The reported proficiency rate for English language arts is 10%.
Original Research by School Decision on Twin Hills School
Twin Hills School sits in one of the most isolated communities in the American school system. Thevillage of Twin Hills is a Yup'ik Eskimo settlement in southwest Alaska, established by families who relocated from Togiak to escape recurrent flooding. There is no road connection to the outside world. Access is by air, via a state-owned gravel runway on a ridge east of the village, or by boat, with a landing but no docking facilities. Cargo arrives by air, and bulk goods must be lightered to shore. Locally, residents get around on ATVs, snowmachines, and along the beach. The village bans the sale, importation, and possession of alcohol. This is the setting in which the school operates.
The school serves students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade, though the total enrollment is very small, with just a handful of students in any given grade and several grades with no students at all. The student body is predominantly Alaska Native, with a smaller portion identified as two or more races. Every student qualifies for free or reduced-price meals. The school is part of the Southwest Region School District, a regional district serving remote villages across this part of the state. It is not a charter school or a magnet school.
Academic performance data is limited, and what is available reflects the challenges of measuring outcomes in a school this small. On the state's AK STAR assessment for grades three through eight, the number of students tested was small enough that proficiency results should be read with caution. In math, proficiency fell in a very low range, with no tested students reaching the proficient threshold. In English language arts, a single tested student was proficient, leaving the overall rate quite low. Science results were suppressed entirely because only two students were tested, a standard privacy protection for very small groups. Average scale scores were not reported for any subject. Participation, it should be noted, was full among those who sat for the exams.
These results are thin and hard to interpret broadly. With so few students, a single child's performance shifts the picture substantially from year to year. A parent reading these numbers should treat them as a snapshot of a tiny group rather than a stable indicator of schoolwide quality. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, particularly to understand what instructional supports are in place and how growth is tracked for individual students over time.
The community itself is built around subsistence. Residents depend on seal, sea lion, walrus, whale, salmon, clams, geese, and ducks, and a portion of the village holds commercial fishing permits for salmon, herring, and herring roe. Togiak Fisheries and other cash buyers provide a market, and residents drive along the beach to reach the cannery. Steady wage employment is scarce, concentrated in the Village Council and the Post Office. The Village Council also provides electricity. Civic infrastructure includes a village clinic, a coin-operated washeteria, and the post office. No public parks, libraries, or transit were identified. Publicly reported sources note that HUD housing units with individual wells and septic tanks were added in recent years, and water, sewer, and landfill improvements have been under study.
Several categories of data that parents often look for were not available. The school's graduation rate was not provided, which makes sense given that twelfth-grade enrollment was zero and the high school grades generally have very few or no students in any given year. No information was available on staffing, course offerings, career or dual-credit pathways, extracurricular programs, discipline, attendance, or civil-rights indicators. Individualized education program rates and English learner rates were also missing. Housing values and rents were not reported, which is typical for a community of this size and remoteness. The district brief turned up no parent-relevant changes of lasting impact in recent searches.
What Twin Hills School offers is a deeply local education in a community where the school is one of the central institutions. The tradeoffs are clear: families here are choosing a setting rooted in Yup'ik cultural life and subsistence traditions, with the reality that academic programming is constrained by the school's size and isolation. For a family already part of this village, the school is the natural option. For anyone considering relocating here, the remoteness and limited instructional scale define the experience.
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