On a Sunday morning last month, James Taq'ac Amik was huddled on a small bridge with his girlfriend. At 4 a.m., they had scrambled into an 18-foot aluminum motor boat, fleeing floodwaters from a massive storm surge that inundated Kipnuk, a village of 700 in the heart of western Alaska's sprawling Kuskokwim River delta.
"I couldn't make it up. I tried, but the wind was too strong to try and go by boat, so we ended up staying on the bridge for five hours," Amik said. Things only grew more dramatic. "The houses started drifting away around 5:30 a.m.," Amik said. "There was still lights in them; there was people in them."
When they set out, the couple were heading to Kipnuk's public school, the largest building in the Alaska Native Yup'ik village. At least that building, they hoped at the time, would be secure.
The storm that hit Alaska's west coast in mid-October was the remnants of Typhoon Halong, which picked up momentum in a warmer-than-normal Pacific Ocean. After the wind died down and the floodwaters receded, the village lay in ruins. But while the school still stood relatively unscathed on its steel pilings more than 20 feet above the muck and wreckage, there were other problems inside. District staff had been working on much-needed upgrades to its main generator. Then the school's backup generator sputtered. Everyone in the community, including Amik and his girlfriend, stayed for two days until local leaders decided the storm had done too much damage and organized a mass evacuation.
When disaster strikes, public school buildings are integral as safe havens in hundreds of predominantly Indigenous villages scattered across Alaska's vast landscape. In many remote communities, schools are some of the only buildings with flush toilets and their own generators. Schools are often the only buildings that stand on pilings — important amid the rising waters of climate change — and also the only buildings large enough to house dozens, if not hundreds, of people for days at a time.
"It is a known fact that if you need to evacuate, you evacuate to the elementary school," said Alaska state Sen. Löki Tobin, a Democrat and chair of the Senate Education Committee, who grew up in Nome but now represents Anchorage.
"Those are lifeboats," said Alaska's emergency management director, Bryan Fisher. "They're the last place of refuge."
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican and former educator, has declared more than a dozen disasters since August 2024, and in at least half of those cases, public schools were used as emergency shelters. The state reported damage in 52 communities in October, and the impacts forced hundreds of residents to sleep in gymnasiums and on classroom floors in rural public schools. Since 1998, Alaska has seen more than 140 state-declared disasters, and dozens of those required schools to function as shelters.
But Alaska's rural schools have been neglected for decades. Earlier this year, ProPublica, KYUK Public Media, and NPR documented a health and safety crisis inside many rural school buildings across Alaska. In some cases, the buildings that function as safe havens in times of emergency are becoming emergencies themselves.
The state is required by law to fund construction and maintenance projects in rural school districts because they serve unincorporated communities where there is no tax revenue to help fund education. In the last 28 years, Alaska's rural school districts have made close to 1,800 requests to the state for money to maintain and repair deteriorating schools, but only 14% of those requests have been approved. And as the backlog of major maintenance projects continues to grow, the state budget has been shrinking.
"Just the maintenance that goes in every day to keep up a building, that's really where the flaw is," said Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop. For years, her department has struggled to meet the growing need for dollars to maintain school facilities, including more than 60 owned by the state. "The crux of the situation," she said during an interview in Juneau last year, is that "we get to an emergency because we didn't take care of it."
The main generator that provides power to the school in Kipnuk was not working before hundreds of residents fled there during ex-typhoon Halong. Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Andrew "Hannibal" Anderson said the generator "was working well enough to provide what it needed for the school." But it was quickly overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand for power once the school became Kipnuk's primary emergency shelter. A smaller backup generator also couldn't meet that demand to charge cellphones and keep the building heated after the community's residents piled in.
The school district waited 14 years for the state to approve funding to do a major renovation in 2015, but it has not asked for funding since then. Every year, the applications school districts submit for construction and maintenance funds are ranked. Data analysis and interviews with superintendents across the state indicate that submitting an application that ranks high enough to win funding is cumbersome, and they feel pressure to include professional inspections and surveys, which can be expensive. Anderson explained that although the generator required maintenance, he believed Kipnuk's needs wouldn't be considered urgent enough to receive funding. "Kipnuk is a relatively new school," he said.
In Kotlik, a village of just over 650 residents almost 220 miles north of Kipnuk, 70 people spent two nights at the school. "We have a church and a community building, but those are seldom used in evacuations," explained Principal Cassius Brown. "That's because the school is situated higher and it's not as close to the river."
Since 2018, the Lower Yukon School District has made annual requests ranging from $2 million to more than $5 million to the state's education department to make extensive repairs to the school in Kotlik and another in a nearby village. That work remains unfunded.
In Chevak, where about 950 Alaska Native Cup'ik people live less than a dozen miles from the Bering Sea coast, school Principal Lillian Olson said 65 people spent a few nights on the gymnasium floor. "Our community is kind of dependent on the school for shelter," Olson said. "One time, two years ago, we had an electric outage in one part of town that lasted for like a week, and because the houses didn't have electricity and no heat, we housed them."
Olson said a test of the building's fire sprinklers failed in September. In a phone call last spring, Kashunamiut School District Superintendent Jeanne Campbell described a host of problems related to the Chevak school's boiler and broken water pipes that impacted the fire sprinkler system. "And that's just inside the building," Campbell said.
In 2024, the Kashunamiut School District made its first request to the state's education department since 2001, asking for $32 million to update and renovate the school. The proposal was one among 114 for fiscal year 2025. The state allocated enough money for only 17 of those projects. Work at the Chevak school was not one of them.
Just over a dozen miles west, in Hooper Bay, Mayor Charlene Nukusuk said between 50 and 60 people sheltered for two nights in that community's public school. The village's location makes it extremely vulnerable. Over the last few decades, fall coastal storms have devoured several rows of sand dunes that used to protect the community of 1,375 people. Now, the black and frigid Bering Sea laps at the beach only a few hundred feet from the far corner of the local airport runway. Nukusuk said that the school is one of the safest buildings.
Hooper Bay's school was rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in 2006. Since then, the district has made 29 funding requests totaling more than $8.4 million in needed repairs to the state for a range of projects on the school including roofing, emergency lighting, and siding. In 2024, the district received money for one of those — just under $2.3 million for "exterior repairs," according to state data. The superintendent did not respond to questions about specific needs in Hooper Bay.
Alaska's emergency management division does not have formal agreements with the state's education department designating schools as emergency shelters, and neither agency has funding to help maintain schools specifically as emergency shelters. However, a division spokesperson said there are some state grants that schools could access for emergency preparedness.
"Schools are built for educational purposes — other uses are incidental or secondary to design," education department spokesperson Bryan Zadalis wrote in an email. He said no one from the education department visits schools "to ascertain whether a facility is in condition to serve as an emergency shelter."
"I don't know if people necessarily correlated together that if you're going to use schools as multipurpose facilities, that you also have to maintain them for those purposes," said Tobin, the state senator. "They're not just institutions of learning. They're also institutions of after-school activities, of community gatherings, and of evacuation facilities and disaster preparedness support infrastructure," she said.
@georgebrightsr This shows that no matter what hardship this village is going through they have a gathering of praise to our Lord Jesus
♬ original sound - George
In February 2024, Tobin, who also sits on the state senate's Military and Veterans Affairs finance subcommittee, put the question of funding schools for emergencies to Craig Christenson, deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, during a budget meeting.
Alaska's emergency management division falls under Christenson's department. "From my understanding," Tobin said to him, "if the school wasn't available in some of these very small, rural, remote areas, we would be paying to evacuate people, versus using an asset that we have already put resources into but have already failed to maintain. Is that accurate?"
"I can't comment on failing to maintain them," Christenson responded. "Our department does not maintain schools." (The deputy commissioner declined to comment further on last year's meeting.)
"But you do utilize them?" Tobin asked.
"We do," Christenson said.
This article was produced for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network.
Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism's National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center's Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
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