Valley students tromp in the woods in search of a career

PALMER — Shortly before noon Wednesday, a group of warmly dressed high schoolers, some wearing rain boots, trudged out of the woods at the end of Wendt Road near Hatcher Pass.

They’d spent their morning talking with state Division of Forestry officials and getting a glimpse of what forestry work entails. After a few minutes spent chatting idly amongst themselves, Ed Kessler, forestry’s Student Intern Coordinator, rounded them up to talk about how they could make a living doing what they just did. He talked about how much fun the division’s internship program had been in previous years and how it helped start interns off in careers in forestry.

He talked about how much the program paid — $8.50 to $12.50 an hour for high schoolers, $12.50 to $16.50 an hour for college students — and how long the program runs — from June 1 to August 1. Forestry doesn’t have a winter internship program.

“Nothing can look better on a resume or an application than saying you worked for the state of Alaska when you were in high school,” Kessler said. Their first step to getting that line on their resume — fill out an application. “If you apply, you’re going to get an interview.”

All 36 of the students in his audience were from Valley schools. The field trip, Kessler said later, was something new at the division, which is trying to drum up local interest in its internship program.

“This is the first time the Division of Forestry has worked with the Mat-Su Borough School District,” Kessler said. And it went well. “I think a lot of people showed more interest than I thought they would,” he said.

Glenn Holt, a Mat-Su Area Forester who, among his other duties, oversees the program, said he led a group doing “boreal forest ecology.”

Which, in lay terms, means they went out to an area where the trees had previously been harvested for firewood sales and checked on how things were going. They looked at the sprouting trees and surveyed the area.

“We also discovered that the moose are eating a lot of the young saplings,” and they talked about that, he said.

Some of the kids seemed to have a lot of fun tramping through the woods. Some seemed genuinely interested in the science.

“Some of them are just interested in getting a decent summer job, which, hey, can’t fault them for that,” Holt said.

He said he was blown away by the amount of interest the Valley kids showed. In his 20 years overseeing the internships it’s mostly been an Anchorage affair.

“It was legislatively provided for through the King Career Center in Anchorage,” he said.

But, recently, the program was expanded to include the Valley. And so the division went looking for contacts in the school district.

Barb Shogren was one of the people the division found. Shogren is the School to Work Coordinator with the district’s Career and Technical Education Program.

“All the high schools were invited to participate,” she said. “I thought it went really well. They pulled it together, they dressed pretty appropriately, which was good.” She said she had worried kids would show up in shorts and flip-flops but none did.

Shogren said the Career and Technical Education program has done things like this with various local businesses and hopes to do more. This field day, in particular, she hopes will become a regular, yearly outing.

And, gauging from their reaction to that, Forestry does too.

“We are so pleased that state Forestry can provide another opportunity,” for kids to explore career paths, Holt said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.