Original Research by School Decision on Hollis School
Hollis School is a pre-K through twelfth-grade public school in the Southeast Island School District, serving the tiny community of Hollis on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska. It is one of the smallest schools you will find anywhere, with total enrollment in the low teens and only a handful of students in any given grade. Some grades currently have no students at all. This is a school where every child is known individually, and where the school itself functions as a primary community gathering place, sitting near the ferry dock on land where an old logging camp once stood.
The community of Hollis is sparse and dispersed, with no traditional downtown or commercial streetscape. Settlements scatter along logging roads and shoreline across a large but very low-density area, surrounded by Tongass National Forest. Publicly reported sources describe Hollis as the gateway to Prince of Wales Island, with year-round daily ferry service connecting it to Ketchikan via the Inter-Island Ferry Authority. The local economic base includes the ferry authority, the Dawson Mine operated by Sundance Mining Group, and small businesses such as mills, lodging, and rental services. The community has a volunteer fire department, a public library, and a state-owned seaplane base and boat ramp on Clark Bay. The nearest airstrip is in Klawock, a short drive west on the Klawock-Hollis Highway. Hollis was founded in the 1890s as a mining settlement and later shifted to logging under the Ketchikan Pulp Company. Population has declined steeply over the decades, though publicly reported school enrollment figures suggest some recent in-migration of families with children.
Academically, there is very little that can be said from state testing data. Alaska's AK STAR assessment results for math, English language arts, and science were suppressed for the most recent year because the number of tested students was so small. Participation was full among the few students who took the exams. This suppression is a routine privacy protection for very small schools and does not reflect a lack of effort or a weak result. A parent looking for proficiency data will not find it reported here, and that is a structural limitation of a school this size rather than a signal about quality. Average scale scores were also missing. No multi-year trend data was available.
The student body is small and diverse. The enrolled students include Alaska Native, Hispanic, White, and multiracial children. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, consistent with the economic profile of a remote community with limited local industry. Data on special education enrollment and English learner status was not available in the provided records. No information on course offerings, career pathways, dual credit, or extracurricular programs was included, and given the enrollment size, a parent should expect a highly individualized but necessarily limited curriculum compared to larger schools. The school is not a charter or magnet school. Title I status was not reported.
No housing market data, no locale classification, no staffing figures, no attendance data, and no discipline data were available in the provided materials. No neighbor comparison fact-set was provided for this school, so there is no basis here for positioning it against other schools in the region. The district brief for Southeast Island School District returned little of lasting parent-relevant change, with no recent referendums, curriculum shifts, or property tax developments noted in publicly reported sources.
What this school offers is intimacy and community. A family choosing Hollis School is choosing a setting where children grow up alongside a very small group of peers in a remote island environment tied to the ferry, the forest, and the water. What it does not offer, at least not at a scale larger schools can provide, is breadth of programming, competitive athletics, or a large peer group. A parent considering this school should contact the district directly to understand how the curriculum is delivered across so few students and what supports are in place for individualized learning.
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