Six Alaska Districts Have Fewer Than 100 Students

Mon, 04 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The school in Pelican enrolls 16 students. The entire district is one building, on an island in the Gulf of Alaska accessible only by floatplane or state ferry. There is no road to Pelican. There is no road in Pelican longer than a few blocks. There are 16 children.

Pelican is one of six Alaska school districts that now enroll fewer than 100 students each. Across them, 328 children attend public school, a number that would fill a single elementary building in Anchorage. Together these six districts account for 0.3% of the state's enrollment but represent six separate administrative structures, six sets of superintendent responsibilities, and six entities competing for funding from a state that is itself shrinking.

A state built on small

Alaska's 53 school districts range from Anchorage at 40,688 students to Pelican at 16. The ratio between them, 2,543 to 1, is among the most extreme in the country. Five districts enroll two-thirds of all students. The other 48 split the remaining third.

The median Alaska district enrolls 378 students. Twenty-nine of the 53 districts, 55%, have fewer than 500 students. These 29 districts together educate 6,169 children, 4.9% of the state total. A system designed around borough governments and Regional Educational Attendance Areas produces districts that serve villages, islands, and stretches of tundra where the nearest neighbor district may be hundreds of miles of roadless wilderness away.

The six under 100: Pelican (16), Aleutian Region (21), Pribilof (56), Hydaburg (62), Bristol Bay (85), and Yakutat (88).

Where the students aren't

The trajectories of these six districts diverge sharply. Pelican has oscillated between 11 and 16 students since 2020 with no clear direction. Its population is so small that a single family moving in or out changes enrollment by double digits in percentage terms.

Hydaburg's path is steeper. The Haida community on Prince of Wales Island enrolled 100 students in 2020, jumped to 169 in 2021 for reasons unclear from enrollment data alone, then declined sharply over the following four years. It dropped to 62 in 2025-26, a 38% decline from its 2020 level and the largest percentage loss among any small district in the state.

Bristol Bay has fallen from 111 to 85 over the same period, a 23% decline that puts the district at its lowest level in the seven-year dataset. Yakutat has slid from 101 to 88, also at a seven-year low. Of the six micro-districts, three are at their lowest enrollment in the available record.

Statewide, the pattern holds: 29 of Alaska's 53 districts, 55%, are at their lowest enrollment in the seven-year dataset.

The cost of remoteness

The funding question facing these districts is not whether they deserve to exist. It is whether the state's formula can sustain them.

Alaska's Base Student Allocation stands at $6,660 per student, but the formula applies cost factors by district that range from 1.0 in Anchorage to 2.116 in Yukon Flats. Small schools receive an additional multiplier: in a school of 25 students, each child counts as 1.62 students for funding purposes. Even so, the total revenue generated by 16 students in Pelican or 21 in Aleutian Region cannot cover a building, a heating system, insurance, and staff.

Nineteen Alaska school districts are classified as REAAs, Regional Educational Attendance Areas, that sit outside organized borough governments and have no local tax base at all. They depend entirely on state funding. The Kuspuk School District, an REAA covering an area roughly the size of Maryland in western Alaska, has dropped from 368 students in 2020 to 272 in 2025-26, a 26% decline. In January 2026, Kuspuk and Fairbanks North Star Borough jointly sued the state, alleging that Alaska is failing its constitutional obligation to fund public education.

"That's almost a decade of just starting at nothing, and when you have to claw your way to even less than minimal funding, that takes a toll." — Kuspuk Superintendent Madeline Aguillard, ProPublica, January 2026

The lawsuit cites Kuspuk's assessment data: 90% of the district's 330 students during 2024-25 were not proficient in English language arts, math, or science. The district has diverted operational funds to patch failing plumbing, fire suppression systems, and structural problems in state-owned buildings.

Eight schools, one principal

The Southeast Island School District, an REAA headquartered in Thorne Bay, illustrates what operating at the margin looks like. The district runs eight schools across Prince of Wales Island and the southern tip of Baranof Island, some with a single K-12 teacher. One principal covers all eight campuses.

"We don't have any fat to cut. We have a hard time making payroll month to month." — Rod Morrison, Southeast Island School District, Alaska Public Media, March 2026

Southeast Island enrolled 188 students in 2025-26, up 13% from its 2020 level of 167, making it one of the few small districts that has grown. But growth in a district this size means 21 more students spread across eight buildings on islands connected by gravel logging roads. The operational math does not change.

Concentration at the top

The flip side of Alaska's micro-district landscape is extreme concentration. Anchorage alone enrolls 32.5% of the state. Add Mat-Su, Fairbanks, Galena (whose enrollment is almost entirely the IDEA correspondence program), and Kenai Peninsula, and five districts account for 70.4% of the state's 125,317 students.

This split creates a structural tension in education policy. What Anchorage needs from the BSA formula is fundamentally different from what Pelican or Kuspuk needs. Anchorage is closing schools and cutting hundreds of positions to manage a $90 million budget deficit driven by declining enrollment and rising costs. Mat-Su, the state's fastest-growing borough, could close three schools and still face a $22.5 million shortfall. The rural micro-districts are not closing schools for efficiency. For most of them, there is only one school. Closing it means there is no school.

Who is shrinking, who is not

Among the 29 districts with fewer than 500 students, six have grown since 2020. Southeast Island (+13%), Kake (+11%), and Cordova (+10%) lead the gainers. But the losses are steeper: Hydaburg (-38%), Aleutians East (-29%), and Kuspuk (-26%) head a list of 22 small districts that have shrunk.

Statewide, 38 of Alaska's 53 districts lost students between 2020 and 2026. Only 14 gained. Alaska is in its 13th consecutive year of net outmigration, the longest such streak since 1945, and the Alaska Department of Labor projects the state's population will begin dropping steadily by 2050. In communities already measured in dozens of students, even modest population shifts can push a district below the threshold where a school can function.

The question Pelican asks

Rural leaders told state lawmakers in February 2026 that the infrastructure crisis in rural schools is far worse than the state's flagship boarding school at Mt. Edgecumbe. Alaska faces an estimated $6.3 billion school facilities funding gap over the next decade, with the state historically funding only about 15% of identified maintenance and construction needs. Since 2003, the state has systematically transferred school building ownership to rural districts that lack the local tax revenue to maintain them.

Pelican's 16 students do not move the state enrollment needle. Neither do Pribilof's 56, or Aleutian Region's 21. But each of these districts represents a community where the school is the only public institution, the building where children go during the day and where adults gather for town meetings at night. The policy question is not complicated to articulate: How small is too small? The answer, for communities accessible only by bush plane, has consequences that a funding formula cannot capture.

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