Covering the distance to mentor teachers in rural Alaska

Cory Turner reported for NPR a few days ago from rural western Alaska where a septuagenarian teacher is mentoring a young colleague, though it requires him to take three flights to reach Chevak, population 938.

Outside Chevak School, in western Alaska, the lake is ice, and the snowy tundra unfurls to the Bering Sea. But that doesn't stop new, first-grade teacher Amelia Tulim from trying to lighten the mood with an outdoor egg hunt. Inside the colorful plastic eggs: small, animal-shaped erasers.

Tulim grew up in Chevak, an Alaska Native community and home to the Cup'ik people. It's here, in the same school where she now works, that her third-grade teacher first inspired her to become an educator.

"She made learning fun," Tulim says, smiling. "I remember sitting in my desk and looking right at her and telling myself, 'One day, that's going to be you. You're going to make learning fun.' "

And she is. But being a new teacher is also hard, she admits.

The long hours of grading and lesson-prep can be exhausting. Poverty is also a challenge in Chevak, as it is in so many districts across the U.S., and often requires that teachers do far more than teach. There's also the long, snowy winters, though Tulim's used to those.

"We only have three cars here," she says, "the rest are ATVs and snowmobiles."

For many Alaska teachers, this math adds up to burnout. The state's rural communities are hit hard by teacher shortages, losing roughly one in four teachers every year. 

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Research shows teachers who were trained in Alaska, as Tulim was, are less likely to leave the classroom than outsiders, a trend that's also been seen in other communities, and that's fueled an explosion in grow-your-own teacher training programs across the U.S.

She also has Ed Sotelo.

The 70-year-old veteran teacher pops into her classroom, greeting the children as they return from their egg hunt – as if he'd simply walked across the hall.   

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Sotelo is one of fifteen retired teachers who now work as mentors for the Alaska Statewide Mentor Project (ASMP). The program began 20 years ago, through the University of Alaska, and later survived being gutted by statewide budget cuts; seeing the impact the mentors were having on their teachers, school districts themselves stepped in to keep the project funded.