MANOKOTAK, Alaska - On a windswept hill, Amanda Cantrell keeps her head low.
The temperature hovers at 30 degrees, but she keeps her focus on the ground. She’s picking through the scrub looking for a treat.
“This is how I get fresh fruit,” she reflects after finding a pellet-sized berry, “coming out and finding it and picking it.”
This is life in rural Alaska, where every day brings a new hunt for food. No roads lead to these distant parts. There are no restaurants or grocery stores.
“You’re catching your dinner - literally,” she said.
Life wasn’t always so for the 30-year-old teacher. Born and raised in Dallas, Cantrell taught theater and English at Garland’s Sam Houston Middle School for the past five years.
However, Alaska offered something more tempting.
“There are jobs here!” she explained.
As Texas cuts billions in education funding and districts across the state lay off teachers, Alaska keeps hiring.
“In the past two or three years, we have seen more people from California, Texas, the Midwest - different states where they’ve had large lay-offs,” said Steven Noonkesser, who’s in charge of recruiting for Alaska’s Southwest Region Schools, which includes Manokotak. “We are seeing more candidates now that are looking for work.”
The demand doesn’t come from a population surge, but from a constant turnover of teachers. The state constantly recruits in the lower 48 states. Estimates show up to 80 percent of Alaska’s 8,300 teachers come from out-of-state.
“I was told I was only guaranteed a job for one more year,” Cantrell said, “and that after that they may cut teachers.”
Fed up with the politics and seeking an adventure, Cantrell and her husband, Scott, quit their jobs and headed north to the village of Manokotak, 375 miles southwest of Anchorage. The village is home to more than 440 Yup’ik Eskimos, with a proud culture and an ancient language still spoken fluently here.
The locals lead a largely subsistence lifestyle of fishing and hunting. Jobs are nearly non-existent and many live in poverty. Fears of crime led to the banning of all alcohol here. The lone village safety officer constantly keeps an eye out for bootleggers.
“This is a unique environment,” Noonkesser warns. “It’s not for everybody.”
With that in mind, the Cantrells traded their 2,200 square foot home in Garland for an 800 square foot furnished apartment. The district provides housing for a discount of $900 a month, including utilities.
She earns close to $60,000 a year teaching English.
“I make considerably more here than I did in Texas, and I have considerable less bills,” she said.
Her husband makes extra money by substitute teaching.
“I think it’s great,” he said. “I love living out here. I love the quiet. I love seeing the stars.”
The scenery is spectacular. Mountains open to breathtaking landscapes, untouched my man.
“It was nice de-cluttering your life,” Scott Cantrell added. “Getting rid of the cars; getting rid of all the junk you don’t really need.”
There is certainly a huge trade-off.
Since no roads lead to the Alaskan bush, almost everything must be flown in. The long journey makes even the most basic supplies hard to find and expensive.
Manokotak has a small general store, yet locals say the shelves are often bare. The food there is often pricey: a small jar of peanut butter, for instance, costs $6.40.
“I miss fresh veggies and fruit,” Cantrell said, adding she gave up being a vegetarian when she moved to Alaska. “You can’t even imagine how much I miss fresh things, because everything here is frozen or canned… We knew coming up here there would be conveniences we would have to give up. “
She has given up almost every major convenience.
She must bake her own bread. If she wants fresh meat, it must be hunted. The pair went fishing earlier this year and stocked up on salmon. Villagers donated extra moose meat to the Cantrell's that had recently been shot and butchered.
They stockpile everything else. Her kitchen and bathroom cabinets are stuffed with canned goods, which is largely what they eat. Meat is precious, so they try to save it for special occasions.
“It’s a college menu - ramen and noodles,” said Scott Cantrell, 34.
Isolation is also another consideration.
The couple’s apartment sits next to the school, but the school is five miles from the village. Locals rely on four-wheelers or snowmobiles - luxuries the Cantrells don’t have. They then spend a lot of free time at home reading or watching television- a recent arrival after they bought a satellite dish.
“I’m not going to lie,” said Cantrell. “It’s a huge adjustment for me. I’ve always lived in Texas.”
As tempting as leaving may be for Alaskan teachers, it’s not so simple. Researchers say the effects of teacher turnover are having devastating consequences on the state’s 130,000 children.
“Districts and schools that have high teacher and administrative turnover rates, their students do not learn as much,” said Alexandra Hill, a researcher at the University of Alaska Anchorage. “They’re not writing as well on the assignments. They’re not doing their homework as much.”
Stories abound of many teachers leaving after just a year, as soon as their contract expires.
“[The children] expect them to leave," Hill said. "They don’t invest emotionally in them."
She says many children have lost respect for their teachers and think they’re out of touch with their needs.
“They see them as temporary foreigners,” she said.
Her research shows that at least 30 percent of teachers in the Southwest Region Schools leave on any given year. The numbers are especially jarring a in a school like Manokotak where only 12 people teach 117 children.
“It’d be like if you had a different mom every year,” said Larry Johnson, the school's principal who himself only arrived in July.
The frustration is clear on students like Clarissa Franklin. The shy 14-year-old has grown numb to a revolving door of teachers.
“We get used to them and then they go, just go,” she said.
She loves school and dreams of becoming a surgeon one day.
Yet the reality is stark. Every child in Manokotak is considered low-income. Only one in four of her classmates graduate high school. Locals say it’s been years since anyone left the village for a four-year university.
“It makes me sad,” Franklin said. “When a teacher comes and they’re fun and they leave, it’s sad.”
Alaska has worked hard over in recent years to reduce teacher turnover. Manokotak built new housing to make life more comfortable. Indeed, turnover rates have been dropping.
Although Hill said the sour economy should get the credit.
“We think the reason why is those teachers can’t go back to the lower 48 and get jobs,” she said.
Although Cantrell arrived only in July, she insists she has no plans to leave anytime soon.
“There are a lot of things I miss,” she decided, “but anytime I look out the window and watch a sunrise… or I look out and see the mountains, it’s worth the trade for me.”
E-mail jbetz@wfaa.com
