Call to Action
Week of October 14, 2002

The Northwest Arctic Borough and North Slope Borough hosted a Workforce Development meeting on September 25, 2002 at our new Assembly Chambers in Kotzebue. As expressed by Assembly President Walter Sampson, who opened the meeting, "We need to address the critical issues of healthy communities and a quality education system."

Nearly fifty representatives of concerned organizations attended the meeting. Guests from out of town included Bob Harcharek and Roy Nageak, Sr. from the North Slope, Carl Rose and Bruce Johnson from the Association of Alaska School Boards, Oliver Smith of Conoco/Phillips Alaska, Inc., and Kitty Farnham of BP Alaska.

Enlightening job data was provided by Maniilaq Association, our region's largest employer. Among the 450 Maniilaq employees, there is about 70% Native hire within the Association and 60% Native hire at the Medical Center. For jobs requiring a high school diploma only, the local hire is nearly 98%. For jobs requiring at least two years of college, that rate of hire drops to 50%. Finally, for jobs that require a four-year degree, the local hire rate drops to just 5%.

Clearly, most of the top jobs are not filled by our local people. We need to nurture the attitude that high school graduation is a good start to an education, but it is only a start.

The Workforce Development Committee drafted three recommendations for how to proceed. The first recommendation was to determine each community's need for and desire to support strategic change. Obviously, there must be a strong local commitment for change before it can occur. Secondly, the Committee recommended creating the partnerships that would be necessary to support healthy communities, student learning, and quality future workers. And the third recommendation was the need to support the school district and local community effort to create school improvement plans.

Based on the recent high school graduations I have attended in our region, it seems that more and more of our graduates are pursuing vocational or higher academic education. It is a trend that we must work hard to continue and develop further.

However, our poor overall high school graduation rate continues to be a major problem. All at the meeting agreed that we have an urgent need to address the dropout problem that begins to occur at about age 14 for our students.

I believe that the first and most important step we must take is to revive our traditional value that a whole village is responsible for raising its children. Students who stop attending school do so because the village allows them to quit, even though it may be hard for us to admit that. When we begin to see each child's failure as an entire community's failure, we will be on the road to recovery.