KTOO’s Emily Schwing recently wrote about the foreign people of color being imported from Brownish countries to teach schools in remote Alaskan areas where the pay is too low to attract Americans. We go deep to get to the bottom of this heartwarming story.
Problem. A significant number of Alaskans choose to live in remote areas that make for hideous living conditions and expensive education. Schools in these remote areas face a tough choice – either raise teacher pay to market rates in order to attract and retain American teachers, or adapt an educational visa program to import colored indentured servants to teach the kids at a discount. We look at the school districts which have elected to forego paying fair wages in favor of importing foreign colored teachers who are willing to work for less.
“People just don’t understand us,” said N’Aay^gnekf Hubbard, a lifelong local who hangs out at the tiny bar in Freezing Leg Creek, a village of just 34 residents that sits 45 miles from the closest town. “We are tied to this land. There is no other place for us to live,” he said. “At least for most of us.”
Most of the population of Freezing Leg Creek moved out when they found jobs elsewhere in the 70’s and 80’s. “We lost most of the young, intelligent and ambitious kids back then,” Hubbard reflected, “most of the people who stayed didn’t want to get into the ‘work-for-a-living’ lifestyle.” The population that remains in the village is largely dependent on the government for its economy these days. “The state just spent $50 million to pave the airstrip and we get a plane in once a week with groceries,” Hubbard noted. “But there’s not much here for a new teacher to do on Saturday night.”
Elsa Crump, Senior Chief Assistant Managing Deputy Director of Rural Recruitment for the Alaska Department of Education’s Region 12(A)’s Human Resources Office, filled us in on the problems she faces in recruiting teachers to staff schools in villages like Freezing Leg Creek, “We can’t even get experienced teachers from the Lower 48 to interview up here, once they check out YouTube,” she said. “Our compensation consultant says we should be paying twice what we pay, but that is just out of the question,” she said. “We would have to consolidate at least three of our regional recruitment offices to come up with that kind of money. That’s not gonna happen.”
The solution? The J-1 visa program, which is supposed to provide educational opportunities to foreign students, but which Alaska has cleverly exploited in order to recruit colored indentured servants as teachers instead of paying them fair wages.
Crump related the benefits of the program, “We learned that many underdeveloped countries are full of well-educated and highly qualified colored teachers who will work cheap.” She told us that the plan was hit-or-miss for a while. “You have to be careful picking the right country, though” she explained “some countries have plenty of coloreds, but they aren’t all educated – a lot of them are ignorant, even illiterate. So you can’t count on skin color alone to pick them.”
Bill Braxton, superintendent of the Flooding Rivers Unified School District, which runs the two-room school in Freezing Leg Creek says “our colored teachers are great!” He continued “they’re a bunch of real quiet kind of people with a laid-back attitude… Until you get a few drinks in them, that is!” he joked. “But seriously, I’ll take as many of them as we can afford,” he said.
Although his funny accent made communication a bit difficult, we sat down with Peter Mindoa, a colored indentured servant from the Philippines who teaches first through fifth grade in Freezing Leg Creek. “I really hate this place and I sure do miss my family and my beautiful home on the beach back home in the Philippines,” he began “but there is no way any of us could turn down the money, even though it is much less than white Americans make. I wish I were a citizen or a permanent resident so I could go somewhere else in America and make that kind of money, but the terms of my indentured servitude under my J-1 contract mean that I’m stuck here in this dump for three years. I just have to make the best of it, I guess,” he concluded.
Things haven’t gone perfectly with the indentured colored teachers, especially where Native Alaskan students and their families are concerned. “We have a proud heritage that we’re trying to preserve in our kids,” said Chief Tom Little, chief of the Lower Icy River band of the Atackabear Tribe. “We’re people of color, too. So when our kids go to school and they see the colored teacher from another culture taking a position of authority over them, it takes away from other authority figures in our community,” he advised. “Not only that, but these colored teachers speak all kinds of languages and seem to know everything, so they greatly influence our impressionable kids. We count on my 17 year-old son to kill the seals we sell for our money. The other day, he came home talking about leaving Freezing Leg Creek and going off to Nome to work for a veterinarian there, all because Mr. Mindao encouraged him to look into it. That’s crossing a line between school and family, in my book.” However, Chief Little was circumspect about the problem, “we don’t have any qualified teachers in the tribe,” he admitted, “so I guess the only other option would be to bring in white teachers and we certainly don’t want to see that,” he concluded.
The kids in the school seem to be doing fine. “Mr. Mindao talks funny, but we like him,” said Cindy Smith, a 12 year-old seventh grader with a dream of getting married to handsome, wealthy boy with a dually diesel pickup truck and a six-seater floatplane someday. “He teaches us some of the songs from his country, and like us, most of their songs are about fish.” Test scores bear out the praise for the colored indentured teachers – their students fail to meet minimum state educational standard at nearly three-quarters the rate of the rest of the state. “It’s not like we’re here to inspire or to force achievement,” said Principal Braxton. “We need to do what we have to do to meet minimum standards, and there’s no question that are colored teachers are nearly getting that job done with almost half the kids.”
The only downside to the program is the limited indenture period. Most of the colored teachers have to return to their home countries after three years. “In colonial times, at least the indentured servants got to stay in America after they worked off their contracts,” Mindao complained. “I don’t get that chance,” he finished. The good news is that the Philippines appears to brimming with highly qualified teachers like Mindao who will grudgingly work in the lonely, frigid wasteland for peanuts. “Right now, the colored teachers are a dime a dozen down there in the Philippines,” Crump reported. “We can scoop up as many of them as we need.”