Lori Nassuk graduated from White Mountain School this spring. For most of her middle and high school career, she read excerpts from thick, SpringBoard-branded textbooks – part of a system sold nationwide and adopted by the district roughly a decade ago.
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“I just got tired of reading a couple pages of a story instead of an entire book, where you can get the entire story,” Nassuk said.
Nassuk’s English teacher, Joanne Anung’aq Wassillie, taught in White Mountain for more than a decade before leaving the district this spring. She said she didn’t like the excerpt approach either.
“You very rarely got to see a whole piece, like the whole play or the whole novel,” Wassillie said. “I think they were trying to cover as much as they could in the text for that year, which really was doing a disservice because you don’t get behind what the author’s purpose was. You can’t really get to the whole meaning of what they wanted you to get out of.”
In 2024, the Bering Strait School District, which serves 15 communities across the Seward Peninsula and Norton Sound region, began reviewing its middle and high school English language arts curriculum.
Curriculum — which are a structured set of lessons, reading materials, and education goals — often come in the form of large textbooks that are sold in bulk to districts across the country.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of enthusiasm across the board for any of the materials that we reviewed,” said Matt Roesch, a parent in Unalakleet who served on the review committee.
Roesch said the committee wanted a program that was rigorous, adaptable to different literacy levels and engaging for students.
“If my children don’t love reading, they’re never going to learn how to write a good sentence, and critically analyze a piece of text, if they haven’t first learned how to enjoy reading,” he said.
Alex Roberts, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction, was hearing that from parents – academics.
“A lot of the research points towards finding really good books and really good stories, and independent reading those stories helps increase the students’ enjoyment of reading in general,” he said.
Roberts, who is originally from South Carolina, moved to Unalakleet and joined the district about three years ago.
He says the old material often focused on experiences far removed from the lives of students in rural Alaska, like kids living in cities doing city kid things.
“We want them to see themselves in their literature,” Roberts said. “Once you do that, they see themselves in it, it becomes more engaging, and that’s backed by data and educational research.”
The district scrapped the search. Over the next year and a half, Roberts spearheaded the creation of seven grade levels of curriculum, each with five units. It’s built around complete books that include local, state, and Native authors, stories, and perspectives.
Budget cuts, he said, left him as the primary administrator working on the project.
“It was definitely a labor of love, working nights, working weekends, working all summer off contract,” Roberts said. “Just getting lots of feedback and not doing it alone, making sure I had the support of the people around me.”
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Lori Nassuk of White Mountain plans to study process technology and aviation maintenance at the University of Alaska Fairbanks this fall, and while English is not her favorite subject, she noticed a change last year.
“I really liked the curriculum, actually, compared to the years prior, because reading those little prompts in the SpringBoard books was kind of boring,” Nassuk said.
Nassuk’s senior class read five full-length books. While there were canon classics like Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” they also read newer titles like the 2011 novel “The Raven’s Gift,” written by Southwest Alaska author and University of Alaska Anchorage professor Don Reardon. The novel follows a couple who move to teach in a Yup’ik village on the Alaska tundra.
In an end-of-year curriculum report, anonymous student comments echoed Nassuk’s response. One wrote, “I liked talking about it because it connected to things we know.” Another wrote, “I don’t usually like reading, but I liked this book because it felt real.”
“I was so just happy to hear that kids were engaging with stories and really enjoying what they’re doing,” Roberts said. “The teachers were seeing a difference, and then we saw the scores go up.”
During the 2024-25 school year, 5.3% of Bering Strait School District students in grades 3-9 scored proficient or above on the state English language arts assessment, according to state data.
State test scores from the end of last school year are not yet available, but the district says it has separate, early data showing middle and high school literacy rates up 10 percentage points.
Former teacher Joanne Wassillie said the curriculum was one of several factors that led the White Mountain School to celebrate rising language arts test scores at graduation. She said the district has been moving the needle in that direction over the past several years through teacher training, lesson planning and strategies for building positive classroom relationships.
“To me, that had as equal a place in student achievement as the curriculum material,” Wassillie said, “But the curriculum coming around when it did was good too.”
She said there’s still room for more community input, including from teachers on the selection of novels and development of lessons.
“There were some good novel selections, but I do wish that there had been a chance to have more community involvement in the process,” Wassillie said. “I’m very collaborative. I like people to work together. And collaboration takes time.”
Unalakleet parent Matt Roesch also sees the curriculum as a starting point. He said he would like it to be tailored even more locally.
“ We have so many different sites with so many different histories and so many different relationships to the schools,” Roesch said. “So I think having a little bit more flexibility is at least a good first step to addressing the fact that what students in Stebbins need is different than what students in Unalakleet need, which is different than what students in Teller might need.”
Roberts said he welcomes feedback from teachers and expects the curriculum to change as the program develops.
“I want teachers to be able to feel like they could tell me, ‘this doesn’t work,’” Roberts said. “The idea is that this is a growing, living, breathing set of documents that will hopefully guide our reading initiatives for 10, 20 years.
For now, it’s year two of the new curriculum in the district , where titles like Gary Paulsen’s “Hatchet” and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” await returning students.
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