When a ferocious storm surge swept through Kipnuk on a Sunday in mid-October — the remnants of Typhoon Halong energized by an unusually warm Pacific — villagers scrambled for higher ground. James Taq’ac Amik and his family fled into an 18‑foot aluminum motorboat at 4 a.m., then spent five hours huddled on a small bridge as houses began drifting away. Their intended refuge was Chief Paul Memorial School, the largest, sturdiest building in the Yup’ik village of about 700.
Schools in remote Alaska regularly serve that role: the only buildings with flush toilets, higher elevations or pilings that keep them above floodwaters, and generators and gym floors large enough to shelter dozens or hundreds. “If you need to evacuate, you evacuate to the elementary school,” said state Sen. Löki Tobin. “Those are lifeboats,” added Bryan Fisher, Alaska’s emergency management director.
But in Kipnuk, the school’s main generator had been undergoing repairs. It functioned “well enough for the school,” according to Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Hannibal Anderson, but was overwhelmed when nearly the whole village poured in. The backup generator could not handle the extra load, and hundreds remained in the building for two days before officials arranged a mass evacuation to regional hubs — some families eventually taken nearly 500 miles away to Anchorage.
Kipnuk’s experience is not isolated. Gov. Mike Dunleavy declared more than a dozen disasters since August 2024; in October the state reported damage in 52 communities. Since 1998, Alaska has had more than 140 state-declared disasters, and in many of those events, rural public schools doubled as emergency shelters. Hundreds of residents in villages from Kotlik to Chevak and Hooper Bay have slept on gym floors or classroom mats during and after storms.
Yet many of those schools are deteriorating. A joint investigation by KYUK Public Media, NPR and ProPublica found a wide-ranging health and safety crisis in rural Alaska school buildings: failing boilers, broken pipes, nonfunctional fire sprinklers, rotting exterior siding, and electrical systems that cannot support large-scale sheltering. At Kashunamiut School in Chevak, for example, a sprinkler test failed and districts have reported chronic boiler and piping problems. That district’s $32 million renovation request for FY2025 was one of 114 proposals statewide; the state funded only 17 projects that year, and Chevak’s was not among them.
The state is legally responsible for funding construction and maintenance for many rural districts because these communities are unincorporated and lack a local tax base to pay for school upkeep. Over roughly the last 28 years, rural districts submitted nearly 1,800 requests for money to maintain or repair schools; only about 14% of those requests have been approved. Superintendents say the application process is onerous: professional inspections and surveys are costly, proposals are ranked against one another, and districts worry their needs won’t score high enough to earn scarce funds.
Districts say they often wait years for money. Kipnuk’s district waited 14 years for state approval of a major renovation request in 2015. The Lower Yukon School District has made repeated requests since 2018 — asking $2 million to more than $5 million annually for repairs to the Kotlik school and others — with little success. In Hooper Bay, which sits dangerously close to a rapidly eroding coastline, the district submitted 29 requests totaling more than $8.4 million; last year it received about $2.3 million for exterior repairs, but many needs remain.
State agencies acknowledge the problem but point to gaps in responsibility and funding. The Alaska Department of Education says schools are built for teaching first and that it does not inspect facilities specifically to determine whether they can serve as emergency shelters. “Schools are built for educational purposes — other uses are incidental or secondary to design,” education department spokesperson Bryan Zadalis wrote. The state’s emergency management division, which relies on schools in many villages during disasters, has no formal agreements with the education department to designate or maintain school shelters, and it lacks a dedicated funding stream to help prepare or upgrade schools for emergency use. A division spokesperson noted some grants exist for emergency preparedness, but they are limited.
The disconnect emerged during a February 2024 budget meeting when Sen. Tobin asked Craig Christenson, deputy commissioner of the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs (which houses the emergency management division), whether maintaining schools for shelter use would be less costly than repeatedly evacuating people. Christenson replied that his department does not maintain schools, even while acknowledging that his division does use them during emergencies.
Education officials say much of the challenge is basic, everyday maintenance that has been deferred until it becomes an emergency. “The crux of the situation … is that we get to an emergency because we didn’t take care of it,” Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop said.
For remote communities the stakes are acute. Many villages have few alternative buildings that are high and large enough to hold evacuees, and some homes lack plumbing, heating, or reliable electricity that would let families shelter safely at home. When schools fail to provide dependable heat, power, water, or fire protection during a crisis, residents face difficult tradeoffs: stay in an increasingly unsafe village, crowd into a building that may itself be compromised, or leave town for costly regional evacuations.
Local leaders and educators urge coordinated, sustained investment. They want clearer lines of responsibility between the education department and emergency management, predictable funding for maintenance and emergency upgrades (like robust generators and resilient electrical systems), and a simpler, fairer process for approving rural districts’ requests.
For families such as Amik’s, the need is immediate. Residents of Kipnuk sheltered in their school as the storm destroyed homes and scattered debris through the village. The building’s pilings and design kept it standing when much else was swept away — but without reliable backup power and other shelter-focused upgrades, the school that served as a temporary refuge risked becoming another emergency.
Reporting for this story included work from KYUK Public Media.
