The first question I was asked for the first month that I was up here was "How are the kids different?" And depending on the situation, would depend on which "kids" they were talking about. Sometimes they were talking about kids in Colorado, other times it was kids in Alaska. The kids in Colorado and the kids in Alaska are not too terribly different. It's just different circumstances that make the kids different. When it comes down to it, they're still kids. Their work ethic isn't much different between the two places, they have relationship problems with the boy/girl friends, some of them have great home-lives and some of them don't, and they love sports.
Because of the circumstances of the high schools in the villages, there are a lot of students who live in other villages that come up to our school because there's no high school in their village. They stay with extended family or live in boarding homes while their here. The boarding home parents get paid for taking in kids, of course, and they usually have kids of their own at home. They also have the right to send the students back to their homes if they get out of hand up here.
Education up here is very focused on the SBAs, which is the state-mandated test (similar to the CSAP in Colorado). The SBAs here though are much more important to most of the students, staff, and parents than the CSAPs ever were for anyone I knew in Colorado. I guess that is definitely a major difference between the two places. Don't get me wrong, everyone knows it's important to pass your state-mandated test (CSAP, SBA, whatever) because of No Child Left Behind...but in Colorado, that's as far as it goes. In Alaska, the students have to take an exit exam to graduate high school, which is taken for the first time at the end of 10th grade. They are tested on reading, writing, and math, and the material is supposed to align with the Alaska state standards, which funny enough, is the same idea with the SBAs.
Most of the kids here are very technology savvy, too. Our school district is a Mac 1-to-1 school, which means every middle school student has access to their own Mac laptop (although they cannot take it home). Every high school student has a Mac laptop that they can take home, after they pay a $40 fee. They end up with a lot of skills using the different programs. We use a program called Remote Desktop to monitor the students while they are working. We can take control of their computers, freeze their screens, or just monitor them. Pretty cool!
All in all, the students in the bush aren't much different than students in the suburbs of Colorado. They have their issues, but their kids...what kid doesn't have problems, right?
