Hundreds of the people displaced by ex-typhoon Halong were children in the middle of their school year. More than 100 of the evacuated students are now taking classes in Bethel.
Most of the hardest-hit communities are in the Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD). Superintendent Andrew "Hannibal" Anderson said that the district did what it could to situate students in new classrooms as soon as possible.
“The schools, of course, have removed immediately any sort of bureaucratic red tape or paperwork that would be any kind of barrier of time in terms of having students being able to get into the schools and into classrooms,” Anderson explained.
As of Oct. 27, 117 new students have been enrolled across five Bethel schools, including Bethel Regional High School, Gladys Jung Elementary School, Kuskokwim Learning Academy, Mikelnguut Elitnaurviat, and Ayaprun Elitnaurvik, the district’s Yup’ik language immersion school. That's about a 10% increase in student population from the 1,203 enrolled across the Bethel schools as of Oct. 1 of this year.
Another seven students evacuated from hard-hit villages to other Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta communities and have enrolled in other schools within the district. Anderson said that those figures are likely to change — it’s still early in the process. He said that school provides a form of stability for students navigating a new normal. And though Bethel is very different from the evacuated villages, Anderson said that the district has been happy to play a role in keeping some students closer to home.
“One can be sure [it’s] a challenging transition for students to come into new classrooms, bigger classrooms, many people they don't know,” Anderson explained. “But hopefully they are also experiencing a lot of support, very genuine commitments of support and care, and feeling relatively close to their home territory here in Bethel, rather than being so far away as Anchorage or other places.”
LKSD started re-enrolling evacuated students on Oct. 20. Across its schools, Anderson said that the district has moved enrollment for 63 students from Kipnuk, 56 from Kwigillingok, and six from Nightmute. He said that LKSD is working to accommodate each student’s unique set of needs.
“We're responding to that with monitoring or communicating with the schools on where the particular significant increases of numbers occur or needs occur, and then responding to that with supporting those schools with additional staffing,” Anderson said. “We're still pretty much within the initial early steps in that flow.”
Anderson said that Bethel schools have pulled out spare furniture from the old Ayaprun Elitnaurvik building to accommodate the influx of students. He said that they’ve also been able to find extra tech devices for the new students from additional supplies or moving things around within the district. He said that afterschool programs and extracurriculars are also open to the new students.
“I think an overarching piece of all this is that the schools are certainly opening their arms to the new students and doing what they can to make them welcome and to include them,” Anderson said.
Anderson said across the district, schools are still figuring out how to accommodate transferred students and help them feel at home. He said that there’s been talk in Bethel of hosting potlucks or other community events to welcome the new families.
