Alaska Public Media

Girl Scouts of Alaska came to Petersburg last week to hold a weeklong day camp. Girls ages kindergarten through junior high participated in the events, many of which happened outdoors.

A few dozen girls are in a circle outside the Rae Stedman Elementary School. They’re singing songs and dancing around on top of the gray gravel near the playground.

The Girl Scouts traveling camp goes to a new remote Alaska community every week.

In Petersburg, the girls have been meeting every day learning social and educational skills.

Now, they are being led through sing-along songs by a few Girl Scout leaders, such as Josie Ward. She’s a college student in Missouri, but is spending part of her summer in Alaska helping run the camps.

The weeklong camp has a $40 suggested donation but they will give any girl a scholarship who can’t pay.

The traveling camp has been going for nine weeks already.

Girl Scouts has already held camps in Ketchikan in Southeast. The week of Aug. 8-12 camps will be in Sitka.

A recently completed runway extension at the Kodiak Airport originally prompted environmental concerns among local groups and a tribal organization, but some members of the community now say they’re satisfied with the compromise that was reached.

Tom Lance, the natural resources director for the Sunaq Tribe of Kodiak, said the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities ended up extending one runway 600 feet into the ocean by the Buskin River.

There was another extension in the Jewel Beach area by the Coast Guard base, and the state extended that runway a little bit and slightly realigned it Lance said.

The Sun’aq Tribe’s original source of worry when the Federal Aviation Administration began seeking comment in Kodiak about its draft environmental impact statement in 2012 was that the extension at the Buskin River would disturb the estuary there, Lance said. That fresh water-salt water transition zone is an important area for migrating salmon leaving or entering the river.

“There’s a physiological change that takes place that allows them to do that in there and they need that transition zone, and so that was a concern we had that somehow the extension of the runway out into the bay would impact that and also we were concerned about just covering up existing habitat,” Lance said.

The FAA agreed to work with the Sun’aq tribe at the last minute to take part of the mitigation money that was originally carved out for the runway extension and direct it towards the Sun’aq Tribe’s ongoing survey of the runway and its effects, Lance said.

“As you know, they did cover a portion of a reef and they extended out into tidelands with that runway extension and they gave some money, $450,000 of that to the Sun’aq tribe to use for a long-term study to basically just monitor the changes over time,” Lance said.

It took a year to hammer out the final details and Sun’aq began work on the project last fall, he said, when it first got into the water to place data loggers, which record information like temperature and are attached to buoys. They’re currently monitoring the area and, if they see something that raises a red flag, at least they’ll have data to back up their observations and remedy the situation.

“Maybe we need to improve the kelp beds to provide more hiding cover for example for outgoing smolt and that sort of thing,” Lance said. “There’s many different things that could be done when you go to manipulate habitat, but the tribe I think was very happy with the end result.”

Other members of the community expressed concern about the environmental impact of the extensions, including long-term resident and retired biologist, Pat Holmes.

Holmes expressed satisfaction with the outcome from meetings between the FAA and local groups like the Sun’aq Tribe and subsistence fishermen.

“I thought that they came up with quite a good compromise with that runway system that they built rather than going out what was a thousand feet plus the base,” Holmes said. “Anyway, I think that that was the best they could do, because we could use a little extra safety here. As everyone knows, when you’re making a flight in on a foggy day and holding your breath with everyone else, that’s a good thing to have.”

Holmes believes the FAA did a good job getting public input.

According to a news release from the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, the department completed the Kodiak Airport Runway Safety Area Extension for $59 million.

What happens when five teenagers pile onto a research vessel and go island hopping through the Aleutians in the name of conservation? Science. Education. And maybe a peek into their futures.

It’s all part of an only-in-Alaska version of the federal Youth Conservation Corps or YCC. The goal is to introduce high school students to a stretch of protected land they’ve grown up near, but may not even know exists — all in the hope that someday these young Alaskans will become its next stewards.

Over the course of a season, the research vessel Tiglax can travel 20,000 nautical miles. For a week, five YCC corpsmembers, ranging in age from 16 to 18, join the crew exploring the vast Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which stretches from the western end of the Aleutian Chain to islands like St. Lazaria near Sitka and even further north than Point Hope.

“It’s kind of cool being able to be on this huge vessel and have people teach you how they do it,” Aurora Waclawski, 18,  said. “It’s really interesting and awesome.”

She and the rest of the crew grew up in communities around the refuge, ranging from Homer, where she’s from, to Atka. But for most of them, this is the first time they’ve actually traveled through it.

Waclawski heads to college this fall, where she plans to study environmental engineering. The opportunity to explore the Maritime Refuge through the YCC program has been on her bucket list for years.

“Throughout my life, I’ve loved science and all that stuff and that’s kind of why I wanted to do this,” Waclawski said. “It’s cool seeing how this science that I’ve only really seen on paper actually goes on.” Science like surveying seabird colonies, and tracking the reproductive success of puffins on Aiktek.

During a week on the Tiglax, the YCC members see a sliver of the refuge, which provides essential habitat for 40 million seabirds — not to mention marine mammals and other migratory birds — but isn’t exactly a household name in the communities on is borders.

Take 18-year-old crew leader Marieana Larsen. Growing up in Sand Point, she didn’t know much about sea birds. But when she traveled to Saint Paul Island in the Pribilofs for the YCC, she says she finally understood the importance of the refuge.

“We made like 100 rat traps and I thought, ‘this is kind of pointless,'” Larsen said. “And then I thought about it and I was like, ‘oh wow birds are dying. No, rat traps are important.’ Because one rat gets on the island it could destroy all the seabirds and that’s no tourism and that’s no refuge and then people aren’t going to have their cultural foods.”

Larsen will take what she’s learned back to her community. Alongside the crew, she teaches environmental education classes at the annual culture camp in Sand Point.

“Its really fun to do classes with kindergarten through fourth grade and just kind of teach ’em different scientific things about nature because it’s not like they’re learning about it at culture camp,” Larsen said. “They’re learning about the cultural aspects.”

She hopes to bridge the gap — intertwining science with Alaska Native culture and finding more ways to connect kids to their landscape. The YCC crew are paid an hourly wage, with all their expenses covered.

Tiglax captain Billy Pepper said it’s one of the best ways the refuge spends money.

“If you’re going to try and tell somebody that wildlife and the environment is important, it’s harder to convince somebody in their 40s than in their teens,” Pepper said. “And if they get it in their teens they really become advocates for conservation.”

The experience has changed the course of some kids’ lives — giving their ambitions a real-world road test, he said.

“They come on,” Pepper said. “They think they’re going to do something and they’ve got a lot of ambition to do one thing and they’re seasick the whole time. And one kid was going to be a pilot that was the end of that. He couldn’t handle the movement. He didn’t have the make up to do it.”

For some, the experience is more successful. Larson is one of the youngest crew leaders and now, a youth ambassador with the Arctic Council. Since her first time aboard the Tiglax, Larsen slowly has been wiggling her way into the Fish and Wildlife Service, but she’s not the only one. At least four former YCC members have gone on to work for the refuge. Larsen thinks eventually she might like being a Refuge Information Technician or RIT.

“It’s like you’re the middle man for the people they want to talk to and telling them what they are doing on the refuge like with the communities close to it,” Larsen said.

That’s exactly the kind of middle men the program is hoping to create — liaisons between the refuge and the people who live near it. Right now, there is not a RIT position for the Alaska Maritime National Refuge. Staff members know Larsen is interested and said having her stationed in Sand Point representing the refuge is a possibility.

Cook Inlet Tribal Council runs one of only two detox centers in the state of Alaska.

At the Alaska Wellness Summit in Palmer Thursday, CITC CEO Gloria O’Neil announced that the Ernie Turner Center in Anchorage will be sold to Southcentral Foundation.

O’Neil said the move is part of a plan to expand CITC’s addiction treatment services to the Matanuska-Susitna area.

“And SEF will take up providing detox, being a medical provider, and CITC will focus on expanding treatment beds to the community,” O’Neil said. “And we’re able to respond to the complex needs and the changing needs in the community.”

The Ernie Turner Center is the only detox facility in Anchorage and maintains the only drug addiction beds available to Muni and Mat-Su patients.

O’Neill said that CITC will partner with the Knik and Chickaloon tribes on Mat Su drug and alcohol treatment services.

An Anchorage Assembly member is facing fines for child labor violations at his comic book business. But the penalties are less about any malicious intent than clerical errors and a misunderstanding over the definition of a Dumpster.

The Labor Department investigated Bosco’s, a business specializing in comics and games, with locations in Spenard and South Anchorage. Bosco’s has been open since 1984, and is owned by South Anchorage assembly member John Weddleton.

In a release sent Thursday, investigators said they had turned up three separate violations. There were two instances of 15-year-old employees working longer than three hours and past 7 p.m. on school nights, and small discrepancies with records for over-time pay.

The last issue cited has to with restricting minors from operating industrial equipment, and a 15-years-old throwing away trash in what everyone assumed was a regular Dumpster behind the store’s Dimond Center location.

“Because it’s a compactor style, (it’s) considered a mechanical device,” Weddleton said by phone. “It’s just not something we paid attention to or noticed. Now we do, of course.”

Weddleton said normally he doesn’t even allow employees younger than 18 to vacuum the floor, in observation of the rule. The business generally has between 20 and 25 employees at a given time, almost all of whom are adults, according to Weddleton.

He’s agreed to pay $4,650 in civil fines, along with a $126 in overtime wages owed. But overall he believes the Labor Department’s audit of three years worth of business records found overwhelming compliance with state and federal rules.

“We run a good operation, and that was acknowledged by the auditor,” Weddleton said. “This is my first experience with this…in 34 years.”

He agrees that when auditors find a violation they should take action, even though he thinks the fines in this case are a bit high.

“But I don’t know what’s typical for these things. I just paid the fine, movin’ on.”

Weddleton was elected to the Assembly in April.

Each of the three main University of Alaska campuses are accredited separately. A study released this week asks would it be more cost effective to bring all the campuses together under one accreditation. The answer: probably not.

The report suggests condensing the three accreditations into one would be a monumental process with few benefits. But there are other cost savings options.

University president Jim Johnsen says the college already is looking into some of those possibilities.

“We’ve got seven teams working as we speak on four administrative areas and three academic areas, to see how we can restructure to reduce costs and drive higher performance,” Johnsen said.

One option is consolidating administrative departments for academic programs that exist on multiple campuses, such as engineering, teacher education, and business administration.

“We have three schools of management; we have three schools of education,” Johnsen said. “Are we gonna continue to have those three or is it gonna be somehow changed?”

Condensing the programs would require accreditations on a program-by-program basis, but he’s confident that would be possible, he said.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities grants accreditation based on certain sets of academic standards.

The report notes that even if that commission approves a move to bring the university system under a single accreditation – which is uncertain – the process would take at least two years, and a significant amount of faculty, staff, and administrative resources to complete.

And, once the process is finished, the report says there’s no guarantee it will result in more students or higher quality programs, or meet the state’s higher education needs.

Regardless of the report’s recommendations, Johnsen says it’s an avenue deserving of a closer look.

“I’m agnostic when it comes to three accreditations, one accreditation, 38 accreditations,” Johnsen said. “It’s about our mission for the state of Alaska. That trumps everything.”

No decisions have been made regarding the university system’s accreditation strategy, but it’s a topic scheduled for discussion at the next Board of Regents meeting in September.