Stebbins remains steadfast in rebuilding after school fire
Three weeks after the tragic fire that razed the Tukurngailnguq School and teacher housing in Stebbins to the ground, the community proves their resilience and resolve in the face of tragedy. With school less than a month away, numerous entities are rallying to get kids to class on time with hopefully some normalcy as the school is rebuilt over the next three years.
The fire
In the early evening of Wednesday June 26, a toolshed that contained the school’s boiler caught fire. After discovering the fire, the community fought to keep it at bay by dumping buckets of water on the growing flames. From the shed the fire jumped to another building next to the school. While efforts to dampen the destruction continued in the form of city owned water pumps dispatched, a bucket brigade and an electrical shut down, people went into the school to collect significant and historical objects from the increasingly vulnerable building.
City Administrator Daisy Katcheak recalls working her way to the trophy cases that housed the most recent generations’ accolades and finding it engulfed in smoke, forcing anyone left inside to evacuate. “There was this blue chemical burn. From the paint and plastic and everything else that was burning,” Katcheak said. “It was hard to douse when the winds picked up.”
The Nome Volunteer Fire Department was contacted and arrived in three planes an hour after the fire was discovered. Eight firefighters touched down with hoses and pumps which they used to siphon water from the ocean onto the flames, catching sand and gravel in the equipment in the process.
Stebbins temporality lost power and water during the fire. Water bottles were flown in and an Alaska Village Electrical Cooperative crew arrived days later to restore electricity, though Katcheak said some people lost subsistence foods that thawed in their freezers.
The fire was declared a State Emergency by Governor Mike Dunleavy on June 27, an acknowledgement that opens the community to receiving state funds in the wake of the disaster.
Cleanup efforts
The ruins of the burned-down school and adjacent buildings have been cleared, with most of the debris removed and flattened out with gravel. A small portion of remaining damage stands out on the plain landscape, the teacher housing unit that still needs an insurance assessment before it can be leveled.
Tapraq Rock LLC, a contractor in Stebbins and partially owned by the Stebbins Native Corporation, was a leader in helping to fight the fire and also moving things along in the aftermath, taking charge in the cleanup process and purchasing equipment for the next steps in the recovery.
The first question uttered by many before the last flames had been extinguished was: Where will kids go to school? After meetings between the tribe, city and the Bering Strait School District, it was determined that elementary and middle schoolers will stay in Stebbins for instruction and high schoolers will bus to St. Michael for class.
On the plot where the school used to stand, a crop of new, temporary buildings will soon emerge. BSSD ordered two portables and six yurts for classroom instruction. Tapraq barged up a man camp that can be used by the school as office, kitchen and dining space. The construction company also purchased and shipped two school busses that will transport the highschoolers along the 10-mile road to St. Michael and back each day for class.
In St. Michael, the city offices are located in the old school. An empty gym will be used as temporary classrooms for the estimated 50 Stebbins students bussing in for instruction. This will be a learning curve, as no one in the district has ever has to ride a bus to school before, Superintendent of BSSD Tammy Dodd said. The decision to not integrate the Stebbins and St. Michael students came from the families and parents who expressed the importance of maintaining the identity of each school, Dodd said in an interview with the Nugget. “We want to make sure Stebbins can try to run as normal as possible and still be their own entity,” she said.
Getting to and from St. Michael in busses is now one of the largest hurdles in the back-to-school planning. The road has never remained open year-round.
It is considered a seasonal road between two independently functioning locations, Kawerak’s Transportation Program Director Sean McKnight explained to the Nugget. Lately, though, the communities have become more interconnected as Stebbins lost their store to a fire almost two years ago and visit the nearest store in St. Michael. That store has yet to be replaced. And St. Michael residents often travel to Stebbins to access the island’s main fuel farm.
Prior to the school fire, the communities put in a request to the Denali Commission for funding to design and develop improvements to the road, in hopes of moving toward constant use.
“People are increasingly having to go back and forth year-round. This is a relatively new development, so last year, the tribes attempted to —and were successful — in opening the road for a short bit of time, but from that lesson, we learned that there’s more to be done, and more effort would have to be made to maintain that road open throughout the winter,” McKnight said.
An assessment done by Kawerak estimates it will cost $2 to $3 million to get the 10-mile road ready to bus 50 kids on a daily basis, and more funding is required to maintain it throughout the winter.
“As of right now, we could not bring students on that road,” Dustin Scalisi, manager of Tapraq Rock, said. He estimates with a good road on a good day it will take around 40 minutes for the bus to travel the 10 miles.
The problem isn’t the work, as Tapraq is prepared to dispatch a crew on the night shift and get the route patched in time for August 21, the first day of school. The problem is the cost of maintaining the road for the three years it will take until the new school in Stebbins is built. Because of its disaster status, the road project will likely be funded by the Alaska Department of Military Affairs, Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, or DHS&EM, but it’s unknown how long it could for the reimbursement to come.
Tapraq has taken on the task of maintaining the road, already purchasing graders and extra equipment for the job, but they are still waiting for the assurance of funding before the work can begin. Still, Scalisi is hopeful the productive energy from the community will continue.“School has to go on. So, it’s not really the ideal timeline, but everyone put their best foot forward and the puzzle is being pieced together and it’s starting to take shape,” Scalisi said.
Lost and found
A school is more than a place for instruction. “A school is one of the centers of the community, and when it’s gone, it’s kind of painful,” Principal of Tukurngailnguq School Robert Cooper said.
A meeting space, area for events, place to dance, practice, connect.
In addition to the instructional buildings, half of the teacher housing burned. This left nine teachers without homes and most of their worldly belongings. Teachers will have to double up in the housing units available, which just one more challenge they will face going into the new school year. Most of the teachers were not in town when the fire happened, including Principal Cooper. The principal said the tragedy still impacted him from afar, but it will be different when he and the other teachers return and are faced with what they lost.
Online fundraising efforts have been initiated by the community to raise money for teachers.
The whole school was destroyed. That means wrestling mats, books, printers, art supplies, jerseys, documents and everything else a place of learning houses were lost. Textbooks have been ordered; basic school supplies were purchased but this year they will be starting from scratch.
“We’re at the point where the children have experienced this, they’ve experienced the loss of our retail store, COVID, Merbok, they’ve learned to become resilient. Instead of going down, they’re building each other up,” City Administrator Katcheak explained to the Nugget with weary pride.
Since the fire, her and her office crew have been making sure the community continues to function.
They planned and executed a basketball tournament held in St. Michael last week, donating funds raised to teachers who lost their belongings in the fire. Some money will also go toward replacing frequently used student items like sports jerseys and equipment.
Katcheak also saw the tournament as an opportunity for kids from both communities to familiarize themselves with each other. They will be more interconnected than ever through this tragedy and having friends to lean on can make the burden lighter, Katcheak said. “We’re all intermediated and unified, and using our natural resources to make it [rebuilding of Stebbins school] a reality.”
The way the communities gathered and utilized the space of St. Michael’s School gym made it hard to believe Stebbins could go without such a stomping ground. From the kids playing on the playground under the midnight sun to the families grouped inside cheering on their teams, a school is a place where people connect.
“There’s no other place that that large of a congregation of people can come together, so that is a huge loss for them,” Superintendent Dodd said.
Cooper said he sees this as a great opportunity for the school and Stebbins. Already impressed by the community’s response so far, he is confident in the student and staff’s ability to adapt.
“I’m sure it’s going to be an adjustment, but I think it’s also a time for an opportunity, to kind of start all over again and to do things in a way that is not really scripted. You can try different things, and as you try together, teachers, admin, students and parents, the more we work together, I think the better it will be,” said Cooper.