As a young reporter in her second year as a Report for America corps member, Riley Board wasn’t expecting to cough up $1,800 to charter a private plane, but she had no other choice: the only scheduled flight to Tyonek, a small Alaska Native village on the west side of the Cook Inlet, had left without her and her photographer, and she had a story to cover.
Board sat next to the pilot in the tiny 4-person plane, giant headphones over her ears to block out the noise of the plane, feeling a mix of relief and excitement: Tyonek is only accessible by plane, and despite occasionally mentioning it in stories, no one from her newsroom had ever visited.
After about 30 minutes in the air, they landed on the community’s gravel runway and hitched a ride to Tebughna School right before classes started. The school serves 17 students in a community of roughly 150 people. Just three of the students are high schoolers, and many are the only ones in their grade. It was the perfect case for Board’s five-part series “The Most Unique District in America.”
Over the course of eight months, Board visited eleven schools across the district, the largest in the U.S. by area spanning over 25,000 square miles, shedding light on the challenges and achievements of their schools. The project, which was published by her host newsroom KDLL public radio over the course of five days in May, was the capstone to her time in Report for America and it helped her figure out the next step in her career and land her current job.
Before she embarked on this project, Board had been reporting for two years on rural communities on the central Kenai Peninsula in Southcentral Alaska for KDLL, focusing mostly on local government and occasionally doing education stories. Originally from Florida, Board went to Middlebury College in Vermont and when Report for America selected her as a corps member, moved to Alaska to work with KDLL. It was her first full-time job, one that she now looks back with fond memories and grateful for the wealth of experience she acquired.
Although on paper she was covering rural communities and government, Board was one of two reporters at the radio station, which meant she had to jump in and cover breaking news, regardless of the topic, when needed. Even though she appreciated the flexibility, the newsroom structure was in stark contrast to what she was used to. For her campus newspaper at Middlebury College, there were around 20 editors and between 50 and 100 writers. KDLL radio was a whole different ball game.
For starters, she had no editors on site to read through her stories, so she had to rely on a statewide network of about 25 radio stations across Alaska. Via Slack, she would reach out to get feedback. There were also three or four months where it was just her at the station. Every day, she would figure out what needed to be reported on, then carry out that reporting for the daily 5:00 p.m. newscast. This extra responsibility and limited staff also meant she couldn’t just take a few weeks off to complete the “The Most Unique District in America” series.
“I was probably doing four to five stories a week around that time. There was no slowing down, necessarily, for the series. It was just about finding time for it,” remembered Board.
The idea for the series started to develop in September of last year, when both she and her general manager got an email from Alaska Center For Excellence In Journalism about some new grant opportunities opening up. The application of the Alaska Impact Reporting Initiative said it was looking for “stories that increase public understanding of complex, underreported issues in Alaska.” That got Board’s gears turning.
“I was covering education a lot and I just sort of developed a thesis based on something that our district superintendent said pretty often, which is that he believed that the school district was ‘one of the most unique school districts in America’ based on a couple of factors. And so that seemed like a good starting point,” she said.
The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, the focus of the series, has 42 schools serving more than 8,000 students. Despite being in the same district, the schools vary immensely. Some are indistinguishable from others in any given state, while others are almost unrecognizable. The schools range from 16 to 600 students, four are only accessible by plane or boat, and many of them reflect the cultural diversity of the state. What unites them all is their financial struggles.
“School funding in Alaska was the topic on every person’s mind last year,” said Board. With a $13 million budget shortfall and an approved $8 million more in budget cuts, understaffing, staff retention problems, deferred maintenance issues, and extracurricular program cuts continue to impact each of these schools differently, providing a thread that connected all the parts of the series
The grant was ultimately approved, and she was awarded $9,000 for the project. Most of this was spent on travel, including the private flight to Tyonek and one to visit schools in Nanwalek, both of which are featured in part four of the series. She also had to drive hundreds of miles, so she stayed in several hotels.
But the expense she was most excited about was hiring photographer M. Scott Moon. Trying to get high-quality photos and audio at the same time is not easy, so she welcomed Moon’s company and input throughout the series. He was so important to the series that he was part of the reason why Board ended up having to charter a plane.
School district officials were flying to Tyonek, and Board had been coordinating with them for weeks to go with them. But at the last minute, extra people were added to the district’s plane. There was only one seat left, so Board had to decide between not bringing the photographer or using a substantial chunk of the grant funds to charter a separate plane for them both. She chose the latter but still planned their plane to take off and land at the same time as the district’s.
Relying on relationships and knowledge she’d developed over her nearly two years reporting on the school district was crucial. She not only had a solid relationship with the district superintendent, but also with principals and individual teachers, which was necessary since some smaller schools don’t have a principal and may only have a single teacher. For those, she reached out to the teacher directly to schedule her visits.
During those five months of travelling, she visited all kinds of public schools in all kinds of communities: Schools like Tebughna where students rode to school via snowmobile; schools like Voznesenka where all of the students were taught Russian as their first language; others like Hope where the students participate in a school-wide gift exchange; and Nanwalek that seek to preserve indigenous culture and language.
There were under-crowded schools, overcrowded schools, schools that rejected technology, schools that embraced it, schools with single grade classrooms, and others with multigrade classrooms. For each one she got to see the different dynamics up close.
Going from more traditional schools to ones like Tebugha, she found herself comparing the experiences of high schoolers in particular. She was struck by the fact that students at large schools like Soldotna have the “classic high school experience” with many sports teams, hundreds of peers, arts and music clubs, and AP classes. But across the pond in Tyonek, there was one high school senior and only two other students close to his age. He had one teacher teaching all of his classes. There weren’t any clubs, sports teams, or specialty courses.
“On paper, he graduated from high school, but it’s an unbelievably different academic and social experience from the people at that other school, even though they’re all graduates from the Kenai Peninsula School District that year.” said Board, adding that a few other schools she visited also featured just one or two high schoolers.
She would spend anywhere from two hours to an entire school day in the schools she visited. With hours and hours of tape, there were numerous people she interviewed who didn’t end up in the final product. She also had to condense 40-minute-long interviews into a single quote.
“I feel like I have enough material in there to write a book. And instead I ended up putting out five 5 to 7-minute pieces, which is what the medium calls for,” she said.
In the week when those stories aired, she said she didn’t work on anything else, instead focusing all of her time on writing, editing the audio, and promoting the series. She published it around two weeks before the end of her time at KDLL, feeling content to have the series as a sort of finale.
Ultimately, both her experience in Report for America and this series helped her realize the direction she wanted to take her journalism career. She saw the program as “a valuable training ground” for strengthening her reporting skills and her ability to find a story. While making this series, she also realized how much she liked talking to teachers, students, school staff and administrators. After graduating from the program, she was hired by the Portland Press Herald in Portland, Maine as an education reporter.
“I realized in Alaska while I was doing super general assignment all-over-the-place reporting that education was the most interesting thing to me, which is what led to me working on that series and also something that helped me realize I wanted to do education reporting full-time.” she said. “People who work in and around schools have great stories and insights, something I found to be true in Alaska and have been discovering in Maine.”
Check out the “Most Unique District in America” series
The post A reporter’s journey covering the most unique school district in America appeared first on The GroundTruth Project.
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