For Suzzuk Huntington, education has always been about bridging worlds. Through her entire career, the Shishmaref-born educator and administrator has moved between classrooms, communities and leadership roles.
Now, in her new position as director of cultural integration for the Bering Strait School District, Suzzuk hopes to weave those worlds together.
“I’ve always considered myself to be a bridge,” she said. “Instead of straddling and jumping back and forth, I want to integrate them and have them become seamless.”
This isn’t Suzzuk’s first time working for the Unalakleet-based school district. She taught in the district for nearly a decade before stepping into administrative roles in the Shishmaref and Koyuk Malimiut schools. She went on to work as coordinator of cultural programs at the district office and most recently served as superintendent of Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka for the past three years.
Suzzuk said a major focus of her work is redefining what it means for students to succeed. One source of inspiration was a meeting with the late Father Michael Oleksa, who met with BSSD staff during her previous tenure. He asked the group what a successful graduate looked like in their communities.
“All that anybody could ever talk about was them being prepared for college, them being able to navigate city life and the things that would be successful elsewhere,” Suzzuk said. “And nobody was able to articulate what those same things would look like to be successful here at home.”
Suzzuk said that for a district like BSSD, where just 12% of students enroll in college post-graduation, it's crucial to prepare the students that stay for life after primary school.
That vision, she believes, requires weaving local knowledge into academic instruction. A math lesson might incorporate sled building, or a science class might study the anatomy of harvested caribou or seals.
“If we build in all of the components, the academic ones and the cultural ones, both are enhanced,” she said.
Suzzuk believes the hardest work lies deeper than classroom projects or surface-level cultural activities.
“The biggest challenges are not orientation or basic terms,” she said. “It’s our deep cultural values and beliefs. It’s the things that are so deep in ourselves that we don’t recognize what they are.”
Those values, she said, sometimes appear to clash with district policies, but in her experience they are often aligned once both sides learn to articulate them in ways that the other can understand.
Sustainable improvement
Teacher turnover across BSSD complicates the process of building cultural understanding. In many of the district’s 15 communities, a majority of teachers come from outside the region or country and stay for only a few years. But Suzzuk believes the key to success lies not in how long a teacher stays, but in how they approach their work.
“The dispositions and the mindsets are most critical,” she said. “Having the ability and willingness to feel like, ‘I don’t have all the answers’, and to see how that applies in this local context.”
Language revitalization is another top priority. Suzzuk said many communities are starting from an “intermediate” level, with limited resources and few places to hear everyday conversation in Inupiaq or Yupik.
“We’re not at a point where we’re ready for immersion,” she said. “What we need to do is build our fluency levels. Many of us get stuck at this intermediate level and not be able to take it to that next level.”
Her choice to go by her Inupiaq name rather than her English name and introduce herself in Inupiaq is part of that effort.
“The whole purpose is to remind ourselves that this should be normalized,” she said. “If we get impatient when people introduce themselves in the language, how are we showing that we value it?”
Suzzuk's Inupiaq introduction
As Suzzuk settles into her position, she will be visiting schools across BSSD, including Shishmaref, St. Michael and Unalakleet where she also serves as liaison for principals. She said being present in communities is as important as working in classrooms or district offices.
“If there’s anything that our communities crave and want from our schools and our educators, it’s that kind of an investment,” she said. “How much are we also showing up for them?”
For her, success will not only be measured in test scores, but in whether schools visibly reflect their communities.
“Do our spaces look and feel like Norton Sound, St. Lawrence Island, and Seward Peninsula communities when you’re at our events?” she asked. “Can it be any random school in the country, or is it very clearly and obviously tied to place?”
Despite the challenges of language loss, teacher turnover and competing priorities, Huntington said she’s optimistic about the future of BSSD and the students it serves.
“I absolutely feel that having more than 80 percent of our students reaching high student achievement levels is doable,” she said. “And I think it’s doable if we do things by capitalizing on the tremendous knowledge that we have.”
