We+are+Community

**Community Connections Presentation**

** We are Community ** ** Land & Sea of the Tlingit, Haida and Athabaskan Tribes ** ** The Salmon Capital of the World ** Ketchikan High School sits high on a hill with a view of the Pacific as it fingers throughout the South East Islands of Alaska known as the Tongass Narrows. Ketchikan, Alaska has a population of 13,593 year round. Waterways of cruise ships bring in 8-10,000 tourists a day on 4-5 ships. The inter-island ferry ships and ship-yard harbors provide access to Ketchikan, Revillagigedo Island’s only port and town. Ketchikan is the closest Alaska port to Seattle and Juneau, unless one takes a 90 minute flight. We are a community of fishermen, native villages, and businesses open seasonal for tourists, largely owned by the cruise-companies. The medium income is $57,000 a year with a poverty level of 9.6%. The environment is more beautiful than can be described with absolutely breath-taking views of extensive rugged beauty, gushing rivers that fill water-cisterns and snow-glaciers towering just behind town. Floatplanes too numerous to count can be seen through the expanse of windows of the high school, where hanging from tall ceilings are fishing canoes floating through ocean waves in red, black and soft turquoise; colors common to the native totems.
 * Geographic Setting: “Alaska Blues” **

The school building is new and remarkably beautiful with rich Native Alaskan wood masks and totems throughout. We have multiple rooms to house our transitional and functional skills classrooms to include exercise equipment, musical instruments, an equipped kitchen, laundry, showers, and a fairly large budget. Alaska schools have a billion-dollar savings account because of oil profits. When oil moneys run out Alaska’s schools will run on interest alone.
 * School Setting: “The Kings” **

My class takes a bus to the new rec center first thing in the morning where students and teachers swim, play basketball, use the gym, exercise equipment and indoor track. After we return to the school I teach life skills, applied math and reading, set up job training placements coordinated with community organizations and meet student’s health and social objectives. I have attended chamber lunches, board meetings, meet and greet that show up on the local TV station and newspaper because this multi-cultural community of 13,000 residents values pride of school, culture and education. The kindness and the rich pride of culture are also reflected among my students and teachers of the Tlingit, Haida and Athabaskan Tribes. My instructional assistants are native dancers, totem-builders, Tsimshian-mask artists and painters. Annette Island across the Tongass Narrows is the only full native-school in Alaska. This is bear country, where we often watch bears feeding at the river mouth, shoo them away when we are at the lake on a field trip cooking s’mores over a fire or they wander up to look in the windows. The sharing of smoked salmon, halibut and rock-cod is a daily occurrence as sharing of food is often an important part of community.

The Ketchikan Gateway Borough School District serves over 2000 students in five elementary schools, two highs schools and through distance learning. Enrollment by ethnicity includes: Caucasian 53%, Alaska Native/Native American 32%, Asian 8%, Hispanic 3%, Pacific Islander 1%, African American 1% and Multi-Ethnic 2%. The graduation rate is at 73% and KGBSD has exceeded AYP based on Alaska’s standards-Based Assessments developed specifically for Alaska’s schools. KGBSD works from a strategic plan that is built on Response to Intervention (RTI,) and Positive Behavior Support (PBS.) 100% of classes are taught by Highly Qualified Teachers, (HQT.)

The school community is a reflection of the community at large. Success of our school district is reliant upon the relationship that we have with the community, businesses, parents, city and borough. The school mission is “to provide high quality instruction to every student within a positive environment reflective of our community needs.” Ketchikan High School partners actively with 53 partnerships. Along with support from businesses, private individuals, parents and concerned citizens donate generously through professional, personal and financial gifts. Schools are indeed the gathering place.

My high-school transitional and functional classroom services students with a spectrum of disabilities and exceptionalities. We have eight students, four female and four male, ranging from 15 to 21 years of age requiring one-to-one, instructional-assistance. I am fortunate to have five Para-professionals with eight students. One of our students is homebound due to profound multiple disabilities. Our hope is for this student to visit our classroom once a week to participate in whole-class activities. Each Wednesday I home-teach our student along with a team of behavior analysts, psychologists, OT, SPL and PT specialists who provide on-going therapies to all students. Students in our classroom are serviced with an emphasis on functional and transitional goals and objectives in their IEPs due to the following disabilities categories: Cognitively Impaired, Autism, Behavioral, Multiple Disabilities and Twice-Exceptional.

Along with meeting academic needs is the importance of self-advocacy skills. Our intent is to prepare our students with balanced whole-life skills to include; exercise, safety in the community, healthy choices and hygiene development, social skills, house-hold skills and teamwork responsibility, along with job-training with the intent to find paid employment before our Super-Seniors graduate. Already this fall we have one student working at Safeway bagging bread, another student working at a the A&P facing shelves, and another young man free-lance writing articles for a local online newspaper, each getting a paycheck. These students and others are also in various job-training positions throughout our school and community.

Our students also have dual-exceptionalities such as artistic abilities creating signage, music abilities such as perfect-pitch and self-taught musicians, strong athletic abilities and these students are actively involved in The Special Olympics. The purpose of our school program provides students a wide-range of functional skills our students need, to transition from high-school to real-life skills. We have developed a new work-study program this quarter for TAG students who have at-risk homes. Students work in our classroom and earn a wage in a safe, school environment.


 * Community Pictures: “We are Community” **

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