money away. It has not, in fact, yet. <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>Second, will it take students away? <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>It will only take students away if the parent and the school district <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>both believe that there is some advantage for those students <v Dr. Harold Raynolds, Jr.>to go to a place like Mount Edgecumbe. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>I hope that as it is now, organized and operated. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>I hope that they will be successful. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>I hope that the students who go there will obtain a first rate <v Dr. Marshall Lind>education. It certainly is at a first rate cost. <v Host>Marshall Lind was Alaska's Commissioner of Education when the Molly Hootch case was

<v Host>settled in 1976. <v Host>Oil revenues were high. The state's economy was booming. <v Host>Today, with revenues declining, many are worried that rural schools could be cut. <v Host>Were this to happen, villages would lose more than just a high school. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>When you spend money for high school in rural Alaska, you're also buying a community <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>center. These small high schools uh provide entertainment for the village's <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>basketball games, football games, choir. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>Many of the schools are running businesses. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>They're providing restaurants, showers, greenhouses, equipment, shops. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>It's uh more reasonable to look at them as a community center, not just <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>as a high school. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>We may only have a 9 and 10 year program. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>9th and 10th grade, 11th and 12th will have to be taken in some residential <v Dr. Marshall Lind>program, either in a boarding home program or something very similar to that. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>I'm sure that that's gonna- have to be one of the the options we'll have to look at. <v Dr. Marshall Lind>Now, on the surface, you say, oh, my goodness, we're going back to the way we used to.

<v Dr. Marshall Lind>Not quite, because years ago we didn't even offer the 9th and 10th grade <v Dr. Marshall Lind>at the local level. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>It seems to me that that rather than have one statewide strategy, <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>some new final solution to the problem of secondary schools. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>What we need are many solutions, solutions that fit the situation in different <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>parts of Alaska. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>What I hope this report will do is to remove this cloud of <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>skepticism that hangs over the village high school. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>This feeling that somehow these schools aren't real high schools and that they can't <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>work. Let's change the debate from were these high schools a good <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>idea to what are the ways that we can support and strengthen them. <v Dr. Judith S. Kleinfeld>[music plays]