More than a quarter of students disenrolled from Alaska’s only state-run boarding school, spurring legislative hearings and wide concern. People disagree on the cause, but students in Sitka say they’re hoping for better.
Mt. Edgecumbe High School has seen a year of student exits, staff turnover and disrepair. What comes next? More than a quarter of students disenrolled from Alaska’s only state-run boarding school, spurring legislative hearings and wide concern.
People disagree on the cause, but students in Sitka say they’re hoping for better. Charity Mila, left, works with Georgiana Fischer in a Mt. Edgecumbe High School physical science class assignment on April 7. SITKA — Almost everyone agrees on this much: It has been a school year unlike any other at Mt.
Edgecumbe High School, an institution that has educated many Alaska Native leaders who shaped state history.that students are in the midst of a mental health crisis after a spate of hospitalizations. Students have been leaving the state-run boarding school at an alarming rate. As of early May, 122 students had disenrolled, more than a quarter of the roughly 400 students the school typically enrolls. Mt.
Edgecumbe has been awash in change. After a financial crisis and a series of abrupt leadership changes, the 2025-26 school year started with a new superintendent and other administrators as well as a new contractor running residential life on the Sitka campus. Students cross an outdoor courtyard area of Mt. Edgecumbe’s academic building at lunchtime.
Some students, staff and parents say the new administration has failed to consult students on important policy changes impacting student life. They contend that the new hires seem disengaged, and that students are suffering as a result. Several of the recently hired administrators won’t be returning next year. In April, the discontent culminated in an Easter weekend student protest over a sudden proposed rule change.
“Hardly anyone at this school has felt very heard from by our superintendent,” one student, Kolby Clark-Pruitt from Old Harbor, wrote in aOthers, like superintendent David Langford, say the school is experiencing growing pains that accompany necessary change, and point to dilapidated facilities as a driver of the problems. Now funding for the high school — the only school in Alaska run directly by the state Department of Education and Early Development, with money from the state’s general fund — is under debate in the Legislature, as a longtime Sitka lawmaker moves to protect funding for campus improvements.
Mt. Edgecumbe and its students, who are 90% Alaska Native and hail from more than 100 different towns and villages around the state, say they are accustomed to their school being regarded with pride. Suddenly this year, it has felt like everyone was discussing the school — and not always in a good way, said Donald Olson Jr., a senior from Golovin who is a student body leader and namesake son of the longtime state senator.
It has all led some students to wonder if the school’s reputation throughout the state has dimmed, and if the school’s future itself is in question. In villages from Nuiqsut to Metlakatla, sending bright teenagers to complete their high school education at Mt. Edgecumbe is a family tradition going back for generations. Mt.
Edgecumbe High School is located on Japonski Island near Sitka Channel in Southeast Alaska. “There’s still families that all their kids go to our school,” said senior Asha Foruria, a student leader.
“But also, since the start of the year I’ve heard that there’s entire villages that don’t go to Edgecumbe anymore, or all the students from one village have left. ”In early April, the Daily News visited Mt. Edgecumbe to hear from the students themselves about their year, their school and their wishes. The night before the visit, dozens of students left their dorm rooms and gathered with signs outside the dorm buildings, gathering in a rare protest.
Earlier that day, an email from the manager of residential care for contractor NANA Management Services had landed in inboxes. The email announced a change to study hours at the boarding school that would have limited students to their dorm rooms after 7:30 p.m. most days. A handwritten sign is displayed inside a Mt. Edgecumbe dorm building, left over from a protest among students about a rule change regarding the time of mandatory study hour.
Students work together in an economics class at Mt. Edgecumbe High School on April 7. Students walk to class from Mt. Edgecumbe High School’s upper campus, where its dorms and dining facilities are located.
Already deep into a school year that had brought an unprecedented wave of changes, this missive just seemed like one step too far, said Emily Walluk, a student from Nome. It felt like the latest in what students viewed as a series of heavy-handed, top-down decisions that gave students fewer of the freedoms and routines they were accustomed to, she said. Almost all Mt.
Edgecumbe students live far from home, and changes such as a proposal to cancel shuttles to SeaMart, a local grocery store, had outsized reverberations on their routines and mental health, Walluk said.
“There were so many things happening and changing throughout the year,” she said. “It didn’t cause a response like this, but it was the last straw. ” The students organized a protest. At 6 p.m. sharp, dozens of them gathered with signs in a semicircle between the main dorm buildings.
Mt. Edgecumbe High School students board a bus to travel from Sitka to a music festival in Ketchikan on April 7. Mt. Edgecumbe High School student Jubilee Lewis, left, works with teacher Breanne Flanagan in a 3D art and textiles class.
Amid discontent, disenrollment and empty dorm rooms, the busy life of a boarding school has continued to unfurl at Mt. Edgecumbe. On one April day alone, dozens of students gathered for a 24-hour ferry ride to Ketchikan to attend a Southeast Alaska music festival. That evening, others boarded a bus for a bonfire on the beach put on by state-employed residence life employees.
There were kids at Native Youth Olympic Games practice getting ready to head to the statewide competition. Students attended class and orchestra and Yup’ik dancing practice and basketball, and ate tacos in the cafeteria. In the Culture Room — a space for students to connect with Indigenous traditions such as butchering a donated seal, sewing kuspuks and beading earrings — Blair Vaden and Walluk shared an Arizona Iced Tea.
“This is the first year that I actually actively asked my parents to let me go home,” said Vaden, who is also from Nome. “My freshman and sophomore year, I was talking about it, but I never actually asked. This year was hard. ” Mt.
Edgecumbe High School students Blair Vaden, left, and Emily Walluk, both from Nome, talk during dinner. Student Jameel Upton works on a sewing project in the Culture Room at Mt. Edgecumbe High School. Still, they agreed, the experience at Edgecumbe was worth staying for.
Both said they loved their teachers and the academic challenges of their classes. Students at the school said they’d come to Mt. Edgecumbe for opportunity and camaraderie, and had found both. But they chafed at a series of leadership and rule changes they said had defined the school year, and pointed to dilapidated and decaying facilities.
Maybe, some said, the bumpy school year was getting Mt. Edgecumbe some overdue attention. Since the legislative hearings, they’d noticed the glut of outside visitors touring the campus.
“We need all these people that come here, all these lawmakers and governors that come here, to actually do what they say they will do,” said Alexia Nestic-Kewan, from Kodiak.sounding an alarm about what they said was a mental health crisis on campus, with eight students hospitalized for suicidal ideation within a two-week period. Lawmakers held legislative hearings and traveled to Mt. Edgecumbe to see for themselves.
Some seemed shocked by the deteriorating conditions of its buildings, reporting leaky roofs, rodents and contaminated water in public hearings. Sen. Lyman Hoffman, a Bethel Democrat who went on the trip, called the quality of the facilities “deplorable. ”A class picture from Mt.
Edgecumbe’s first graduating class in 1948 is taped to a refrigerator in the Culture Room. Mt. Edgecumbe is Alaska’s only state-run boarding school. The school, which opened in 1947 in a former military barracks on Sitka’s Japonski Island, for decades was operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, part of a network of boarding schools for Alaska Native youths who didn’t have a high school in their home village.
While part of the same system of Bureau of Indian Affairs residential schools that suppressed Indigenous traditions and language across Alaska, Edgecumbe developed a different reputation from other Alaska campuses, such as the Wrangell Institute. Over the decades, the school became known as a place where Alaska Native students formed bonds and became leaders, both in their home communities and in statewide politics.
In the 1980s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs shut down the school and the campus emptied for the first time in more than 35 years. Alumni fought to reopen the school, pushing back on the contentions of urban lawmakers who saw the boarding school model as expensive and out-of-date. The state reopened the school in the mid-1980s, making it the only one directly operated by Alaska’s education department rather than a local school district.
The school is even credited with bringing together Alaska Native youths who “helped seed a statewide leadership network that would trigger social, political and economic reform in Alaska in the 1960s and lead to passage in Congress of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971,” the Daily News wrote in 2012. Candace Nielsen attended Mt. Edgecumbe in the late 2000s rather than staying in her tiny Alaska Peninsula community of Cold Bay.
There were only three or four other high school-aged students in town at the time. At Edgecumbe, Nielsen remembers dining with the families of teachers and staff members, and growing close to her roommates, who hailed from all over the state. Noah Avugiak and Ben Balluta play guitar during a music class at Mt. Edgecumbe High School.
She became the mayor of Cold Bay by age 23 and is now the director of regional strategy and policy at the Aleut Corp.Students today attend for basically the same reasons, said superintendent Langford, who was a teacher when the state reopened the school in 1985: They can take a broader variety of classes, play sports and participate in activities that may not be available in some villages where, at the smallest schools, one or two teachers may instruct across all grades. Others, including those from Anchorage and other urban centers, come to be part of a hub of Indigenous culture.
“It’s amazing to see and know that you’re part of something bigger,” said Foruria, the student leader who previously attended schools in Anchorage. She will attend the University of California Santa Cruz next year. While almost everyone acknowledges Mt. Edgecumbe is going through a rough year, there is less agreement as to the reasons why.
The school is an island in the state bureaucracy. During the pandemic, Mt. Edgecumbe received millions in extra funding. But when that money ran out, the school faced a serious financial reckoning, said Deena Bishop, commissioner of the state education department and a former Anchorage School District superintendent.
At the time, Andrew Friske had been Mt. Edgecumbe’s residential life principal for 20 years. He wrote a letter saying the school couldn’t safely be run with fewer workers attending to the academic, social and emotional lives of young people far from home. One of the positions being considered for cuts was a mental health coordinator.
“I said, we really needed to really think about that because our population has the highest per capita suicidal ideation and suicide rates in the nation,” Friske said in a phone interview. Friske said he offered to resign, but had hoped for a conversation about the cuts. Instead, his resignation was accepted.
Some of the cuts were subsequently rolled back, but key positions — like AmeriCorps volunteers who worked to offer recreational opportunities and trips for students — remained cut. The superintendent at the time also left. Langford was hired as Edgecumbe’s superintendent in midsummer 2025. He concurrently serves as the superintendent of the Chatham School District in Southeast Alaska, which includes the communities of Angoon, Gustavus, Klukwan and Tenakee Springs.
Langford says he encountered a colossal mess in Sitka: He contends that when he arrived at the school weeks before students arrived, the doors of the campus buildings had been left unlocked. Windows were open. There were birds inside flying around and rats, he said. State officials logged more than 300 food safety violations in the kitchen, according to Langford.
The top level of the Mt. Edgecumbe girls dorm building shows condensation on April 7. School officials say the school’s facilities are in need of significant updates and repairs. Langford said the cafeteria was in such poor condition he considered delaying the start of the school year for 30 days.
In the fall, as kitchen gear was replaced, students ate mostly pre-packaged meals that only needed to be warmed, he said. Friske pushed back on the assertion that the campus and cafeteria were left in ruins, saying when he left at the end of the 2024-25 school year, he didn’t see things in the condition Langford described.
A new contractor, NANA Management, won the contract to provide residential services such as some staffing of dorms, activities for students and operation of the cafeteria. Students described sudden changes to their routines and privileges that chafed, as new faces arrived and new policies began to be enacted within the dorm management. Problems of the physical buildings remain, Langford said in April: The dorms were originally World War II military barracks and show their age.
On the third floor of a girls dorm building, buckets catch leaks from the roof. Sometimes the leaks drip on the student mattresses. Langford stacks 55-gallon trash cans under the leaky spots. Due to the unique position of Mt.
Edgecumbe within the state system, there are no budgets for items like replacement furniture, mattresses or laundry equipment, he said. There’s only one working washer-dryer in the girls dorm, and often a line. Langford estimates it would cost about $100,000 to replace all the washers and dryers needed. Foam board and batt insulation is spread on the top level of the girls dorm at Mt.
Edgecumbe High School. School officials say roof leaks are an ongoing concern. The maintenance budget for Mt. Edgecumbe is about $20,000 a year, which Langford calls laughable.
The budget is overseen by the Department of Transportation, meaning the school is an oddity and not a priority. Friske, the former residential life principal, said that in his opinion, the condition of the campus isn’t the reason so many students have left. Major changes in the people running dorm life and the rules students live by are the driver, he said.
“It’s not the leaky roof, and it’s not ... the rat running around,” he said. “Those issues have been happening for a long time. People have been aware of it. In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with residential life.
” Bishop, the education department commissioner, said the state is committed to keeping Edgecumbe open and finding funding to repair buildings and improve facilities.funding requests, including over $22.4 million for the school for projects such as a new roof on a dorm building. Bishop said that her agency investigated the repeated vetoes and concluded that more than $15 million for those projects were returned to the “major maintenance” budget through the Department of Transportation — the agency responsible for maintenance of the school — but that projects “weren’t managed to completion.
”advanced by the state Senate Finance Committee in April included $14 million in upgrades for Mt. Edgecumbe, including $10 million to further remodel the dining hall, $460,000 to replace worn furniture in the dorms, $3.1 million for dorm windows, $125,000 for new laundry machines, and $50,000 for mattresses, the Alaska Beacon reported.to flip their votes on overriding Dunleavy’s veto of a sweeping election reform bill.
Afterward, some speculated that his voteAt a press availability, Stedman said he had not traded his vote for support of the Edgecumbe funding. Students in an economics class listen to teacher Ryan Barwik at Mt. Edgecumbe High School. Along with the disrepair he inherited, Langford’s leadership has come under fire by some, including advisory board member Kitka.
Such critics claim he’s been dismissive of concerns, including about student mental health, and has made decisions that impact students without enough feedback from them. Langford says he can’t please everyone and is doing his best to address problems as they come up. He maintains he wants to hear from students. The study hourSitting around a cafeteria table after dinner but before study hour, Alexia Nestic-Kewan and her friends contemplated the year’s changes.
From left, Chloe Myre, Victoria Andrew, Alexia Nestic-Kewan and Kylee Johnson gather for dinner at the Mt. Edgecumbe High School dining hall. Nestic-Kewan is from Kodiak, and says she chose to attend Edgecumbe because she wanted more from her high school experience than she thought she could get at home. Building-wise, “the place is kind of falling apart,” she said.
Still, the academics were positive for her, and going to school and living with your friends was fun, she said before joining an Aluutiq dance practice. Kylee Johnson, from Mountain Village, sat nearby. She said she was in a student leadership class and learning to advocate for what students wanted to see at the school.
“There are empty rooms,” Johnson said. “It’s kind of upsetting. ” The friends agreed that the biggest problem was consistency. With the changes in the dorms, nothing felt as expected.
That, they agreed, was leading students to leave. Nestic-Kewan chimed in. For students thinking about coming to Edgecumbe, “I’d say the school is good, and I’d say it’s fun here. I wish the dorm life would be more consistent to make more kids happy so they want to stay.
” Mt. Edgecumbe student Tayler Richards, of Kotzebue, talks with dorm management director Debbie Little Dog. Friske, the former residential life principal, gets a little choked up when he talks about the students who still attend Mt. Edgecumbe.
“Losing 122 kids , that’s unacceptable,” he said. “That’s 122 kids that have missed out on an amazing opportunity. ” The senior class nominated him to be their graduation speaker, despite his painful exit from the school. He says he’ll talk about grit and resilience.
For Olson, the student leader senior, the problems of this year seem solvable. With more time and consistency in leadership, and administration listening to students, he said, more students might come back to enroll in a school unlike any other in Alaska. After graduation, Olson plans to earn a pilot’s license. He was accepted to Brown and Columbia universities.
At the state basketball tournament, he heard elders talking proudly about how generations of their families had attended Mt. Edgecumbe.
“The strongest parts of our school are the teachers and the programs and the amount of work that everyone puts in there,” Olson said. Michelle Theriault Boots is a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. She focuses on stories about the intersection of public policy and Alaskans' lives. Before joining the ADN in 2012, she worked at daily newspapers on the West Coast and earned a master's degree from the University of Oregon.
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