The Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) has a new superintendent.
Andrew “Hannibal” Anderson took the helm of the district on July 1 after previous superintendent Kimberly Hankins retired. Anderson will oversee the more than two-dozen schools spread across the district from the Kuskokwim River coast upriver to Kwethluk, around 12 miles above Bethel.
Anderson comes to Bethel from Montana. He previously served as superintendent of the Lower Yukon School District from 2018 to 2020 and got his start in Alaska in the Bering Strait School District.
Anderson sat down with KYUK to talk about what drew him to the Kuskokwim Delta and what his priorities are as he leads the region’s largest school district.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and flow, and may contain transcription errors.
KYUK (Sage Smiley): Thank you so much for joining us here on KYUK today. To start off, can you just introduce yourself? Who are you?
Andrew “Hannibal” Anderson: Yes, who am I? Well, I should introduce myself first formally. My name is Andrew Anderson, but many people know me as Hannibal Anderson, so people in the district office, others that I'm meeting are getting to know me as Hannibal, and it might be great for just the community as a whole to know that either name is very comfortable for me, but Hannibal is a nickname I've had since I was five or six years old.
KYUK: Where does that come from?
Anderson: It came from a children's storybook that had a little character named Hannibal that my father loved to read to me, and you know, I loved to hear him read it. So one day, as I was complaining, I think, about chores as a little boy, it was similar to the story, and my father just said, ‘Just like little Hannibal,’ and that was the name that came, much to my mother's dismay.
KYUK: So. Previous to becoming the Lower Kuskokwim School District superintendent, what brought you there? What has your career path been that brought you to this place?
Anderson: Yes, it's really interesting to me, the way my career path is laid out. I'll start with growing up in a rural, ranching, mountain kind of community. I just had the great early life of being in a wild place with three brothers. We had a lot of freedom and we were outside a lot. We were with animals, both domestic and wild in a very familiar kind of way. And so I think that just deeply imprinted on me a comfort level and a real sort of kinship with rural, relatively wild and open landscapes, and comfort with the people in those landscapes. I've lived in urban areas on and off, especially through my education track, but always I'm most familiar or comfortable with wide open places. So from there, then, I ranched.
My very beginning career was as a ranch manager for nice, big cattle ranches. And at a certain point, realized that I really wanted to be another kind of career track. Education became what that was. And so I began as a high school social studies teacher in a small community in Montana, and then I became an administrator, very importantly in my learning curve, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northern Montana, based in Browning. Wonderful, beautiful, highly exposed, I would say, part of the landscape and a wonderfully courageous and resilient people that I was able to work with. And that was a launch pad for me to always wanting to become more involved in what I would say, in Indigenous or Native communities and landscapes. And so shortly after that, my wife and I both came together to Alaska, and I began in the Bering Strait School District in Gambell, out on the edge. A wonderful experience, an experience where one comes to know themselves within fairly extreme conditions, a really valuable thing, and comes to appreciate greatly the grounded kind of relationships that keep one going. So from there I went to Nome only briefly, because we were in the midst of some other transitions, and then returned to Montana for eight years as superintendent. So that was where my first really valuable, important experience as superintendent was eight years in the Livingston, Montana School District, a community of maybe 8,000 people. And then couldn't resist a return to Alaska, and so went back to Bering Strait as a principal in Brevig Mission, and then in Lower Yukon [School District], where I was a central office person, ending after four years for as two years of the superintendent in Lower Yukon, and I retired from there with a general intention to retire in the spring of 2020, when COVID was really occurring. I will just say I had made the decision before COVID became a reality at all. Otherwise, I am quite sure I would have just remained there. Could not have jumped the ship in the midst of that, but I'd made that commitment and followed through with it. After a few years now in Montana, back in ranching and being home, close to family and community, I couldn't resist truly a strong attraction back to Alaska. So when this LKSD position became open, I thought to myself, ‘This is the one that I want to – you know – I don't want to walk past these positions anymore. This is the one I will go for.’ And to my great good fortune I was hired.
KYUK: So let's talk a bit more about that. What about LKSD or the Lower Kuskokwim more broadly made you want to be superintendent of this school region?
Anderson: Yeah, right on the surface of it, and very, very importantly, what drew my attention – of course, I was somewhat familiar with LKSD when I was up in Lower Yukon – but the size was attractive to me. I wanted to be in a so-called leadership position in a large enough district to have discrete departments, a large workforce, a large capacity, I would say. And therefore, you know, a large interface with a community, the community it serves. My trajectory has been from smaller to larger and larger, basically, and I wanted that to continue. And then, along with that, unquestionably, the other major draw was the nature of this regional community, the Alaska Native aspect particularly. I have never looked seriously at similar positions on the Alaska road system. And it's not because of any other reason than wanting to be in a more rural, complex, or diverse student and family and community population. So those are the two main things, rurality and Indigeneity. And then the size of the district.
KYUK: What do you want the Lower Kuskokwim School District community, or the Lower Kusko[kwim] more broadly, to know about you as a leader, as a superintendent, in your vision for this position?
Anderson: I like being a team leader and building or supporting the kinds of professional growth or personal growth, even, that brings people into really strong team relationships. And so with that sort of dichotomy of leader to team, the quality of team, to me, is what I'm really passionate about. And that team can be anything from student to teacher, teacher to teacher, the community in a school, the community outside of a school, and its relationship to the school. So I, in general, I would say that identifies me as being very committed to building capacity of people who can then serve in a really strong relational set of dynamics that bring us all to becoming, you know, to being more successful in what our basic mission is. And in this case, it's for students to be able to experience the best opportunities they can for their own healthy education and healthy growth.
KYUK: So Lower Kuskokwim School District is, as you mentioned, a very large, rural district dealing with a pretty diverse and varied set of infrastructure issues, of logistical issues, of all these different things. What are your focuses? What are the things that you're wanting to pay the most attention to as you're starting out in this position?
Anderson: It is the people of all sorts here that I want to be my main focus. There are plenty of other things going on, of course, but I really do believe, without much question at all, that the greater the capacity of people to bring their best to the table and to work with each other in that then many, and perhaps virtually all of the challenges that we may be faced with can be responded to and really positively and constructively sort of lived through and experienced. So in that then, and it's a little bit similar to what I spoke of earlier, the quality of relationships that we all can establish and that I can help support are the primary focus of what I think, what I think really a good leader does. And anyone – leader, follower relationships – anyone can participate, very importantly, in those relationships. Other things, there are a lot of good things in place in the district. I mean, the policies are well developed through supports from [Association of Alaska School Boards] and we update them, of course, they're important to stay clear on. Infrastructure, big questions, facilities, especially those, are big, and we may talk about those a little more in this. But the quality of our working relationships and our developing, you know, confidence in each other, trusting each other to be there and step up with the best – that'll be where the differences are on how well, how, how successful we are in our work.
KYUK: How do you anticipate doing that? I mean, obviously there are already established relationships and communication pathways and things in a district like the Lower Kuskokwim School District. So how do you plan on encouraging and helping shepherd the development of team relationships and peer relationships within the district?
Anderson: I'll begin with just by setting a good example. I mean walk the talk. And recognizing clearly the ingredients, sort of the essential parts of what quality relationships are made of: trust, dependability, confidence in each other, transparency, respect, compassion. I mean, let's just say no one's perfect. We need to be able to be able to be vulnerable and not fearful of each other if we make a mistake, if things don't work out the way we want to. Solid and really highly-functioning teams are a group of people who know that everyone is supporting them and has their back when things don't go as we'd like. And so being an example for that kind of energy and support, inclusiveness, as well as clarity around accountability, around expectations, stepping up and getting the job done well – all those come together in a in a coalescence, I would say, of the best qualities that we we have, and it's helping support people in developing those.
KYUK: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the Lower Kuskokwim School District in the coming years?
Anderson: Yeah. It's easy and it's certainly correct to say that funding is a big challenge everywhere, and as I believe, it's not ever going to go away. And so how we meet that challenge, and then the other associated, seriously costly aspects of education will have a lot to do with how well we develop our really high-functioning relationships. So within the funding issue, of course, doing really well with what we have is critical. Being very responsible with our resources and developing, let's say, synergy around that. But also developing in the different aspects of agency relationships. You know, our district relationship with the state level, with the Department of Ed[ucation] and Early Development (DEED) – critical that we have mutually respectful and understanding and supportive relationships. We can't expect DEED, for instance, to operate out there with a big target on it from all of us, without lending our support and, as we're as much as we can, our confidence in them. Along with that funding, then, I would say, a very large challenge, which is going to become even larger, is how to maintain facilities. The costs of – as we all know – are increasing and have and will continue to. There's a limit to what those resources are going to be. And so how we manage to respond to the even bigger challenge in the long run of climate and weather, which is now and will, I believe, in an accelerated sort of fashion, will really impact the facilities. How we manage sustainability around that, it will be something that I think all of us, not just the education personnel, the district, but communities in specific areas and larger regions, you know, those conversations are going to be critical to manage our pathways forward without being caught too late in the decision making game.
KYUK: Do you feel like LKSD has been caught too late in the decision making game so far in infrastructure issues?
Anderson: I wouldn't jump to that conclusion by any means. I haven't been here long enough to have that kind of perspective. I would say, from on the surface, I would say no, because there's a lot of really seriously good things happening in terms of facility development, you know, new schools. The response to the situation in Napakiak has, I think, been very, very responsible and is being handled well, I believe. But that's only to say overall, from sort of a societal perspective, some of these challenges are big enough and complicated enough that it would be easy to be behind the curve rather than ahead of it.
KYUK: What's been most surprising or exciting for you in your time so far with the Lower Kuskokwim School District? You started July 1.
Anderson: That's right, yeah. Well, I think what's been most exciting for me is the quality, the skill sets of the people that I've encountered, particularly the people I've gotten to know in the district office, where those are the people that I've worked the most closely with. The combination of skill, experience, love for this place, and commitment to the well being of the district and particularly the students at the end of the day, I think it's, frankly, it's outstanding. And so – not particularly surprising, because I knew somewhat the reputation of LKSD, but really exciting to see it firsthand and get to know and become more familiar with the complexity, the density I would say, of the skills and the quality of the programs that are being provided to teachers and students. And then, along with that, what's really exciting is to become closer to the commitment to dual language, the culture and language aspect of this district, and all the support systems that make this happen are really exciting, and I am really eager to see how we can move that forward.
KYUK: Are you studying Yugtun yourself?
Anderson: No I'm not, but I'm looking for the opportunity to, yes.
KYUK: Flip side question: what's been hardest or most stressful in the month and a half or so since you've been on the job?
Anderson: The go to is the stress about the timeline around Napakiak’s school. That has been, on a topic to topic basis, that has taken the most attention, immediate attention for me. And it's been stressful, indeed, because of the continued erosion, the rate of that erosion, and balancing the unpredictability of that with the desire to have the students in Napakiak experience as high quality an educational beginning to the year as they can. And there's a little bit of a – I mean, there was not high levels of predictability in it. And so the rate of erosion shifted our plan from trying to begin the student year in the existing building and then pivot away from that into alternative sites during the annual fall conference in early September – the rate of erosion forced us to change that plan. And so it was a fast scramble to renovate, in a sense, or to grow the capacities of some remote buildings into instructional spaces, and therefore, you know, also having to delay opening of school for a couple of weeks. So all of that in a mix was stressful, and yet at the same time, I would say, not the kind of stress where everybody's throwing their hands up and not knowing what to do, because I think it's been handled really well. But the stress of not knowing exactly what's going to happen next, and, of course, worrying more than anything that that building might actually start to go in the river.
KYUK: Is there anything else we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to know about you, your leadership style or your plans for leading the Lower Kuskokwim School District?
Anderson: I would, I think, just add how, I'm grateful to be here. I appreciate tremendously the commitments to education, in this case, but also the resilience of this community and the communities of the region to continually just forge ahead and believe in themselves and their futures. That's tremendously inspiring to me, and I am really, really glad to be able to participate in that kind of belief and commitment to each other.
KYUK: Well, thank you very much for your time and good luck in your first year on the job.
Anderson: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.
