Far flung school offers a lot, maybe even basketball

The upper Matanuska Valley is known for its natural beauty and recreational opportunities. Located in the uppermost reaches of the Matanuska Valley is the Glacier View community that encompasses residents from Mile Post 90 to Mile Post 118 on the Glenn Highway and is home to Glacier View School, the Mat-Su School District’s only K-12 facility.

Last year, the students from Glacier View School participated in the Region II music festival. Schools flocked to Anchorage from all parts of Alaska to partake in the chaotic three-day musical extravaganza.

The one question every Glacier View student admitted to hearing repeatedly was, “Your school has how many people?” The enrollment at Glacier View — its blessing and its curse — is approximately 40 students.

The school’s restrictive size poses some difficulties for the students, not the least of which is finding enough participants for athletic teams. In recent years, basketball has been

the only surviving sports option for Glacier View guys. Their first hurdle to overcome is recruiting athletes, the second is ensuring these guys actually want to play, then comes the big one — academic eligibility. If even one player’s grades fall under the bar, it is

likely that the entire team will be “benched.” It is fortunate that Glacier View students are afforded the opportunity of increased teacher-student contact time.

Jenny Lee, a freshman says, “One of the greatest advantages of attending a small school is more one-on-one time with teachers.”

This creates a love/hate relationship for some students: The “love” or “hate” being directly dependent upon whether a student is ready to participate in his or her own education.

Every teacher knows every student’s name; they always have a good laugh at the “Failure to Identify Oneself” clause in the district’s student handbook. The staff also knows the scholastic

strengths and weaknesses of their students, and is more able to provide adequate instruction time for all students than some teachers in the Valley who are regrettably faced with over-crowded classrooms.

It is also likely that the majority of high school classmates have been in attendance together since elementary school. This results in students who are more likely to help each other out and to support one another through academic and social difficulties. However, Tasha Van Daam, a senior, muses that although there are advantages to knowing your classmates well at a small school “there are not as many opportunities to meet new people.”

As “close” as they are in school, students who live in the Glacier View community are often faced with the vast distance that the community encompasses. Attendees at Glacier View come from 58-Mile Road near Sutton, to Mendeltna, at Mile Post 151. The fortunate students are those who live near the core area from Mile Posts 99-105, who can (maybe) walk or bike to each other’s houses to socialize or work on homework together.

However, most students live many miles from their peers and must rely on a significant amount of travel time or gas money to visit their friends.

Alaska towns and cities afford teens the same opportunities of any equivocal population center in the Lower 48; libraries, malls, theaters, school and league athletics, and so forth. Residents of Glacier View are willing to make the drive to town periodically for these amenities. In general, they believe life in a small community in Alaska provides one of the finest opportunities for education, and life in general, of almost any location.

Those who live in Glacier View have freedoms afforded by location that many urbanites envy: They can step off their front porches, inhale the invigorating mountain air and go four-wheeling, go snowmobiling, go horseback riding, go hiking, walk on a glacier, go river-rafting, get an extraordinary education at the local public school, and, hopefully, play basketball, too.

Christopher Martin is a junior at Glacier View School.