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This is part one of a three part series called “Rethinking English language arts in the Bering Strait.”
Joanne Anung’aq Wassillie taught middle and high school students in White Mountain for more than a decade before leaving the Bering Strait School District this spring.
For most of that time, she taught with an English Language Arts curriculum called SpringBoard ELA – a national program the district adopted about a decade ago – which relied primarily on excerpts from plays and novels.
“You very rarely got to see a whole piece, like the whole play or the whole novel,” Wassillie said. “I think they’re trying to cover as much as they could in the text for that year, which really was doing a disservice.”
Wassillie said reading only excerpts limits students’ understanding and hinders their ability to analyze themes, symbols and other elements of literature. At times, she set the curriculum aside to teach a full Shakespeare play, though that meant leaving out other material prescribed by the SpringBoard curriculum.
“To me, it is a disservice to literature when you don’t address a text in its entirety, because you don’t get behind what the author’s purpose was,” she said. “You can’t really get to the whole meaning of what they wanted you to get out of.”
A curriculum is a structured set of lessons, reading materials and educational goals. These programs often come in the form of large textbooks sold in bulk to districts across the country.
In the past, Wassilie sat on the district committee responsible for reviewing English Language Arts curriculums. As Wassillie struggled with the one-size-fits-all program in the classroom, she says the committee worked to find the best material they could.
“But even then the curriculum material was from a large national publishing house who made the same textbooks for a wide audience,” she said. “So, the idea of finding something more tailored to our students, it’s a great idea.”
In 2024, the Bering Strait School District, which serves 15 communities across the Seward Peninsula and Norton Sound region, began another review of its middle and high school English Language Arts curriculum. Again, the committee struggled to find the right fit.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of enthusiasm across the board for any of the materials that we reviewed,” said Mattox Roesch, a Unalakleet parent who served on several curriculum committees.
Roesch said the 2024 committee wanted a program that was rigorous, adaptable for students with different literacy levels and engaging. But, he said, excerpts can make it difficult for students to engage with a story.
“I think that’s asking a lot when the kids don’t know what’s happening in the novel,” Roesch said. “They don’t know who these characters are, what they want, what they don’t want, and they’re not invested in the story.”
Roesch has a master’s degree in creative writing and is the author of “Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same,” a novel set in Unalakleet.
“If my children don’t love reading, they’re never going to learn how to write a good sentence,” Roesch said. “They’re never going to learn how to break down an argument and critically analyze a piece of text if they haven’t first learned how to enjoy reading.”
The district’s Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Alex Roberts, agreed.
“A lot of the research points toward finding really good books and really good stories,” Roberts said. “Those stories help increase the students’ enjoyment of reading in general.”
Roberts joined the district about three years ago, when, he said, literacy scores were “far below” acceptable achievement levels.
State assessment data show that just 5.3% of BSSD students in grades 3-9 read at or above grade level during the 2024-25 school year. Statewide, about 32.7% of students tested at or above grade level that same year. Data for the 2025-26 school year is not yet available.
Roberts said that while test scores matter, the district’s first goal was to help students become more engaged readers.
“Obviously we want the test scores to go up. We want the assessments to show results, but, like, that’s not what grounds us,” Roberts said. “We want to do what’s best for our kids. We want to put kids in the best position. We believe that will increase test scores, as opposed to, we create this to increase test scores.”
Roberts said off-the-shelf materials were not connecting with students in the district. The previous material, he said, often focused on experiences far removed from the lives of students in rural Alaska, like kids living in cities doing city kid things.
“There wasn’t enough grounded in their area, who they are,” Roberts said. “We want them to see themselves in their literature. And I believe that once you do that — they see themselves in it — it becomes more engaging. And that’s backed by data.”
Additionally, Roberts said the prices for off-the-shelf curriculums were difficult for a small rural district already dealing with inflation and flat state funding. Roberts said the district was quoted between $300,000 and $500,000 for a new curriculum. That estimate did not include the cost of annual renewals, online components or teacher professional development.
“I’ve had these conversations with some of the companies, they’re kind of pricing small rural districts out,” Roberts said. “Which has kind of led us, and not just this district, but other districts that I’ve had conversations with, to do more on their own.”
Ultimately, the district didn't choose any of the off-the-shelf curriculum options under review. Instead, over the year and a half that followed, they built their own.
That process is the focus of part two of this series, scheduled to publish Monday.
