University of Alaska

When a child enters the foster care system, it often means being removed from their family, a traumatic process that disproportionately impacts Native children.

A new study from the University of Alaska Anchorage explores alternative child welfare strategies to limit family separation.

Saniġaq Jessica Ullrich is co-author on the study. She is Iñupiaq, enrolled in the Nome Eskimo Community. She worked for the Alaska Office of Children’s Services for more than eight years.

“My whole passion has been about ending the disproportionate number of Alaska Native children in out-of-home care,” Ullrich said. “And I felt like I did everything I could within the system to create change, but the number stayed the same.”

Of the more than 3,000 Alaska children in out-of-home care, roughly two-thirds of them are Alaska Native or American Indian. Alaska Native people only make up a fifth of the state’s population.

In order to address the disparity, Ullrich left OCS to go back to school and get her doctorate in social welfare. In her dissertation, she interviewed people with experience in the child welfare system, including Alaska Native foster care alumni and relative caregivers, as well as foster parents.

She said she heard stories of trauma from the separation of families and loss of culture. She equates it with trauma experienced by Native children in residential boarding schools.

“What happened in the past is still happening today,” Ullrich said. “And I feel like there’s not enough attention or recognition that the current policies of child welfare are slanted toward removal.”

In her new study published this month with fellow UAA social work researcher Yvonne Chase, the two looked at an alternative approach to child welfare. Their proposed framework is built around empowering families and communities rather than removing children from their homes. That means acknowledging past trauma, working to get families the resources they need and shifting the focus towards reunifying families.

Ullrich said instead of finding more foster care families, OCS could look for “safety plan participants.” They’d be tasked with checking up on families to make sure they’re OK rather than removing children and taking over caregiving responsibilities.

“I don’t have the ability, time and resources to be a foster parent right now,” Ullrich said. “But instead, I’m assisting, and I’m helping to preserve a family, and keep the children with their parents if at all possible.”

Ullrich said communities might be able to handle their own child welfare cases through more preventative measures. She points out that the Yup’ik village of Kwigillingok is already doing that through its Child Protection Team.

“Kwigillingok showed a drop from 20 something cases to zero in a relatively short amount of time because there was that relationship and connectedness that happened among the community members,” Ullrich said. “Checking in, ‘How are you? How can I support you? What’s going on?’”

She said in some cases it’s still safer to remove the child from their home, but using preventative measures would drastically reduce that need.

Funding this community-centered approach to child welfare, however, has been a problem for decades. Chase, the other author of the study, put forth similar recommendations to the first Bush administration in the early 1990s.

Chase said addressing child welfare goes beyond the state Office of Children’s Services. It would require top-down approaches to byproducts of generational trauma, including poverty, substance misuse, housing and food insecurity. She said these preventive measures aren’t well funded.

“Every time we move funds from something like investigation and removal to prevention, we lose the funding. So I think there’s also a reluctance on the part of systems of agencies to do that because they know in budget crunch times, that’s what goes.”

The study notes the federal government has budgeted more than $9 billion on foster care and adoption this fiscal year with only millions of dollars on support and prevention.

Chase and Ullrich hope their research will show that, to enact real change in child welfare systems, lawmakers and administrators will have to look beyond where families are and instead address how they got there.

For now, Ullrich said she’s working on putting together resources for tribes to enact community-focused child welfare systems in their own communities.

The study “A Connectedness Framework: Breaking the Cycle of Child Removal for Black and Indigenous Children” was published earlier this month in the International Journal on Child Maltreatment.

An Anchorage Superior Court judge ruled on Thursday against four university students who had sued the State of Alaska to try to maintain more than $400 million in a fund for scholarships and grants.

Judge Adolph Zeman’s ruling means that the money in the Higher Education Investment Fund will no longer be set aside in a lasting way to pay for three programs: the Alaska Performance Scholarships, which are based on students’ high school grades and test scores; Alaska Education grants, which are based on students’ financial need; and the state’s medical education program.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has proposed funding the programs along with the rest of the budget. That can continue to happen in the future, but students won’t have the assurance that there’s a large fund set aside for them.

The money that was once in the higher education fund is now in a state savings account known as the Constitutional Budget Reserve, raising its total from roughly $1 billion to $1.4 billion.

The money was swept into savings after three-quarters of both legislative chambers failed last year to agree to keep it in the separate higher education fund. Opponents of maintaining the funding offered different arguments. Some focused on their belief that these programs should have to compete with the rest of the state budget for annual funding. Others would not vote to reverse the sweep unless the Alaska Legislature agreed to increase permanent fund dividend amounts.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration determined that the money was subject to the reverse sweep vote. Previous administrations had not taken that position.

A separate lawsuit successfully protected money in a different state account, the Power Cost Equalization Endowment Fund, or PCE. That fund pays to make the energy in high-cost areas more equal with that in the rest of the state.

The laws establishing the higher education and PCE funds used different language. The higher education fund law said that the fund is in the state’s general fund, which is used to pay the state’s budget and is subject to the annual vote. But the PCE endowment law said the PCE fund is separate from the general fund.

In the scholarship lawsuit, the legal arguments focused on whether the Higher Education Investment Fund, or HEIF, was available for the Legislature to appropriate. Judge Zeman found that it was. Under a provision of the state constitution, that means the money must be swept into the Constitutional Budget Reserve unless three-quarters of both chambers vote to reverse the sweep.

“If the legislature believes these programs should be funded, it possesses the power to establish the HEIF as a separate fund outside the general fund or to appropriate money from other sources — for example, a reverse sweep of the CBR — to fund the programs in the future,” Zeman wrote. “However, this is not within the Court’s power. The power of appropriation belongs solely to the Legislative Branch.”

The students now must decide whether to appeal Zeman’s decision.

An Anchorage judge will decide in the next two weeks whether more than $400 million will remain in a state fund that pays for scholarships and need-based grants for Alaskans to attend college.

Lawyers for four Alaska university students and the state government presented their arguments to Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman on Tuesday to determine the future of the Alaska Higher Education Investment Fund. The fund was started in 2012 with $400 million. 

But three years ago, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration started sweeping the money into the Constitutional Budget Reserve, a state savings account, unless three-quarters of both the Senate and House of Representatives agreed to keep it in the higher education fund. That failed to happen last year.

So, in January, four students sued to maintain the fund. 

Jahna Lindemuth, the students’ lawyer, argued that the state misapplied a provision of the constitution that determines what money will be swept into the Constitutional Budget Reserve each year. She served as the attorney general in the administration of former Gov. Bill Walker, an independent who is challenging Dunleavy, a Republican, in this year’s election.

Lindemuth said Dunleavy had proposed language in a bill that would have eliminated the fund, which the Legislature failed to pass. She said that it wasn’t until after that happened that the administration reached its conclusion that the higher education fund money was subject to being swept without legislation.

“The governor simply has different legislative priorities than the Legislature,” she said, adding that it was a “money grab that fundamentally violates the Legislature’s rights” under the constitution. 

Assistant Attorney General Margaret Paton-Walsh represents the state in the case. She noted that the state constitution requires that unspent money in the general fund that’s available to be spent in the annual budget — also known as being “appropriated” — be swept in into the Constitutional Budget Reserve. She said that applies to the money in the Alaska Higher Education Investment Fund, which the law defines as being in the general fund.

“The Legislature is quite free to appropriate that money for any purpose that it wants,” she said. “There is no dispute about that fact.”

The judge noted that students rely on scholarships for several years, and asked Paton-Walsh if that makes the higher education fund similar to the state setting aside money for a construction project that lasts several years. 

“How’s that different than a four-year education?” he asked. 

She replied that with the higher education fund, the Legislature has to take two separate actions: putting money into the fund and then spending it on programs like scholarships. 

But with a multi-year construction project, it only appropriates it once. And the Legislature doesn’t appropriate it again for the same construction project in multiple years.

“That money is not available for appropriation because the executive branch can spend it without any further action by the Legislature, ” she said of a multi-year construction project. 

The state now considers the $422.8 million that was in the higher education fund to be part of the Constitutional Budget Reserve, which has another roughly $1 billion.

Dunleavy has proposed funding the Alaska Performance Scholarships, need-based Alaska Education Grants and the state’s medical education program in the budget for the coming fiscal year.

The money for those programs wouldn’t come from the higher education fund, but instead from the general fund, which pays for the rest of the state budget. Without the money in the Alaska Higher Education Investment, the students expressed concern that there wouldn’t be funding for the programs in future budgets. 

Judge Zeman said he would issue a decision by Feb. 22. That could allow time for the case to be appealed to the state Supreme Court and resolved by the time the Legislature finishes its work on the budget. 

Arctic methane explosions and the scientists who love to study them are the focus of the newest episode of the public television program Nova.

The show follows University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers investigating the appearance of craters, sometimes big ones, in northern regions. That’s where a rapidly warming climate has thawed permafrost and allowed more methane to percolate upward from deeper in the Earth. As the thinking goes, the methane travels upwards and forms a kind of tube, not unlike magma in a volcano, and then builds up pressure at the surface until — kaboom! — it erupts, sometimes even with a fiery explosion.

Longtime permafrost researcher Dr. Vladimir Romanovsky with UAF’s Geophysical Institute, a professor emeritus as of this week, is featured in the Nova episode that aired Wednesday night. And Romanovsky says there are several reasons to keep an eye on the exploding methane phenomenon.

Listen here:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Vladimir Romanovsky: So it’s still in discussion, the process, the physical process behind this phenomena. But I think it’s more and more clear that there is some protrusion of high pressure gas, and this protrusion goes from below the bottom of permafrost toward the surface. And eventually, when the pressure is high, then it just erupts and removes this cap. And these pieces of frozen material and the big chunks of ice are flying away, very far sometimes, like 300 feet and even more away from the crater. And sometimes even there is some evidence that during this eruption, coming out, methane was ignited, and it was not just eruption, but eruption and then explosion. And yeah, people are aware of it, and they are monitoring. And of course, the satellite data is high, very high resolution, and are also now used very, very widely to, first of all, to look for these existing craters and how they change with time, but also looking at suspicious, little hills, round hills, the right size, and potentially could be those ones ready — sooner or later — to explode or to erupt.

Casey Grove: Some of those hills, maybe now you’re thinking, they’re not full of ice, they might be suspiciously full of methane, then?

Vladimir Romanovsky: Yeah, and not just full, but this high pressure. So it makes it dangerous to try to just simply drill into these hills. You may not survive, you know, because the pressure is very high, and also possibly there could be ignition. So it would make a really serious explosion and definitely will be not safe. Definitely. I wouldn’t recommend anybody to drill in those in those hills.

Casey Grove: I will note that for future reference, in case I find myself in that position.

Vladimir Romanovsky: Yeah. Just stay from a distance and look.

Casey Grove: Why is this happening? I mean, why is this showing up here relatively recently?

Vladimir Romanovsky: That’s a very good question. Why now? Why not before? And, of course, what really happened, what changed? Well, the climate warming. So that’s why, the first kind of reaction to explain why now. It’s related to a warmer climate, and why a warmer climate would trigger this, this phenomena, that’s where we need to have a very good understanding of the physics, the processes behind it. I have a very possible scenario why it is happening. And this explanation is, well, pretty straightforward. So this protrusion from below may be happening for a long, long time. But before, the permafrost was much colder. We have data, we have our measurements, going on for the last 40 years. And we see that, for example, permafrost on the North Slope now is about 3-4 degrees warmer near to the surface of permafrost, compared to 30-35 years ago. So now, warmer permafrost will allow this protrusion to come closer and closer to the ground surface and eventually allow these eruptions.

Casey Grove: And I guess the concern isn’t just that you might be standing nearby and the thing would explode, or if you were drilling into it or whatever, it has to do with the actual methane being released into the atmosphere. Can you explain that?

Vladimir Romanovsky: Yeah, that’s true. And the amount of methane which will be released during the eruption is not that much. And especially if it explodes, then methane will just turn into CO2 and water, pretty much. But if this chimney or connection to below permafrost environment will be still open, which we see in some cases — it’s still open in this case — it’s allowed to escape a much, much larger amount of methane, which is sequestered there and otherwise will be sitting there for, you know, millennia, it will be able to escape to the atmosphere. It’s still a question of how much. It’s still a question, it needs to be assessed and estimated, but it may be one of the potential sources of increase in methane concentration in the atmosphere, increasing this greenhouse effect, because it’s a very, very potent greenhouse gas.

Casey Grove: And that would just sort of cause a feedback loop and maybe even make the problem worse, I imagine?

Vladimir Romanovsky: That’s right. Yeah, the more greenhouse gas concentration, faster warming. Faster warming and permafrost thaw, more right conditions in more areas where it isn’t possible right now, and more explosions and so on. But I wouldn’t kind of neglect the possibility of problems with infrastructure with that, because according to my theory, this phenomena happens in the areas of warmer permafrost. And also, we know that any large infrastructure makes permafrost warmer. So in this case, this protrusion will actually be directed toward the warmer permafrost, which is under infrastructure, and that makes it very dangerous. So, you see, it’s kind of some sort of heat-directed missile, you know. It goes to the source of heat. Of course, it’s speculation. Of course, it’s kind of like an interesting twist in this phenomena, but it’s possible.

Casey Grove: Yeah, that does seem pretty troubling, and also interesting, just that, if that’s the case that it goes toward those things, it definitely seems worth studying more.

Vladimir Romanovsky: Right. And in the Yamal Peninsula, in Siberia, several of them have already happened. And very, very close to this Bovanenkovskoye gas field infrastructure, to the pipelines. So for them, it’s not a theoretical, potentially possible problem, but it is real problem. They’re already pretty much worried about what is going on there.

Casey Grove: Wow, yeah. And also I thought I’d ask, while I have you on right now, about your retirement, because I think I read that you are retiring from the Geophysical Institute after something like 30 years, right?

Vladimir Romanovsky: Right. Well, it’s my second day of retirement today.

Casey Grove: And you’re still talking to me while you’re retired?

Vladimir Romanovsky: Well, I am a professor emeritus, which allows me to be active and to be present at the Geophysical Institute. So for for a while, they will keep some office for me, and I have even free parking. So that’s my privilege. So I will be around as a professor emeritus, and I will talk to anybody who would like to know more about permafrost and permafrost-related questions.

Casey Grove: That’s great. And, I mean, as a former UAF person myself, I know that the parking really does matter. You know, Dr. Romanovsky, I thought I would ask, just as a Fairbanks person myself — and, you know, having been born there, I didn’t have much of a choice — but I like to ask people that moved to Fairbanks, why did you end up there? How did you end up in Fairbanks?

Vladimir Romanovsky: Well, Fairbanks is very, very proper — and obvious even — choice for a person who studies permafrost. My previous life, scientific life, was related to Moscow State University, which is in Moscow. And even in all American movies about Moscow, it’s always winter and it’s always snowy. There is, unfortunately, no permafrost around Moscow. And to study permafrost, we had to go far, far away from it. And Fairbanks is a great place. It’s a great place. First of all, because permafrost is just around — just outside. But also because the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Alaska in general, it’s a very, very great scientific institution. So it’s a worldwide kind of leader in the cold regions research. And it’s a great place to be to study permafrost, because I have the huge knowledge of people around me. And any question I have, outside of my expertise, I can go and simply ask and work with those people around me. So that was great place, great decision on my side to come here and I’m very happy to be here.

Casey Grove: It sounds like you’re not leaving anytime soon for somewhere warmer, where you don’t have to just drive up the haul road to do permafrost research.

Vladimir Romanovsky: No, I will be here for a while, yes. It’s not easy to get rid of me.

The Alaska Legislature is supporting the lawsuit by university students against Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration to protect a fund that pays for scholarships.

A joint council of the House of Representatives and Senate on Monday approved filing a legal brief backing the lawsuit.

The Alaska Higher Education Investment Fund has held more than $400 million. Each year, money from the fund pays for Alaska Performance Scholarships, need-based Alaska Education Grants and the state program for medical students, known as WWAMI.

Dunleavy’s administration has said that the money in the fund must be swept into a state savings account if three-quarters of both legislative chambers don’t vote each year to maintain the funding. That vote failed last year.

Kodiak Republican Sen. Gary Stevens said emptying the fund would leave students uncertain about whether the scholarships would be available.

“The medical students are on a long-term program, and for them not to know from year to year to year how they’re going to be supported would be quite devastating,” he said.

Dunleavy has said that he supports funding the scholarships.

The Legislative Council’s vote to support the filing was 12 to 1.

Michele Yatchmeneff knew she wanted to be an engineer from the time she was a teenager. Yatchmeneff grew up in False Pass and King Cove, in the eastern Aleutians. She was raised in an Unangax̂ household, living a subsistence lifestyle.

Right after high school, she enrolled in engineering classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1999. She was looking forward to it.

Almost immediately, she began to feel many of the other students didn’t want her there.

“You would have students either not talk to you, or look at you in a certain way,” Yatchmeneff said. “Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s actually a slap in the face. You get called ‘villager,’ you get called names.”

There are more Indigenous people living in Alaska than anywhere else in the United States. But Alaska Native students are vastly underrepresented on college campuses. And when it comes to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math — fields that are especially dominated by white men — Alaska Native students face even greater barriers to entry.

When Yatchmeneff attended school, there had only been two Alaska Native students who had graduated with engineering degrees from the University of Alaska system. She felt isolated being surrounded by students and faculty who didn’t look like her.

After a year, she transferred to Anchorage. But after a year there, she left Alaska altogether. She moved to Arizona and enrolled in Arizona State University, hoping it would be better there.

Instead, Yatchmeneff says the further along she got in school, there were even fewer women and people of color.

Yatchmeneff felt alienated — and she internalized the blame.

“I always thought it was my problem, why I didn’t belong,” Yatchmeneff said. “I always thought there must be something wrong with me, I must not be good enough.”

She says her grades began to decline, and that she even started losing interest in engineering.

Yatchmeneff moved back to Alaska. She was lost, didn’t know what to do, and wondered if she’d ever make it through college.

But then some friends told her about an organization that helps Alaska Native students in STEM fields. Her first meeting showed her a world she didn’t know existed.

“There were all these other students that looked like me, and they were all doing internships, and they were sharing what they did during their internships,” Yatchmeneff said. “It was like coming home.”

Since the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program started in 1995, it has helped hundreds of college students with scholarships, internships and mentoring. They also have programs for elementary, middle and high school students.

After finding the program, Yatchmeneff finally felt she had the support she needed. She was able to earn her bachelor’s degree, her master’s and a doctorate from Purdue.

In 2015, Yatchmeneff became the first Alaska Native female engineering professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She’s earned awards from organizations like the National Science Foundation. And last fall, she became the executive director of Alaska Native education and outreach at UAA, working directly with the chancellor to help boost enrollment and graduation among Alaska Native students.

Alaska Native undergraduates earning STEM degrees has more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2018, according to a 2019 study by ANSEP. But even today, Yatchmeneff faces a lot of the same hurdles as when she was a student.

“A lot of the time, students still don’t think I have the credentials to be teaching, they still don’t think I fit their picture of what an engineer looks like,” she said. “So therefore, I must have cheated or I don’t belong.”

But not every student feels that way. Yatchmeneff says especially students from marginalized communities have told her it was because of her leadership, and because they saw someone who looked like them teaching the class, that they knew they belonged.

Yatchmeneff says that teaching and working with the school to support Alaska Native students is her chance to give back to her community.

“It’s an Indigenous value that we always give back,” she said. “Because I had the support and because I got help from people along the way … it’s full circle.”

Still though, there’s a long way to go.

“We’re just scratching the surface, Yatchmeneff said. “What you want it to be is that you don’t need a specific Alaska Native program for science and engineering. We shouldn’t need that,” Yatchmeneff said.

She added, “But until we’ve gotten to that point, we need programs like ANSEP to be there.”