In Rural Alaska, Geospatial Education Creates Local Career Pathways for Youth

Spread over 40,000 square miles, the Bristol Bay region in Southwest Alaska relies heavily on the fishing industry for its economy. The region is home to the world’s largest commercial sockeye salmon fishery and is a major source of wild-caught seafood for the lower 48 United States.

Residents in rural areas of Southwest Alaska are of the Alutiiq, Yupik, and Dena’ina peoples. These areas are often centered around an airport because there are no connecting roads. Some villages have a year-around population of under 100 and students’ only mode of transportation to school is by small aircraft, flying there and back every day.

Due to the region’s remoteness, youth often have limited exposure to specialized learning options, inconsistent internet service, and challenges accessing lessons due to logistics or weather. Additionally, there are not many well-paying career opportunities outside of local trades, such as the fishing industry, which do not require a high school diploma.

To help students reach beyond the usual career options they typically see, the Bristol Bay Region Career & Technical Education (BBRCTE) program provides learning opportunities to students that can lead to an internship and eventually a job. The BBRCTE combines four rural school districts: Dillingham City School District, Lake and Peninsula School District, Southwest Region School District, and Bristol Bay Borough School District. 

“Before BBRCTE was around there wasn’t a lot of career and technical education because the school districts are so small,” said Jenny Shryock, executive director of BBRCTE. “But everyone pooled their resources together and built a program that students would be able to attend, meet other kids, and gain knowledge in whatever field they want to pursue.”

In the past, BBRCTE received funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for staff from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to teach Alaskan kids and adults how to use geographic information system (GIS) tools to map wetland areas that had shifted over time.

But for school-aged youth, career and technical education was limited to occasional, short-term visits from specialists who would fly from village to village to teach a specific subject. “Our kids got photography for a day because that’s how long the school photographer was available before traveling to the next village to take more school photos,” said Nathan McArthur, the EdTech and homeschool coordinator for the Lake and Peninsula School District.

BBRCTE now provides students with four in-person intensives each year. During each session, students study 40 hours per week in fields like health care, aviation, construction, culinary arts, welding, and technology. In 2024, foundational GIS training was added to the curriculum. Following the in-person introductory courses, students can take more online courses, then complete internships or capstone projects. For GIS specific coursework, BBRCTE also partners with the Bristol Bay Native Corporation, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, bringing more learning and socialization experiences to students.

The program application consists of an essay about what students hope to learn and how they plan to apply their knowledge in the future, as well as a teacher’s recommendation. Selected students receive dual high school and college credit, and travel arrangements are coordinated by BBRCTE for those who must fly to host-district schools for the week. For the duration of the course, students also receive a laptop and a cell phone.

With previously limited internet access having been improved by Starlink satellite service, students in the region can now participate in online learning via video calls. “Everyone has high-speed internet across the region, which has made it our own miniature ’90s tech boom,” said McArthur.

The Introduction to Community GIS class gives students the chance to explore broad geospatial concepts that can bring greater understanding about challenges directly affecting them. GIS helps students relate to climate or other environmental challenges and issues around urban planning that impact their own communities.

“A lot of students don’t know what GIS is until they take the course and then they say, ‘Wow, this is really cool,’” said Shryock. “We link the GIS element into it; we show them that they can map their communities. They can fly their friends from village to village with a career in aviation, they could be that health-care provider in their region, so we make ‘the world is your oyster’ a little less scary.”

To teach the concepts of GIS, instructors take students on walks so they can see their locations change on a map in real time. Students also learn to collect field data, analyze it using Esri’s ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online, then communicate and display their findings as maps in the digital storytelling tool ArcGIS StoryMaps. Some students’ stories accurately mapping wetlands and river areas have even been used by the state to improve safety on the waterways.

Additionally, students have mapped wetlands across the region and are building skills that will allow them to support future efforts using drone imagery, including salmon monitoring. “A part of my job is to get technology to be cool and exciting, and connecting it to things in their lives, and fishing is one of the most relevant things we can do,” said McArthur.

After the students’ classwork is complete, they have opportunities to play sports and socialize with other students. “We offer a study hall time so they don’t get behind on their coursework that they may be missing from their home sites,” said Shryock. “We eat dinner together and give students a chance to mingle and get to know each other more to build connections across the region.”

Seeing the results from the intensive, specialized coursework, BBRCTE wants to continue to expand on what they know works—the collaboration between school districts, federal government agencies, Native organizations, and the university—to create a sustainable model for rural education.

BBRCTE staff recently secured a Distance Learning & Telemedicine grant from the US Department of Agriculture, so they can leverage new technology, like big-screen Smart boards and speaker systems for each of the 21 schools in the region, to implement more online courses.

With additional support, BBRCTE will continue to evolve based on students’ needs, but the focus remains on building local capacity to advance talent in the region.