A Very Welcoming Place

Naknek, Alaska—You'd think sixth-grade Travis had enough adventure in his life—winging across the Naknek River every morning on a bush plane to attend Bristol Bay School. Skimming across Kvichak Bay in his own skiff, fishing for herring and salmon with the permit he inherited from his Aleut grandmother. Tooling across the scrubby tundra in search of caribou and moose, his Remington 308 rifle mounted on the "Big Red" Honda three-wheeler that's his pride and joy. You'd think his own real-life stories would be enough—like the heart-stopping tale he tells about crawling on his stomach toward a flock of cranes and coming nose-to-hoof with an 800-pound moose and her calf. Or the time he accidentally trapped a bald eagle in a 330 Conabear he'd set out for beaver. "I sent it off to a wildlife rehab place, and they released it later out at Lynx Loop," he says, clearly relieved that the bird survived. Legends of the wilds are ingrained in his family lore. "I don't hunt swans, that's for sure," reports Travis, who aspires to a career as a ranger or wildlife biologist. "I've heard stories that they haunt you. My dad shot one, one time, and its mate followed him everywhere and made sad noises. It made him kinda feel sad."

Yet, despite his action-packed life, Travis can be found each weekday morning before class, searching out still more adventure in a less obvious place—the school library. One morning in May, he's leaning into one of the library's PCs, tapping out answers to online quizzes on Walt Morey's Home Is the North and James Houston's Frozen Fire, two of the many titles he's read for the annual K-8 reading challenge run by school librarian Tiki Levinson. Kids earn points for passing a quiz on each book they read. They can redeem their points for all kinds of goodies, from ice cream cones to a pajama party. Last year, the students passed quizzes on 2,800 books—an impressive literary feat for a K-12 school with only 220 students.

"Everyone has a book under their arm, everyone's talking about books, all excited," says Levinson, who launched the program three years ago. A federal grant paid for software from Scholastic Inc. called Reading Counts, which tracks kids' reading via computer. "It's changed the whole culture of the school."

But on this particular May morning, that culture of rabid reading is in jeopardy. That's because at its last meeting, the school board cut two-thirds of the library position to balance a budget beset by local and statewide economic troubles. Levinson, who was honored in 1997 as Alaska's School Librarian of the Year, is looking elsewhere for work. As students and teachers scramble to finish end-of-year projects and wrap up curriculum units, everyone feels the looming loss of the library program Levinson has built during her 15-year tenure at Bristol Bay Borough School District—one of the smallest Alaska districts with a full-time, certified librarian.

"Without Tiki, we'll fossilize," predicts Pam Krepel, who teaches high school Spanish and social studies at Bristol Bay.

"If Tiki leaves, it'll rip the heart out of the school," adds middle school teacher Bill Hill.

Heart of the School

To understand Krepel and Hill's remarks, you only need to spend a day or two hanging around the Bristol Bay library. If you drop in before the first-period bell, you'll have to skirt around a crush of kids at the computers, and sidestep more kids scanning the stacks for intriguing titles. Lots of parents are there, too, helping their children find books and complete quizzes in their quest for points in the K-8 reading challenge.

Even more striking, though, is the traffic that happens after the early-morning crowd disperses. All day long, it's ceaseless: students, teachers, and parents seeking Levinson's counsel. You realize pretty fast that people come not just for the books and magazines and videos that form the library collection. They come for Levinson herself—for the deep knowledge of resources that she shares with unflagging enthusiasm.

Not only does Levinson know the name of every child in every grade, she knows just about every book they've ever read and what they'd probably like to read next. Not only does she keep up on the curriculum goals of every subject at every level, she passes on ideas for how teachers might blend literature into a science lesson, or magazine research into a math unit. Not only does she recommend new books and hot Web sites to anyone who asks, she keeps a constant lookout for new resources that might pique a child's interest or meet a teacher's needs and passes her tips along with an ardor that's contagious.

"The things Tiki does to support the classroom and kids' reading are just amazing," says Egli. "The students and the staff rely on her heavily for support for everything—she's not just there to help you check out books."

Teachers are quick to tick off recent examples of the countless ways Levinson backs up their teaching, both general and specific, mainstream and arcane:

"We have a real close working relationship between the librarian and our academic field," says teacher Patrick Krepel. "I know that if Tiki goes, I will not be able to do some of the things I do now. We're losing not only the physical resource—accessibility to the materials—but we're also losing the human resource."

Nowhere is Levinson's human touch more evident than in her relationships with students. She knows the reading levels and literary tastes of virtually every child who wanders through the doors of the brightly lit, colorfully decorated library. Mysteries, science fiction, adventure, classics, romance—whatever the genre, Levinson knows what's new and what's good. That's because she's read thousands of the library's 10,000 titles herself. So when she says, "Hey, Olaf, here's something you oughta read," or "Psst, Shilo, I've put aside this book for you—take a look," the recommendation is not only reliable but deeply personal. Standing at the back of the library, she talks quietly with a long-legged high schooler whose grey, hooded sweatshirt seems out of sync with her pink flip-flops. "Erica just read this one," Levinson tells the girl, pulling a book off the shelf. "It has more depth than the movie." As the girl studies the cover, the librarian plucks another volume from the stacks. "I just got this one from the book fair. It's good, but it's not as meaty as what you've been reading."

Another student, a junior named Ted, catches Levinson's attention when he passes by with a copy of The Old Man and the Sea. "Oh, another Hemingway," she remarks. "Yeh, I liked The Sun Also Rises," he says, adding, "I was looking for another classic. I like Stephen King, but you can't read those kinda books all the time. You gotta mix it up once in awhile."

"I'll see parents at the store, and I'll make a point of talking to them," Levinson says. "That's the value of being in a small town—we're all connected to each other."

Patrick Krepel cherishes this quality in Levinson. "It's being more than a librarian," he says. "It's being a member of a whole community and figuring out along the way what would really help and what would make sense for our school."

Bugs and Bears

The natural wood siding of Bristol Bay School blends with the tangle of alder, willow, and wild berries that thrives here on the Alaska Peninsula. There's a footpath through the scrub that you can follow from Al and Lou's B&B. But it's best to call ahead—just in case.

"There's no bear danger today," Levinson cheerily tells a visitor preparing to take the short trek to the school. She pauses. "Not that I know of, anyway."

Bear danger, it seems, is no more alarming to the inhabitants of Naknek than freeway pile-ups are to residents of the Lower 48. It's just an everyday risk of getting around town.

Another local risk is insects. Mixed with the calls of Aleutian song sparrows and black-capped chickadees, the summer skies are abuzz with mosquitoes and black flies. And then there's the weather—cold rains and bitter winds tearing in from the Bering Sea, and snowstorms brooding in the mountains of the Alaska Range. It's enough to keep kids huddling in the house much of the year. These natural hazards feed the technological hazards kids face in the bush—endless television viewing and video game playing.

"The weather is cruddy a lot," says Levinson. "Even in the summer when it's nice, kids have to stay inside because of the bugs and the bears. TV is the major form of entertainment here. Unlike in larger communities, there aren't a lot of other things to do."

Levinson sees books as the best antidote to TV catatonia. And there's another big reason that the reading-advocacy hat she wears is particularly important in this one-road town of fewer than 700 souls. Traditional Native culture, she notes, is not tied to print. "In rural Alaska, a lot of kids come from an oral tradition," she notes. "There are not a lot of reading materials in their homes, and they're not read to when they're younger. So the librarian, in conjunction with the teachers, plays a really important role in familiarizing kids with the written word, and getting them excited about books and reading."

The community's willingness to invest in its school and its library program goes back a half-century. Weary of sending local youths to boarding schools in Sitka—or even as far away as Oregon or Oklahoma—when they reached high school age, residents founded Alaska's first borough (equivalent to a county) in 1952. Local leaders then had the authority and taxing power to establish a high school. The library program was launched the same year. Over the decades, the little school at Bristol Bay has produced some of the state's highest test scores—a tribute to the community's fierce commitment to education, according to Levinson: "It's the way we see ourselves."

The library program both reflects and bolsters the school's success, Levinson says. But all of that is in question now. Fishing families that once thrived on the silvery bounty of salmon and herring have had to abandon expensive homes and seek work in other places after "The Disaster" of 1997. That's when the fishery crashed. Although the resource has rebounded somewhat, fish that once sold for $2.25 a pound is going for 42 cents today. A school that was once flush with art and music programs is now clinging on to a bare-bones curriculum, with PE the next likely casualty and its library program shrinking away.

Bill Hill is one of the many teachers who will feel the loss of Levinson deeply. Taking a job five years ago teaching social studies, math, and science to middle schoolers at Bristol Bay was a homecoming for Hill, who was himself a student here in the 1980s. ("We moved down from Kakhonak," he says. When an out-of-state visitor admits that she's not exactly sure where Kakhonak is, he elaborates. "It's on Iliamna Lake." To the visitor's deepening quizzical look, he volunteers, "Iliamna Lake is up the Kvichak River." By now, the visitor is blinking blankly. With the good-natured patience that longtime Alaskans show with cheechakos ignorant of the wildest reaches of this northernmost state, Hill says, "It's halfway between here and Anchorage." The visitor's face registers recognition at last. "Oh, OK, gotcha," she says.)

"Tiki has information on everything," Hill says. "She's on the ball all the time."

If he and his students come to the library to research South America, for instance, Levinson immediately jumps into action. Showing Hill and his kids every relevant resource in the school's collection and guiding them to valuable Web sites is the first step. But then, "she doesn't forget about it," Hill reports. She'll keep feeding him ideas and resources throughout the unit in what he describes as an essential—and irreplaceable—support to his teaching.

"She has the training, she has the experience, and more than that—she's a really driven person," he says. "She gets everyone reading."

That "everyone" includes the teachers themselves. One of the math teachers, for example—a new staff member from Colorado who insists he never cracks the spine of anything other than a textbook—has been the regular recipient of "famous Alaska stories," such as Shadows on the Koyukuk, from Levinson's trove of Northwest readings ever since he arrived at Bristol Bay last fall.

When a new teacher comes in, Levinson wastes no time reaching out. "You let them know what the library has to offer and how it can support what they do," she says. Then, using an apt metaphor for a fishing town, she adds, "You put out the bait, and hopefully they'll take it."

"You don't do it just once," she counsels. "You keep up the contact—e-mail people and talk to them: Talk, talk, talk, all the time. I try to keep track of what people are doing in their classrooms and just keep it in my head all the time—what might be useful to them this year, what I should purchase that might augment what they're doing next year. I try to figure out a way to make a connection with everybody on the staff. It just becomes a way of doing business."

Big-Sky Bookworm

Mary Levinson was nicknamed for the glittering-green eyed Tiki doll her aunt sent as a souvenir from Hawaii. Growing up in Montana, where every school is required by law to have a library, the little girl kept her green eyes glued to books. Constantly. It was all a bit much for her mom at times. Tiki would lug towering stacks of public library books into the family car, only to finish reading them by the time her mom pulled into the driveway back home. During the family's frequent road trips, Tiki kept her nose in her books, oblivious to the scenic wonders outside.

Levinson, whose undergraduate work was in secondary education and library science, concedes now that her initial interest in libraries was naive. "Being a librarian was really tempting to me because I'd always been a bookworm," she says. But once she enrolled in college library courses, she quickly awakened to a new understanding of the role.

By the time Levinson finished her master's degree in curriculum and instruction, technology— especially the Internet—was adding yet another dimension to an already multilayered job. The Internet's ubiquity and instant accessibility, far from negating the need for librarians, made the librarian's skills all the more essential, particularly for kids.

"The analogy I like to use is, it's a jungle out there," Levinson says of the Internet. "There's just a big mess of information—a mess. It's just weeds and vines and all overgrown. The librarian is the guide. She's got a pith helmet on, and she can tell you, 'Oh, there's a poisonous snake over there,' and 'Look out for that big pit you might fall into.' She can guide you to the other side in one piece."

Filters are fine as far as they go: screening out objectionable material. But "screening in" the good stuff—digging up those digital "gold mines of information," in Levinson's lingo—is critical for making the Internet a powerful tool for learning.

"I guide kids to the rich and appropriate resources—the reputable, well-organized sites with factual information—so they aren't left to just wander around," she says.

She teaches a two-day class for high school English students on how to navigate the Internet and assess the quality of Web sites—one of the countless ways she collaborates with teachers at Bristol Bay.

"I have good relationships with the teachers," she says. "Most of them want to collaborate."

At this query, Levinson practically leaps out of her chair, shaking her head emphatically at the questioner.

"Oh, no, no, no!" she corrects, insistently. "The librarian reaches out to the teachers!"

Editor's Note: Tiki Levinson received the Linda K. Barrett Award for service to the school library profession from the Alaska Association of School Librarians for the 2002-2003 school year. She has moved to a full-time library position in the Delta/Greely School District in Delta Junction, Alaska.

The school library is the heart of this Alaskan bush school beset by bugs, bears, and a battered economy

Heart of the School

Bugs and Bears

Big-Sky Bookworm