For eight years, the students of Ayaprun Elitnaurvik attended classes, yuraqed, and butchered moose in a building that used to be a grocery store and still houses Bethel’s two-screen cinema.
“I teared up watching the kids opening their lockers,” said Ayaprun Loddie Jones, the namesake of the school. She stood in the hallway of the new Ayaprun Elitnaurvik, leaning on her walker. “The happiness they had, I just couldn't get over how each child found their names,” she said, gesturing to notecards with Yup’ik names taped to the gray lockers that line the walls.
Jones is originally from Scammon Bay and taught in Bethel for more than 50 years. She retired in 2022, but stays involved with the school that’s named after her.
“It's been, what, almost 29 years since Ayaprun Elitnaurvik opened,” Jones said. “And for the first time, the students have a locker room, they have a gym, they have their own classrooms. All this is unbelievable.”
Ayaprun Elitnaurvik is a landmark of Indigenous education. It follows a Yup’ik subsistence calendar, teaching Yugtun, the Yup’ik language, and traditional knowledge in the classroom, out on the tundra, and up and down the river. It’s been nationally recognized for its approach to learning, and has been studied and modeled throughout the United States.
The school began as a pilot language immersion program in 1995, after more than 20 years of community calls for Yup’ik education. It expanded one grade at a time, housed at various schools in Bethel, and officially received charter school status four years later.
“I could see it in the children this morning; their step is different this morning,” said Anna Charlie, the school’s secretary. “I watched them from here.”
Charlie sat behind the desk in a bright, brand-new front office. She has been Ayaprun’s school secretary since 1999.
“It's just so nice to have our own building,” Charlie said. “It's something that we've been looking forward to for a long time.”
A catastrophic fire in late 2015 destroyed the Kilbuck school building that Ayaprun Elitnaurvik shared with another alternative education program, the Kuskokwim Learning Academy. In addition to destroying the building, the fire incinerated decades-worth of hand-developed Yugtun teaching materials. But the school pressed on with donations from around the state.
A legal settlement between the Lower Kuskokwim School District and its insurance companies helped fund the new Ayaprun Elitnaurvik. In 2020, the district broke ground on the building, but soon faced delays from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even while housed in the converted grocery store, Ayaprun Elitnaurvik kept growing and added seventh and eighth grade in 2022 and 2023.
Looking at the floor plan, the new immersion school is built like a fish, with classrooms arranged in a diamond shape around a central qasgiq, or meeting area, with a gym attached to the tail.
Teacher Arnaucuaq Madeline Reichard welcomed students at a door near the fish’s tail. She said that teachers got access to the building just under a week ago. Like the rest of the staff, she said that it’s exciting and really special to finally, for the first time, have a standalone building for the Yup’ik immersion school.
“I think it's so important and so exciting for people to remember that we have kids that are now in eighth grade that have never been in a school that has had classrooms with walls and doors,” Reichard said. “As an eighth grader, a 14-year-old, this is your first day in an official, quote, unquote school. I've had so many kids walk in and tell me they were so excited last night they couldn't sleep. They've been up since five [a.m.]. So it's just the excitement that you can feel about the building and hopefully to continue with the success of the program. And we're just happy. We're happy to be here.”
Inside, Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Andrew "Hannibal" Anderson walked the halls, smiling widely.
“It's wonderful to see so many happy, young faces that are wide eyed and exploring their new building,” Anderson said. “There's truly a really great, positive, excited energy in the air today.”
Wearing an orange outer space print qaspeq, Principal Joshua Gill said that it’s thanks to Jones’ dream and vision that the school became a reality.
“[It’s] great having kids under the roof. It's awesome,” Gill said. “We're excited. We're excited for the kids.”
Students and teachers gathered in the brand new gymnasium. A rock wall lines one end, and straps hang ready to hold a wrestling mat that Gill said is “in the mail.” A long curtain will serve as a backdrop for archery once those supplies arrive as well.
Nuyailnguq Rose Domnick sat at the edge of the bleachers. She said that she tries to bring subsistence foods for Ayaprun teachers’ lunch at least once a month to show her gratitude and appreciation for the care they show the children.
“There's a lot more education that they provide,” Domnick said. “It's not just education to fill their minds, but it's education that fills the spirit, the heart. And so those are equally important components of the human being that need to be nurtured.”
Domnick is a grandparent to two Ayaprun students, and said that their mothers both graduated from Ayaprun as well.
“The way the teachers relate to, connect with the students is a very Yup’ik way,” Domnick said. “Those components of a human being are very critical to be nurtured. They contribute to a whole, balanced person that will help our kids to succeed and to be grounded, to be okay as adults.”
With the students gathered, Jones stood facing the bleachers and led the students in the school’s song – the first time of many it’ll be sung in the school building that’s finally home to the Yup’ik immersion school after decades of making do.
While students are in the classrooms, construction crews are still putting the finishing touches on the new Ayaprun school. In the coming weeks they’ll finish the parking lot, the playground, and address lingering cosmetic issues around the building, which are marked with green and blue painter's tape.
