To Foster Community Support in Alaska, add ICE (continued)

Help from the Alaska Association of School Boards

Under the umbrella of Alaska ICE, Wrangell became a partner in QS2, which includes a big element of community involvement. Over the years in Wrangell, community involvement has helped to boost student achievement. The gap narrowed between the test scores of Alaska Native students (Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts) and white students. Reading scores improved. School spirit came back—where once the volleyball team might have had eight spectators at a game, there soon was an actual cheering section. “After the mill closed, there was a lot of fighting, moodiness, depression,” remembers high school principal Monty Buness. “Assets gave us a sense of hope.” Adds ICE community engagement specialist Kem Haggard, “It was a very conscious effort to build assets into our children and to say 'yes, our community IS there for our kids.' We focused on the positive instead of the negative.”

Today a long list could be reeled off about how Wrangell connects to its students and encourages them to become responsible citizens:

• Alaska Marine Lines buys space in the Sentinel newspaper to spotlight a high school senior each week.

• Before the district goes to Juneau to lobby on education issues, superintendent Susan Sciabbarrasi goes over the district’s budget with the high school student council. Students apply to accompany school board members to the capital, and Sciabbarrasi says, “The students really know their stuff. Legislators listen to them.”

• A local church sponsored an old-fashioned drive-in movie theater for little kids; families painted large cardboard boxes to make the “cars” that children sat in. (One teenager, hearing that not all parents would be participating, constructed a giant Hummer that accommodated five kids.)

• Peter Helgeson, general manager of radio station KSTK, invited teenagers to participate in making three videos, such as one on totem pole restoration, as a part of their curriculum. “We trained them to do interviews, take videos, do microfiche research. I had predisposed notions of how it was going to be. They thought [my approach] was boring. I learned to let THEM drive it.”

• In 2000, Wrangell started student-led parent-teacher conferences, in which students do the preparation and presentation of their own academic strengths and weaknesses.

• The Interagency Team (police, fire, hospital, behavioral health officials, tribal leaders, and others) coordinates their efforts to support young people.

• “Getting parents to school was our hardest problem,” says former school board chair Janell Privett, acknowledged by many as a leader behind the intensified community engagement. Soon Wrangell schools featured Grandparents Day, math day, a Hooligan fair—all efforts to help adults connect with kids.

Measuring progress

Wrangell’s standardized test scores are strong. In terms of requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Wrangell has met AYP (adequate yearly progress) as a district and for all subgroups (e.g., economically disadvantaged, ethnic, disabled); 90 percent of students showed proficiency in language arts and 82 percent in math in 2006.

Wrangell also measured the asset levels for its youth, both in 1997 and in 2004, and found that over time, many deficit and risky behaviors decreased. Use of alcohol dropped 21 percent, for instance, and sexual activity dropped 30 percent.*