\n<\/p>\n
On a Sunday morning last month, James Taq\u2019ac Amik was huddled on a small bridge with his girlfriend. At 4 a.m., they had scrambled into an 18-foot aluminum motor boat, fleeing floodwaters from a massive storm surge that inundated Kipnuk, a village of 700 in the heart of western Alaska\u2019s sprawling Kuskokwim river delta.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t make it up. I tried, but the wind was too strong to try and go by boat, so we ended up staying on the bridge for five hours,\u201d Amik said. Things only grew more dramatic. \u201cThe houses started drifting away around 5:30 a.m.,\u201d Amik said. \u201cThere was still lights in them, there was people in them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
When they set out, the couple were heading to Kipnuk\u2019s public school, the largest building in the Alaska Native Yup\u2019ik village. At least that building, they hoped at the time, would be secure.<\/p>\n
The storm that hit Alaska\u2019s west coast in mid-October was the remnants of Typhoon Halong, which picked up momentum in a warmer-than-normal Pacific Ocean. After the wind died down and the floodwaters receded, the village lay in ruins. But while the school still stood relatively unscathed on its steel pilings more than 20 feet above the muck and wreckage, there were other problems inside. District staff had been working on much-needed upgrades to its main generator. Then the school\u2019s backup generator sputtered. Everyone in the community, including Amik and his girlfriend, stayed for two days until local leaders decided the storm had done too much damage and organized a mass evacuation.<\/p>\n
James Taq\u2019ac Amik, his girlfriend and his daughter fled to the school in Kipnuk before evacuating to an Anchorage hotel more than 480 miles away two days later.<\/span> Gabby Hiestand Salgado\/KYUK<\/span><\/p>\n When disaster strikes, public school buildings are integral as safe havens in hundreds of predominantly Indigenous villages scattered across Alaska\u2019s vast landscape. In many remote communities, schools are some of the only buildings with flush toilets and their own generators. Schools are often the only buildings that stand on pilings \u2014 important amid the rising waters of climate change \u2014 and also the only buildings large enough to house dozens if not hundreds of people for days at a time.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a known fact that if you need to evacuate, you evacuate to the elementary school,\u201d said Alaska state Sen. L\u00f6ki Tobin, a Democrat and chair of the Senate Education Committee, who grew up in Nome but now represents Anchorage.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThose are lifeboats,\u201d said Alaska\u2019s emergency management director, Bryan Fisher. \u201cThey\u2019re the last place of refuge.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican and former educator, has declared more than a dozen disasters since August 2024, and in at least half of those cases, public schools were used as emergency shelters. The state reported damage in 52 communities in October, and the impacts forced\u00a0 hundreds of residents to sleep in gymnasiums and on classroom floors in rural public schools. Since 1998, Alaska has seen more than 140 state-declared disasters, and dozens of those required schools to function as shelters.<\/p>\n But Alaska\u2019s rural schools have been neglected for decades. Earlier this year, ProPublica, KYUK Public Media and NPR documented a health and safety crisis inside many rural school buildings across Alaska. In some cases, the buildings that function as safe havens in times of emergency are becoming emergencies themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n The state is required by law to fund construction and maintenance projects in rural school districts because they serve unincorporated communities where there is no tax revenue to help fund education. In the last 28 years, Alaska\u2019s rural school districts have made close to 1,800 requests to the state for money to maintain and repair deteriorating schools, but only 14% of those requests have been approved. And as the backlog of major maintenance projects continues to grow, the state budget has been shrinking.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJust the maintenance that goes in every day to keep up a building, that\u2019s really where the flaw is,\u201d said Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop. For years, her department has struggled to meet the growing need for dollars to maintain school facilities, including more than 60 owned by the state. \u201cThe crux of the situation,\u201d she said during an interview in Juneau last year, is that \u201cwe get to an emergency because we didn\u2019t take care of it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The main generator that provides power to the school in Kipnuk was not working before hundreds of residents fled there during ex-Typhoon Halong. Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Hannibal Anderson said the generator \u201cwas working well enough to provide what it needed for the school.\u201d But it was quickly overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand for power once the school became Kipnuk\u2019s primary emergency shelter. A smaller backup generator also couldn\u2019t meet that demand to charge cellphones and keep the building heated after the community\u2019s residents piled in.\u00a0<\/p>\n Emergency supplies fill the lobby of the Chief Paul Memorial School in Kipnuk, Alaska. Nearly 700 people sheltered there for two days after ex-Typhoon Halong.<\/span> Eric Stone\/Alaska Public Media<\/span><\/p>\n A storm surge from the remnants of Typhoon Halong carried houses off their foundations and scattered them throughout the village. The impacts forced the entire community to shelter in the local public school. <\/span> Eric Stone\/Alaska Public Media<\/span><\/p>\n The school district waited 14 years for the state to approve funding to do a major renovation in 2015, but it has not asked for funding since then. Every year, the applications school districts submit for construction and maintenance funds are ranked. Data analysis and interviews with superintendents across the state indicate that submitting an application that ranks high enough to win funding is cumbersome, and they feel pressure to include professional inspections and surveys, which can be expensive. Anderson explained that although the generator required maintenance, he believed Kipnuk\u2019s needs wouldn\u2019t be considered urgent enough to receive funding. \u201cKipnuk is a relatively new school,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In Kotlik, a village of just over 650 residents almost 220 miles north of Kipnuk, 70 people spent two nights at the school. \u201cWe have a church and a community building, but those are seldom used in evacuations,\u201d explained Principal Cassius Brown. \u201cThat\u2019s because the school is situated higher and it\u2019s not as close to the river.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Since 2018, the Lower Yukon School District has made annual requests ranging from $2 million to more than $5 million to the state\u2019s education department to make extensive repairs to the school in Kotlik and another in a nearby village. That work remains unfunded.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Chevak, where about 950 Alaska Native Cup\u2019ik people live less than a dozen miles from the Bering Sea coast, school Principal Lillian Olson said 65 people spent a few nights on the gymnasium floor. \u201cOur community is kind of dependent on the school for shelter,\u201d Olson said. \u201cOne time two years ago, we had an electric outage in one part of town that lasted for like a week, and because the houses didn\u2019t have electricity and no heat, we housed them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Olson said a test of the building\u2019s fire sprinklers failed in September. In a phone call last spring, Kashunamiut School District Superintendent Jeanne Campbell described a host of problems related to the Chevak school\u2019s boiler and broken water pipes that impacted the fire sprinkler system. \u201cAnd that\u2019s just inside the building,\u201d Campbell said.<\/p>\n Last year, that school district made its first request to the state\u2019s education department since 2001, asking for $32 million to update and renovate the school. The proposal was one among 114 for fiscal year 2025. The state allocated enough money for only 17 of those projects. Work at the Chevak school was not one of them.<\/p>\n Just over a dozen miles west, in Hooper Bay, Mayor Charlene Nukusuk said between 50 and 60 people sheltered for two nights in that community\u2019s public school. The village\u2019s location makes it extremely vulnerable: Over the last few decades, fall coastal storms have devoured several rows of sand dunes that used to protect the community of 1,375 people. Now, the black and frigid Bering Sea laps at the beach only a few hundred feet from the far corner of the local airport runway. Nukusuk said the school is one of the safest buildings.<\/p>\n Hooper Bay\u2019s school was rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in 2006. Since then, the district has made 29 funding requests totaling more than $8.4 million in needed repairs to the state for a range of projects on the school including roofing, emergency lighting and siding. Last year, the district received money for one of those \u2014 just under $2.3 million for \u201cexterior repairs,\u201d according to state data. The superintendent did not respond to questions about specific needs in Hooper Bay.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alaska\u2019s emergency management division does not have formal agreements with the state\u2019s education department designating schools as emergency shelters, and neither agency has funding to help maintain schools specifically as emergency shelters. However, a division spokesperson said there are some state grants that schools could access for emergency preparedness.<\/p>\n @georgebrightsr via TikTok<\/span>\n<\/p>\n \u201cSchools are built for educational purposes \u2014 other uses are incidental or secondary to design,\u201d education department spokesperson Bryan Zadalis wrote in an email. He said no one from the education department visits schools \u201cto ascertain whether a facility is in condition to serve as an emergency shelter.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know if people necessarily correlated together that if you\u2019re going to use schools as multipurpose facilities, that you also have to maintain them for those purposes,\u201d said Tobin, the state senator. \u201cThey\u2019re not just institutions of learning. They\u2019re also institutions of after-school activities, of community gatherings, and of evacuation facilities and disaster preparedness support infrastructure,\u201d she said.\u00a0In February 2024, Tobin, who also sits on the state Senate\u2019s Military and Veterans Affairs finance subcommittee, put the question of funding schools for emergencies to Craig Christenson, deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, during a budget meeting.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Alaska\u2019s emergency management division falls under Christenson\u2019s department. \u201cFrom my understanding,\u201d Tobin said to him, \u201cif the school wasn\u2019t available in some of these very small, rural, remote areas, we would be paying to evacuate people, versus using an asset that we have already put resources into but have already failed to maintain. Is that accurate?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t comment on failing to maintain them,\u201d Christenson responded. \u201cOur department does not maintain schools.\u201d (The deputy commissioner declined to comment further on last year\u2019s meeting.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBut you do utilize them?\u201d Tobin asked.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do,\u201d Christenson said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On a Sunday morning last month, James Taq\u2019ac Amik was huddled on a small bridge with his girlfriend. At 4 a.m., they had scrambled into an 18-foot aluminum motor boat, fleeing floodwaters from a massive storm surge that inundated Kipnuk, a village of 700 in the heart of western Alaska\u2019s sprawling Kuskokwim river delta.\u00a0 \u201cI<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[7131,18775,1274,247,177,588,7770,18776],"class_list":{"0":"post-32565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-alaskas","9":"tag-deteriorating","10":"tag-emergency","11":"tag-propublica","12":"tag-public","13":"tag-schools","14":"tag-serve","15":"tag-shelters"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Kipnuk Neighbors Take Refuge in the School\u2019s Main Atrium<\/strong><\/h3>\n