This article appeared in the New York Times on 25 November 2009. For more information and the full article, please visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/us/26alaska.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
EXCERPT


Alaska's Rural Schools Fight Off Extinction
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: November 25, 2009

NIKOLSKI, Alaska — This distant dot in the Aleutian Islands needed just 10 students for its school to dodge a fatal cut from the state budget. It reached across Alaska and beyond but could find only nine.

Built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1939, the little Nikolski School will not be the last in Alaska to close. Four others have closed this fall and at least 30 more are at risk because of dwindling enrollment; one school in remote southeast Alaska survived only by advertising on Craigslist for families with school-aged children.

"We lose one or two every year," said Eddy Jeans, the director of school finance for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.

As Alaska celebrates its 50th anniversary of statehood amid new political prominence and urban aspirations, it is confronting a legacy of loss in rural communities that are unlike any others in the United States.

Some of these communities, like Nikolski, are linked to the earliest human settlements in North America, yet are now buckling beneath the accumulated conflict of old versus new. Alaska Natives are increasingly leaving villages for cities. Young women, in particular, have departed, and birth rates, once disproportionately higher in villages, have dropped. Jobs for the young people who remain are declining. Village elders have fewer peers who share their dialects. Heating fuel, gasoline and groceries can be expensive and medical services minimal.

For more information and the full article, please visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/us/26alaska.html?_r=1&emc=eta1