Anchorage Daily News

SITKA -- In the back corner of a nearly deserted campus, the president of Sheldon Jackson College guides a visitor through the empty hallways of a dreary dormitory to his sparse temporary offices.

Gone are the trappings of his position. So is the hustle and bustle of a thriving educational community.

"Just two of us are still employed here," said Rev. David Dobler, who works with school controller Debby Pucket and balances his school duties with a full-time job as a Presbyterian minister in Juneau.

Sheldon Jackson College is the oldest college in Alaska, rich in history and land, and located at the heart of this southeast island town of 8,800 people. But it didn't take long last year to fire more than 120 faculty and staff and shut the doors on the 130-year-old establishment.

Now, plywood covers the elegant paned windows overlooking Sitka harbor, and tattered "for rent" signs flutter on the doors of quasi-Tudor style buildings as trustees consider selling the school's assets to repay its massive debts.

Like its many small private college brethren across the country, Sheldon Jackson was beset by declining enrollments and had trouble sustaining its annual $8 million budget. But the abruptness of its collapse was breathtaking. Most employees were given one day's notice last June at a meeting in the school's chapel.

"I still get butterflies thinking about it," said the former head of the science department Keith Cox. "People were crying. It was really pretty heart-wrenching."

Senior Patricia Campbell of Fairbanks was stunned when she heard the news later that day. She was just several credits shy of graduating.

"We didn't get any notice or instruction until a month later. It was really bad," she said. Campbell was able to complete her degree that summer with a faculty member retained to help students in similar situations.

FINANCIAL MISSTEPS

Though trouble had been brewing for years, the board of trustees and the administration were full of assurances before the closure. They had hatched a plan in 2006 to pay down some of the school's crushing debt, which was then thought to be about $5 million, said Dobler.

But key investors pulled out, and the plan began to fall apart. The final straw came when the city assembly balked at releasing a portion of a $1 million line of credit that it had approved just two weeks before. Three days later, the school shut down.

"It was kind of like a house of cards," said trustee and former state Sen. Arliss Sturgulewski. "We really were trying very hard to make it work. We had some plans, not all of which came to fruition, and there we were. It simply was not possible to go any further."

At first, school officials said they would suspend operations for a year while the school went through a financial restructuring. The school's assets, including 216 acres of land, are worth between $20 million and $30 million. But past debts kept cropping up and rose to a final total of about $12.5 million, Dobler said.

He blames a long history of poor financial decisions.

"How can I say this kindly?" he said. "Very poor management and business practices, coupled with a very high commitment to education and personal attention to students, meant that people gave everything to educate students -- but in so doing, they also gave away the school."

That commitment was not enough to attract a sustainable student population. Enrollment, which was 275 students at its peak, had dropped to just over a 100 students in 2006, while 2007 promised to be even worse.

Publicity over the school's long standing financial troubles -- it almost closed in 1999 -- didn't help matters; neither did questions about whether the school had outlived its historic mission.

PIECE OF ALASKA HISTORY

Founded by a Presbyterian missionary 11 years after the purchase of Alaska from Czarist Russia, Sheldon Jackson opened as a training school for Tlingit Indians in an old military barracks.

As it grew into boarding high school then a college, the school drew village children from around the state and turned out skilled boat builders, teachers, fish hatchery managers and other professionals.

It was considered the birthplace of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood, powerful organizations that were critical in securing native land claims. Some of the state's most noted civil rights leaders, clergy, educators and politicians are among its graduates.

It was part of the state's boarding school experience that was a foment for change.

"In some powerful ways, it made the Alaska Native leadership and the Alaska native experience of today what it is," said alumnus Byron Mallott, a former head of the state's multibillion permanent fund and the First Alaskans Institute, a native policy center.

But times changed, and more mainstream educational opportunities opened up, including the University of Alaska, which has a satellite school in Sitka.

Mallott, who served as a trustee for Sheldon Jackson in the 1980s, is saddened by the school's closing but not surprised.

He believes the combination of its religious ties and secular education, coupled with a reputation as a school for Alaska Natives, made it difficult to attract a broad range of donors.

"People view it as a Native school, but the Native community doesn't particularly view it that way, they view it as a religious-oriented school," said Mallott. "It has almost a schizophrenic personality."

MOVING ON

Dobler and the board have little hope of reopening the college as a four-year institution, though they remain optimistic that the state or another educational entity will step in with plans to use the campus for educational -- preferably vocational -- programs.

Community groups meanwhile are scrambling to preserve aspects of the school, such as the fish hatchery, the library, and the day care and fitness centers.

While many staff and students have scattered, Campbell found work in Sitka at a substance abuse treatment center for adolescents using skills she learned at Sheldon Jackson. But she's ready to move on.

"It's been wearing to see the closed buildings and to slowly see friends leave town one by one," said Campbell.

Cox works as a federal biologist and heads up the newly formed nonprofit Sitka Science Center, which manages the school's largely volunteer-run fish hatchery.

Looking around his old office that he's leasing from the school, he sighs. Last year at this time, the building was bustling with students finishing up senior projects and school staff and directors were committed to a plan that would move the school forward.

"Things happen like that," Cox said. "One minute you're on the upswing and then the bottom falls out."

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