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By Suzie Boss

How small is Dillingham, Alaska? Depends who's asking.

During the 18 years she's been teaching at Dillingham Elementary, Marilyn Rosene, 46, has learned that there's no easy way to size up a community. Her adopted Bristol Bay hometown of 2,200 looks pint-sized to visitors from Anchorage, some 350 miles away by air. There's not even a traffic light on the one road that starts at the commercial fishing harbor and dead-ends 25 miles away. But to people who make their homes in the bush of southwestern Alaska, Dillingham is the hub—the nearest city large enough to house retail shops, a hospital, and offices for government agencies.

For Rosene, Alaska's Teacher of the Year for 2000, Dillingham has proved big enough to carve out a rewarding life. "As a teacher and as a person, I feel like there is a place for me here," she says. She wears all sorts of hats: wife, mother, community volunteer, teacher, colleague, friend, neighbor, leader. "It's not exactly the laid-back existence some people might imagine," she says.

Indeed, not much about teaching in rural Alaska fits outsiders' preconceptions. "Schools here are different from rural schools in other places. We're inaccessible and unknown to most of the world. In rural Montana, you can get in your truck and drive for four, six, or eight hours and eventually get to a Wal-Mart. Not here. You can only get in and out by air—and if the weather turns, you're stuck." And because of the sparse population, she adds, "most of our teaching staff comes from somewhere else."

Like many schools scattered across Alaska's vast landscape, the 580-student Dillingham City School District (including an elementary school for preschool through fifth-graders and a middle/high school for grades six through 12) constantly struggles with staff turnover. This school year started with a new superintendent, several new teachers, a new principal for the secondary school, and an opening for the elementary principal's job. Because she sees so many colleagues come and go, Rosene has given serious thought to the factors that convinced her to stay beyond a year or two—to make a real life here, not just a short-term adventure.

Growing up in the suburbs of Minnesota's Twin Cities, Rosene wanted to be a teacher from a young age. Ironically, it was inner-city children she imagined herself teaching, not the population of predominantly Alaska Native rural youth she teaches today. After college, graduate school, and a few years of teaching in Wichita, Kansas, she moved to Anchorage with a girlfriend in 1982, almost on a whim. She worked in a restaurant, started substituting in schools, and began hearing about the other side of Alaska—the rugged back country of glacier-fed lakes, mountains, tundra, and vast forests that sounded like "a whole other world."

Rosene enrolled in a summer program in Fairbanks designed to help prospective rural teachers get their bearings. "I learned more about the culture, people, and history. Guest lecturers helped us overcome our misconceptions about the bush and provided a good reality check. They told us things like, if you have a missionary zeal, don't come. If you think teaching in a two-teacher school will help your marriage, don't come. They helped get rid of the stereotypes." In hindsight, she sees that program as a key to helping her make a successful transition to small-town teaching in a community where being Caucasian makes her a minority. Now, when she's on the recruiting end of summer job fairs, she's the one challenging prospective applicants' myths about living and teaching in rural Alaska. What she hopes to avoid is the horror story she's heard all too often: new teachers flying into a bush community, then hightailing it right back out again before they see their first sunset.

"Teacher turnover is a statistic, but it's also about people," Rosene points out. "Think of a child who gives his whole heart to a brand-new teacher. And then that teacher leaves, and that hurts. So maybe he'll give only nine-tenths of his heart to the next teacher. And after four or five teachers come and go, the child's afraid of getting hurt again. He's not so open anymore." Rosene is not surprised when the first question parents and children ask a new teacher is: Are you going to stay?

When small-town teaching is a good match, though, the benefits extend to teachers, students, and community members. Rosene sees the advantages her own 12-year-old daughter enjoys, growing up in Dillingham. "Kids can participate in all the activities in school here. It's not like the big suburban school I attended, where you were either a jock or a brain or in the band, with no chance to overlap. In Dillingham, either everyone participates or the activities just don't happen." High school students involved in athletics or student government gain exposure to a wider world, traveling by air to competitions and events across the state.

What's more, Rosene says, "You know almost everybody here. Most of these kids have been playing together since they were in diapers. Students know their teachers in and out of school, whether as neighbors, through church, or just bumping shopping carts at the grocery store." Drawing on research in resiliency and on her own experiences in the classroom, she has become a big believer "in having adults really know kids, adults who are important in their lives."

As a teacher, Rosene has found ample room for professional growth in Dillingham. "Because we're a small staff, I've had opportunities to participate in staff development, to write and adapt curriculum, to provide inservice training. As a basic fifth-grade teacher, I've had a lot of involvement in leadership roles. Not every teacher might be as excited about that," she admits, "but it's helped me learn and grow."

In her own classroom, Rosene makes an effort to connect learning with the lives of her 10- and 11-year-old students. "I try to be reality-based. I encourage my students to be responsible for what happens in our classroom, for what doesn't happen, and also responsible for the school and larger community." Her kids operate a school-supply store, for instance, called "The Pencil Place." Rosene invites guests from the community to talk with her young entrepreneurs about how to run a business, how to work with a bank, how to work effectively as a team, how to prepare for careers in the real world. At the end of the year, they donate proceeds—usually several hundred dollars—to causes they have researched and consider important for their community and the larger world. Elementary-aged students are old enough "to think of the future," she says, "to see themselves as productive adults."

In all subject areas, Rosene makes an effort to incorporate both community and culture. A social studies discussion about family, for instance, typically includes a classroom visit from elders in the community. In a math lesson, she explains how the Yup'ik people take a mathematical approach to designing parkas. In health, she talks about avoiding and treating hypothermia—a survival skill during the long Alaska winters.

As Alaska's Teacher of the Year, Rosene has had a chance to share her experiences and insights with everyone from the governor to state education officials to outstanding teachers from other states. Their questions often bring her full circle, to that first query that greeted her in Dillingham: How long will she stay? "What's forever?" she answers back. Although she can't foretell the future, Rosene knows that this remote place on the edge of Bristol Bay feels like home. "It's a comfortable place, and it works for both my husband and me. My daughter is challenged academically. And I've had a chance to form relationships here with children, with community members, and with my educational family. It's a bond I'll never make anywhere else."

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