MEMORABLE TIMES AT HAROLD KAVEOLOOK SCHOOL IN KAKTOVIK
Children in grades pre-K through 12th grade
attend Harold Kaveolook School in Kaktovik.
It’s a modern facility with staff,
Inupiat and Caucasian, that seem passionate about their work with the children. The ratio is 7:1, students to teachers and
since arriving on the North Slope close to year ago, I’ve heard teachers talk
about wanting to work there.
The new principal, Todd and his wife, Ann, the combined 3rd
and 4th grade teacher, had most recently moved from Ambler, in the
Kobuk region, where teacher, authors and photographers, Nick Jans (titles of
books listed in a June blog entry, “Overcoming Writer’s Block”, after sharing a
flight to Fairbanks) and Seth Kantner (Ordinary Wolves, Shopping for Porcupine:
A Life in Arctic Alaska) spent good parts of their lives. Nick moved there as a young man while Seth
grew up nearby with his brother and parents subsisting off of the land. Ann said that the school there where they
worked and where Nick taught, is filled with his stunning photography of the
animals found in that region.
A google search for Seth and Nick led me to these wonderful
websites. Amazing photography and more
about their writing:
Todd and Ann taught and counseled at Lake Iliamna near
Bristol Bay for a number of years prior to moving to Ambler. They said that they had enjoyed both places,
but Todd especially, ever since hearing about the school in Kaktovik, thought
it would be a dream job, so was elated to have been chosen as the new principal
this year.
I also met Isaac, the first counselor the school has ever
had. He’d most recently come from a
school in Houston, Alaska, in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley outside of Anchorage
and prior to that had lived in foreign places including Fiji. The “There’s No Safe Level of Second Hand
Smoke” T-shirts I’d brought from Barrow for all of the children were delivered
to him and I enjoyed hearing about his plans to propose a student-led program
to disperse them while educating about the damaging and life-threatening
effects of smoking or being around smokers.
I made my second trip to the school on Wednesday and read quite
a few of the children’s PPD’s, visiting each classroom and looking at each arm,
progressively getting larger and larger as I moved from one grade to the next. Not one positive for evidence of TB germs--I was
very grateful. I brought stickers for
the kids and smiled that even most high schoolers wanted one. It’s not safe to assume that boys don’t like
Dora stickers…some of them do. It was
such fun interacting with each child, answering their questions about “the
monkey” shot I’d given them and apologizing for not remembering each of their
names from Monday. The staff all had negative
readings as well, so I breathed a sigh of relief for the community as well as
for myself, not looking forward to the extra nursing duties that finding a positive
result would produce.
Several young men were out whaling that day and several
children were absent, so it wasn’t possible to read their PPD’s while at the
school. This meant that if I wasn’t able
to read them the next day, they’d need to have the test repeated in the clinic,
using extra doses of Tubersol, already in short supply. Fortunately for me, Mary, the amazing clerk
at the clinic assured me that we could contact the ones who had stayed home
sick and those who’d gone whaling when they returned in the late afternoon. From 4:30 – 5:00 pm found both of us on the
telephone asking them to come in. The
mother of one of the young boys who had stayed home sick agreed to my coming to
their home to read his and others brought their children, mostly recovered, in
for their readings prior to my home visit.
It was interesting talking with the young men who’d been out
whaling. It had started out as a perfect
day with high visibility and calm water but by the afternoon high winds picked
up, forcing them to come in without seeing a whale.
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