Anchorage Daily News

FAIRBANKS -- The towns of Mentasta Lake and Fort Gibson, Okla., are more than 2,770 miles apart but have shared a close relationship this school year, thanks to a first-year elementary teacher.

Mallory Cooper, 24, moved to Mentasta Lake, a small village 47 miles from Tok, early this summer to take a teaching position.

The village, with 114 people, is pretty different from Fort Gibson where she grew up, a town of 4,000 in northeast Oklahoma -- a town she once thought was small. This year's senior class at Fort Gibson High School is made up of 130 students.

"That's way more than these kids are used to seeing, especially in one school, let alone in one grade," Cooper said.

The Mentasta Lake school has 17 kids in grades kindergarten through 12. Cooper, one of only two teachers at the school, teaches 11 of them.

For the past several months, though, those 11 kids have gotten a taste of Oklahoma, not only through Cooper, but through an exchange of letters and gifts with the senior class in Fort Gibson.

"We're really just trying to be pen pals with them," said Katie Smith, a 17-year-old senior in Fort Gibson. "We're sending up different gifts for different holidays."

The seniors sent the Alaska children Halloween candy and a slew of Christmas gifts.

"We sent little scarves we had made, and toys -- tons of toys -- and we filled up a little stocking for each one and we wrote their names on the stockings in glitter," Smith said. "And we sent pencils and pens and mittens and hats and stuff."

The senior class had been working since October collecting the Christmas gifts. Smith said she was impressed with her classmates' effort.

"It was crazy how much the senior class produced," she said. "Everybody contributed some."

The two groups of students also exchange letters regularly.

"They write letters or they make cards or draw pictures," Cooper said of her students. "Me being from Oklahoma, they had a lot of questions about Oklahoma anyway. Now that we're talking back and forth with these seniors, they have more questions."

Smith enjoys getting the letters from Alaska and looks forward to the questions. "They ask about our school and our town," she said. "And they just tell us about themselves."

Cooper's students have enjoyed the little gifts, but Cooper said she hopes they enjoy the connections they're developing even more.

"It's been a learning experience for them to see something that they would have never experienced in the village," she said.

Living in Mentasta Lake has been a new experience as well for Cooper, who said she's dreamed of teaching in Alaska ever since she was in middle school.

"I feel like I'm making more of a difference here than I would teaching in Tulsa or Muskogee or some other big town," she said.

Smith said the seniors are planning on continuing the relationship for the rest of the year. They're already making plans for Valentine's Day and want to send all the kids in Alaska a sweat shirt with a custom-made slogan commemorating the relationship between the two communities.

"It just makes me feel really good," she said.

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