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This is the final story of a three-part series called “Rethinking English language arts in the Bering Strait.”
Lori Nassuk graduated from White Mountain School this spring. For most of her middle and high school years, she read excerpts from thick, SpringBoard-branded textbooks – a national English language arts program the Bering Strait School District adopted roughly a decade ago.
“I just got tired of reading a couple pages of a story instead of an entire book, where you can get the entire story, I guess,” Nassuk said.
Nassuk plans to study process technology and aviation maintenance at the University of Alaska Fairbanks this fall. English is not her favorite subject, but she noticed a difference in last years curriculum.
“I really liked the curriculum actually, compared to the years prior,” Nassuk said. “Because reading those little prompts in the SpringBoard books was kind of boring.”
Nassuk’s senior class read five full-length books(opens in new tab). 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(opens in new tab), anonymous student comments echoed Maynesik’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 happy to hear that kids were engaging with stories and really enjoying what they were doing, and the teachers were seeing a difference,” said Alex Roberts, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction and developer of the program. “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 literacy assessment, according to state data(opens in new tab). The assessment measures students’ English language arts skills, including reading, writing, speaking, listening and language.
State assessment results from the end of the last school year are not yet available. But BSSD officials said their preliminary data show middle and high school literacy rates increased by 10 percentage points.
“None of this happens without our teachers embracing it and doing an amazing job of incorporating the books and showing excitement about it,” Roberts said.
A work in progress
Joanne Anung’aq Wassillie, English language arts teacher at White Mountain School for over a decade before leaving this spring, said her students responded well to the material during the curriculum’s pilot year.
She said that during her 19-year career working in several school districts, she taught multiple curriculums and she prefers the novel-based literacy framework.
“Overall, it’s a good start to trying to pick things that might be more successful with our students," she said. "More relevant.”
Wassillie said White Mountain’s English language arts test scores rose last year, an accomplishment they celebrated at graduation.
She says the district has been moving the needle in that direction 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.
She said there’s still room in the curriculum 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.”
Matt Roesch, a Unalakleet parent who served on past curriculum review committees, also sees the curriculum as a starting point, not a finished product. He hopes the district continues making room for communities to adapt it to their own cultures and needs.
He says that even with an in-house initiative tailored to the region, an overarching curriculum may still not fit all students.
“In BSSD, we have so many different sites with so many different histories and so many different relationships to the schools,” Roesch said. “So 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,’ because it’s going to be a growing and developing thing and teachers have some really good feedback as to, ‘we would really love this to be incorporated next year,’ ” 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.”
Students return to classrooms Aug. 27 to pick up new novels for the second year of the BSSD Novel-Based Literacy Framework program.
