The reported proficiency rate for Math is 20%.
Original Research by School Decision on Tebughna School
Tebughna School sits in Tyonek, a Dena'ina Athabascan village on the northwest shore of Cook Inlet, reachable only by small plane or boat. No roads connect it to the rest of Alaska. The school serves pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade and is part of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, though its setting is unlike nearly every other school in that district. The village itself is tiny and compact, built on a bluff above the inlet, with homes, community buildings, and the school arranged within a small residential footprint. The Tyonek Native Corporation, formed under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, built much of the village's infrastructure and remains the primary economic engine, supporting jobs, education, and health services through land management and government contracting. Many residents continue a subsistence lifestyle of hunting, trapping, fishing, and whaling.
The school is very small, with an enrollment that spreads across pre-kindergarten through high school in single-digit grade cohorts. Some grades have no students at all in a given year. The student body is predominantly Alaska Native, with the remainder identifying as Hispanic or two or more races. Every student qualifies for free or reduced-price meals, which reflects the economic reality of a community the federal government classifies as an area of persistent poverty, a Difficult Development Area, and a DOT Equitable Transportation Community disadvantaged tract. The village has no commercial corridor, no library, and no formal park system. Civic and educational life centers on the school and the Native corporation's facilities.
Academic data is limited, and much of what exists is shaped by the school's size. On the AK STAR assessment for grades three through eight, math proficiency was reported at a low level, with full participation among the small group tested. English language arts results were suppressed for privacy reasons, and science results were suppressed as well, with only a handful of students tested in that subject. No average scale scores were reported for any subject. The tiny testing population makes year-to-year comparisons unreliable, and a single student's performance can shift the picture substantially. A parent looking at these results should keep the school's scale in mind and may want to ask the school directly about how it tracks individual student growth across the years, since aggregate proficiency figures tell only a narrow story here.
No graduation rate, course access data, staffing figures, attendance data, discipline data, or program offerings were available in the provided materials. We looked for the district's recent parent-relevant changes and found nothing that surfaced with lasting impact. Civil rights data was not provided. State testing for the high school grades was not included in the available assessment summary, which covered only grades three through eight. A school this small, serving a remote Native community, often operates outside the patterns that larger schools follow, and gaps in standard reporting can reflect that context rather than any deliberate omission.
The community itself has been losing population over recent census cycles. The village was relocated in the 1930s to higher ground because of flooding at the original site, and the current settlement is the result of that move. The Tyonek Native Corporation continues to pursue mineral and carbon offset development in the surrounding region, channeling revenues into housing and community infrastructure. Still, no major new housing developments were identified, and the area's remote character and shrinking population shape what the school can offer.
What Tebughna provides is a community-anchored education in a place where the school is one of the few civic institutions. For a family rooted in Tyonek, it is the local path, tied to Dena'ina cultural life and the subsistence traditions of the Tebughna people. For anyone evaluating it against larger or more resourced schools, the comparison will almost always fall short on conventional measures. The question for a parent is whether the school's deep community integration and small-group setting serve their child's needs, and the available data is too thin to answer that fully without going directly to the school.
See more original research from School Decision →