Alaska's "Molly Hootch Case": High Schools and the Village Voice.

Abstract

Nine years ago, Anna Tobeluk was an 18-year-old casualty of Alaska’s failure to provide rural high schools. Anna lived in Nunapitchuk, an Eskimo village of 400 people 410 miles west of Anchorage. After finishing ninth grade in the village’s Bureau of Indian Affairs elementary school, she was at the end of the educational road. For in Nunapitchuk, as in 120 other native villages throughout the state, children who wanted schooling above the elementary level had no choice but to enter a boarding program, sometimes hundreds of miles away, to live in a dormitory or in the home of a stranger for nine months each year. Indeed, Nunapitchuk was lucky to have a ninth-grade program. In all but a handful of the villages, schooling stopped after the eighth grade.