After 5 years without a school, the village of Clarks Point brought one in on a barge

A teacher and his family moved to the tiny and remote Southwest Alaska village of Clarks Point in mid-July. Soon after, barges traveled across the bay, carrying the massive pieces of a building, wrapped tightly in plastic.

After five years without a school, one had arrived.

"This is awesome, isn't it?" Mariano Floresta, a 53-year-old lifelong Clarks Point resident, said by phone Tuesday. "For us, this is huge. It's mega. It's a really good thing."

Classes will start Monday in Clarks Point for the first time since May 2012, when dwindling enrollment forced the Southwest Region School District to shutter the town school, according to district administrators.

The closure of village schools in Alaska isn't unusual. Every year, a few shut their doors due to student enrollments that fall below 10 — the minimum for full state funding. In the past decade, about 20 schools have closed, all but one because of low enrollment, according to the state education department.

[2 more Alaska schools close due to shrinking enrollments]

Floresta said he feared the closure of Clarks Point school would turn the village into a ghost town, draining it of its families with children. He had watched the scenario play out elsewhere.

"You see a lot of the schools that close in other villages around here and their town literally died; everyone moved away," Floresta said.

When Clarks Point lost its school, he said, it also lost about a half-dozen jobs and a hub where residents met for basketball games, potlatches and plays. The school district stripped the building of its books, computers and furniture and turned it over to the city. The building sat for five years, vacant, dark and eventually vandalized, the windows broken and later boarded up.

Betty Gardiner, president of the Clarks Point Village Council, said the town's year-round population fell from roughly 60 people to around 30, or perhaps fewer. Families left for other places with schools. Even Gardiner's daughter and two grandsons moved to Dillingham, a much larger town only 15 miles away, but not connected to Clarks Point by any roads.

"It got really, really quiet after the school closed," Gardiner said. "It was sad. It was scary."

Gardiner and Floresta said the village's turnaround point came in March 2016, when Danielle Aikins started working as the Clarks Point tribal administrator.

"She worked very, very hard," Gardiner said. "And I really give her the credit; we're really proud of her."

Aikins, 26, said she started asking Clarks Point residents what the council could do for them and what they wanted to see in their community. Their unequivocal answer: Bring back the school.

A few young children living in Clarks Point would start kindergarten in fall 2017. If the school opened again, Aikins also believed families that left would come back to town. With those two conditions, enrollment was expected to exceed 10 students, enough for full state funding.

So Aikins had the old school building assessed over the winter, and she said it was determined that it needed serious repairs to bring it up to code. It would never open by the start of the next school year, she said.

"Residents were saying, 'Well, if there isn't a school this fall we're going to have to relocate,' " she said. "We knew if we started to have people relocate, we would never have enough kids for a school again."

The school district didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare on a new school and neither did the village council, Aikins said. But the council was eligible for an annual block grant of up to $500,000 from the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corp. It was told it could use that money on a new school, Aikins said.

It took several phone calls, but she eventually found a 1,540-square-foot four-bedroom, two-bathroom modular home in Washington that could work as a school, as well as a second two-bedroom structure in Anchorage for the teacher and his family. Together with freight expenses, they totaled roughly $480,000.

"We pretty much committed everything we had to this project," she said.

To prove it had the students, Aikins also provided the district with 12 enrollment packets filled out by parents who said they intended to send their children to the Clarks Point school in the fall.

In May, the Southwest Region School District agreed to reopen the school.

"The community has been great," said Steve Noonkesser, district associate superintendent. "They've put wholehearted effort into making all of this happen."

Dave Piazza, district superintendent, said he hopes the school will remain open for many years. Given population projections, he said, it looks like it should.

Across Alaska, unsteady enrollments have left a few of the state's roughly 500 public schools opening, closing and reopening again. In Southeast Alaska, Whale Pass School closed in 2005, reopened in 2009, closed in 2010 and reopened again in 2012, according to the state. Just to the north, Edna Bay School closed three times in 15 years. Rampart School in Interior Alaska closed for more than a decade before it opened again in 2015.

The 10-student funding minimum can make operating schools in parts of remote, rural parts of Alaska tenuous. One family leaving can shut a school down. Operating small schools in remote Alaska is also expensive, prompting some state lawmakers in the past to discuss increasing the number of students a school needs to enroll to receive state money.

But Aikins, Gardiner and Floresta want the children of their village to have a schooling opportunity in their hometown. The schools also often serve as the lifeblood of small rural villages.

[The last kid in Cold Bay]

In Clarks Point, the school created seven new jobs, all but the teacher hired locally. This week, the city and village council will join together to move the new school building to a plot of land donated by the city.

Aikins said they plan to eventually move classes back into the old school building and use the modular as housing for the people they hope will return, growing Clarks Point back to the size it once was.

"I'm still kind of in awe of this project," Aikins said.

By Wednesday, the Clarks Point school had 15 students enrolled.