Anchorage Daily News

One of the big stories of 2008 -- the sudden exodus of rural Alaska Natives to the cities, driven by the high cost of energy in remote villages -- may not be such a big story after all.

Newly released data on statewide school enrollments show little unusual movement of school-age children this year, beyond the city-bound trickle of families that has been going on for generations.

A few districts in small villages have lost students, but those declines are in line with losses of the past decade. In other economically depressed rural districts facing high energy costs, such as those on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, school numbers have actually increased.

School officials in key rural districts said in interviews that a few families have left, but the massive exodus they anticipated hasn't taken place.

"I don't see anything that would constitute a trend or even a blip," said Lower Kuskokwim School District superintendent Gary Baldwin in Bethel. "Yup'ik culture family ties are very strong here, so people are much less likely to leave their home."

"The closer I look, the less there is," said Stephanie Martin, a researcher studying migration for the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage. "I'm not convinced there's a huge influx of people, or anything out of the ordinary."

EXPECTATIONS

To be sure, life has grown harder in Alaska's rural villages this winter. Electricity and stove oil cost more than twice as much as in the state's urban areas. Recent declines in oil prices haven't helped in the Bush, where fuel storage tanks were filled up by barges in summer when prices were at their peak.

And it's certainly true that some people are moving away from the rural villages -- for better jobs, education, or to join their families. This is nothing new, and indeed is part of a global migration pattern, researchers say. Declining birth rates in rural Alaska have helped unmask this trend in recent years.

Hard economic times can accelerate the outward migration. Anchorage schools continue to deal with an influx of new-to-town Native students first reported in September.

But statewide school data don't support the fearful scenario described by Native leaders, elected officials and media reports around the time of freeze-up: families abandoning once-vibrant villages in Grapes-of-Wrath numbers and swamping schools and social service agencies in Anchorage and Fairbanks.

That potential forced exodus was the unstated theme of this year's Alaska Federation of Natives convention in October. Politicians from Sen. Ted Stevens to Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich called for action. Begich and Anchorage school superintendent Carol Comeau wrote to Gov. Sarah Palin, who formed a special subcabinet to look at the problem.

"Nobody wants Alaska to end up being a couple of big cities overlooking the remnants of fishing camps and ghost villages scattered throughout what was once rural Alaska," wrote Rep. Bryce Edgmon, D-Dillingham, in an October newspaper commentary. Edgmon and other rural legislators have pushed to increase state aid for rural areas, including subsidies for renewable energy and power costs.

When the state count of student numbers emerged in the last few weeks, however, they showed some rural areas actually gained students. Others, where population was already ebbing, said they saw no unusual acceleration.

"During tough times, it may be cheaper to hunker down in the villages," said Ty Mase, acting superintendent of the Lake and Peninsula School District. His region has lost some students in southern communities on the Alaska Peninsula and gained some in the north, where Pebble Mine jobs and the availability of firewood make a difference.

Overall, Mase said, the out-migration was less this year than expected. He noted that Anchorage can be expensive, with rent, utilities and auto costs -- "You know, Home Depot and Chili's are open every night."

EBB AND FLOW

An unscientific survey at the AFN convention showed employment, education, and family as primary reasons why people had moved at some point in their lives. Energy costs were the fourth-most listed reason, said Janie Leask, president of the First Alaskans Institute.

It's an old story. Similar reasons for "the consolidation of villages and the migration to the cities" were cited in an earlier federal-state study called "The Evolving Pattern of Village Alaska." Researchers at ISER like to point to the study as a cautionary note: it was published more than 30 years ago, in 1976.

"Migration is not a one-time event," said Marie Lowe, an ISER anthropologist. Some of what the state is seeing, she said, is ebb and flow between city and regional hub and village. Furthermore, some of the students newly enrolled in Anchorage are moving alone to town to stay with relatives and take advantage of bigger schools, she said.

"From our perspective, we can't really say it's real yet," Lowe said of the expected population shift pushed by high oil prices.

People are circulating this way on the Seward Peninsula. Last spring, Nome officials anticipated a small population boom. A new gold mine was starting up, and people were moving in from regional villages. The mine didn't last long before shutting down, and now Nome is showing nearly a 6 percent drop in students from last year.

Some of the departing Nome students headed to Anchorage, said Nome school superintendent Rick Luthi, but an equal number returned to the peninsula's small communities. The Bering Strait district ended up with a net increase for the year.

RURAL SCHOOLS

Some shrinking districts hew closer to the expected storyline.

In the Kuspuk District on the middle Kuskokwim River, people were leaving due to a "perfect storm" of high fuel prices, no jobs and poor moose hunting, said Brad Allen, the Aniak-based superintendent. Many of those students have ended up in Anchorage.

The district's eight villages are small and offer correspondingly fewer school options. Kuspuk dropped from 383 students to 342, and the school at Red Devil is likely to close next year, Allen said. It's a sharp drop, but the numbers have been inching downward steadily from a peak of 493 students in the past decade.

Southeast communities and the Bristol Bay Borough also saw significant drop-offs, after years of declining student numbers. At Bristol Bay, past school closings have left the district with a unique flying school bus, as students from South Naknek are flown to school and back every day across the Naknek River.

The biggest percentage decline was in the single-school district of Tanana, which lost nearly 32 percent of its students, according to the state's preliminary figures. That means 17 students, most of whom moved into Fairbanks, with or without parents, superintendent John Bania said. In this case, village and city are closely tied by frequent air service, no doubt making the urban move easier than one from, say, a village on the distant Bering Sea coast.

Rural districts showing growth or break-even numbers include the Lower Kuskokwim, Lower Yukon and Unalaska. The preliminary statewide total this year shows a decline of 333 students, or 0.3 percent.

FACTS VS. MYTHS

Anchorage schools still include 400 to 500 new Native students who showed up after school began, said Doreen Brown, the district's Indian Education supervisor. The district is seeking additional funds from the School Board to help students make the transition, she said.

"I think there's been an increase, anecdotally," Brown said. She said she's hoping someone comes up with reliable numbers to say what's going on.

That job is falling to Tara Jollie, director of the state's Division of Community and Regional Affairs. Assigned by Palin's rural issues subcabinet, Jolie said she is working with ISER, social service agencies and other groups to find out if migration has accelerated alarmingly and if it threatens the survival of rural communities.

"We want public policy to be based on real facts, not myths," Jollie said after a meeting of her working group last week. "This migration thing turned into a high-profile deal lately. I've even heard it repeated like it was a real fact. It isn't a real fact."

Jollie said that, personally, she thinks the expected impact has been overstated at times, but that normal migration is picking up speed.

Officials also say that winter here is long enough to outlast the buying power of last summer's energy rebate bonuses from the state. Hard times could still turn harder.

"There's a whole lot of people cutting wood these days," said Baldwin, the superintendent in Bethel. "I think we'll see the real crunch here soon."

Daily News reporter Megan Holland contributed to this story. Find Tom Kizzia online at adn.com/contact/tkizzia or call him at 907-235-4244.

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