When the only preschool teacher left Harold Kaveolook School in Kaktovik, a village of around 250 people on the northern coast of Alaska, Chelsea Brower was in charge. It was January and she had been the preschool aide for about a year and a half.
“Being with the kids and trying to be their teacher is what really made me realize I want to be their teacher — and it also made me realize I need to become certified to be their teacher,” she said.
The only problem was that universities that offered the requisite courses were hundreds of miles away, and she wanted to stay in her hometown with her students.
Fortunately for Brower, the regional Arctic Slope Community Foundation has been working with other tribal groups, the state and federal Departments of Labor and the University of Alaska at Anchorage to develop an apprenticeship program that aims to grow the teacher pipeline in Alaska. The program was approved by the University of Alaska board of regents in mid-July and solidified the first apprenticeship programs for teacher licensure in Alaska.
The tribal, state and university partnership unlocks millions of dollars in grant funding to educate and support the apprentices. It is all possible because the Labor departments made teaching an apprenticeable trade in 2022.
Now Brower can keep her job with the students in her community while she gets her education paid for. She is one of dozens of apprentices that will begin their coursework remotely with UAA this fall.
Brower is Inupiaq and said she hopes to build cultural values in the school.
“The students are seeing more people that look like them inside their school, and I’m hoping that it gets more people to want to become certified to be teachers for the different grade levels,” she said. “That would be good, because we have our language and we could incorporate it more into the school. And (the students) will learn more from the teachers from home than teachers from out of state.”
The news comes as the state grapples with an unprecedented teacher shortage.
Tonia Dousay, dean of the UAA School of Education, said apprenticeships have been common in other industries for a long time, but it was only in 2022 that the state began accepting registered apprenticeships as a pathway to teacher certification.
“Nationwide, we’re watching the registered apprenticeships for educators movement. This fall, we will welcome our first cohort of apprentice teachers from around the state,” she said. “This takes our degree and makes it the required training for a registered apprenticeship through the U.S. Department of Labor.”
The program targets paraprofessionals, people without teaching credentials who already work in the state’s schools, like Brower.
Leaders from regional, tribally affiliated groups worked together to build the apprenticeship program in Alaska with an aim to create a local teacher pipeline in the communities they serve, which are largely remote districts that are the trickiest to staff. Bristol Bay Regional Career and Technical Education Program, Sealaska Heritage Institute and Arctic Slope Community Foundation are sponsor groups for apprentices in their respective regions.
Steve Noonkesser, who works with the Bristol Bay program and is a former superintendent, said the groups worked with the U.S. Department of Labor in Anchorage to become apprenticeship sponsors. That opens up federal funding and grant opportunities to track their apprentices’ progress on different skills, called competencies in the apprenticeship world.
“When you do a federal apprenticeship, you learn skills and you basically check off competencies as you work through it — whether you’re an electrician or a plumber or a welder or, in this case, a teacher,” Noonkesser said.
The state’s Board of Education and Early Development has also discussed apprenticeship programs and passed a resolution supporting them, but no state regulations about how to become a teacher have changed.
Since state law dictates that someone must have a bachelor’s degree to become a certified teacher, the groups partnered with UAA and School of Education dean Dousay to create a pathway to a bachelor’s degree for the apprentices.
Noonkesser said there are additional hurdles to getting the degree for people who live in remote parts of Alaska, including financial challenges, difficulty in access and the often low quality of internet that may prevent potential students from taking online courses on their own.
For those reasons, he said the apprenticeship coursework is delivered differently and with a different context: culture and place-based connection to community.
“We’re really heavily emphasizing that, because that we think has a huge bearing on recruiting teachers and teacher retention. You know, staying in the community and keeping teachers longer, because the turnover rates in Alaska have become just astronomical,” he said, pointing to districts hiring ever increasing numbers of teachers from overseas because they “just can’t hire enough teachers from Alaska.”
“We think that this program will help not only retain teachers more, but it will connect the teachers that are in our schools much better with the kids they’re serving,” he said.
In his region, he said, 80% to 95% of the students are Alaska Native compared to only about 8% to 12% of the educators.
The Bristol Bay program’s first “class,” he said, is predominantly Alaska Native paraeducators who are from the region. “Many of them have as many as 10 or 15 or 20 years of experience in the schools — as a parent, professional, as a classroom aide — and are very much connected to community, place and culture.”
Kristy Ford, Sealaska Heritage’s education director who oversees the program in Southeast, said it opens up more opportunities because it allows apprentices to work through three tiers of certification, starting with a child care development specialist certificate, then moving to associate and bachelor’s degrees.
Ford said the program is the first of its kind in the state.
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