Original Research by School Decision on Ayaprun School
Ayaprun School sits in one of the most extraordinary contexts of any school in the United States. It is a pre-kindergarten through twelfth-grade school in Newtok, a traditional Yup'ik village on the Ninglick River in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, operated by the Lower Kuskokwim School District. The village developed around an early Bureau of Indian Affairs school, and for decades the school functioned as both the educational heart and the primary employer in a community with no road connection to the outside world, reachable only by bush plane or barge during ice-free months. The terrain is vast, treeless tundra dotted with ponds and sloughs, within the boundaries of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge.
What sets Ayaprun apart from nearly every other American school is that the land beneath its community is disappearing. The Ninglick River has been eroding toward the village at a rapid pace, with thawing permafrost causing the ground to sink. Residents voted years ago to relocate to a new site called Mertarvik, roughly nine miles away on Nelson Island, chosen for its higher bluff and access to a freshwater spring. Typhoon Merbok in the fall of 2022 accelerated the damage, pushing the shoreline closer to the village edge. By late 2024, the Newtok Village Council had voted to evacuate the remaining residents, and the original village is now described as essentially a ghost town, with only a diesel generator powering the cell tower still operating. Ayaprun School officially closed at the end of the 2023-2024 school year as relocation progressed.
The enrollment was very small, with only a handful of students spread across every grade from pre-kindergarten through senior year. Some grades had a single student. Every student was Alaska Native, and every student qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. The school was, in every sense, a community institution: publicly reported accounts note it employed a dozen teachers and roughly two dozen additional staff, making it the largest formal employer in a village whose economy otherwise centered on subsistence fishing and hunting. Data on special education and English learner populations was not available, so those figures are left out rather than estimated.
State assessment results from the most recent year are limited and should be read with the school's tiny enrollment in mind. Math proficiency among tested students in grades three through eight fell in a low range, and ELA proficiency was lower still. Science results were suppressed entirely. Participation rates were uneven, with roughly half of eligible students sitting for the math assessment and about four-fifths for ELA, while no students participated in the science exam. In a school this small, a few absent students can shift results dramatically, and the suppressed counts reflect that reality. Average scale scores were not reported. A parent looking at these results would want to understand them in context: the community was in the midst of a wholesale relocation, and the conditions under which teaching and testing occurred were anything but ordinary.
The Lower Kuskokwim School District, which operates Ayaprun and roughly two dozen other schools across the region, has adopted a Dual Language instructional model now implemented in most of its schools, integrating Yup'ik and Cup'ig with English instruction. The district frames its mission as providing bilingual, culturally appropriate education for its predominantly Alaska Native student body. That commitment shapes how classrooms operate across the region and would have been part of the pedagogical fabric at Ayaprun as well.
The school's story does not end with its closure. Its continuation is the Mertarvik Pioneer School, still under construction at the new site with a target completion of 2026. During the transition, a community center built at Mertarvik has served double duty as a school facility. For any family connected to this community, the relevant question is not about choosing among schools but about following a community that is rebuilding itself from the ground up on new ground. The educational pathway here is inseparable from the relocation itself, and the years ahead will be shaped by what gets built at Mertarvik and how the district sustains its bilingual mission in a setting that is still coming into being.
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