I went to rural Alaska to report on school buildings. I found a system built on neglect and apathy.

I’ve spent years reporting on the myriad challenges facing Alaska’s rural communities, and during those field assignments, I’ve typically stayed overnight inside the local public school. So, I thought I had a good grasp of the challenges rural school districts face this far north: high turnover rates among teachers and administration, large gaps in student achievement, and the ripple effects of generational trauma in predominantly Indigenous communities.

It wasn’t until I stood inside the crumbling K-12 public school in tiny Sleetmute, where coffee-colored water stains bloomed across the ceiling tiles and black mold crept across the buckling back wall of the woodshop, that I realized the true extent of the health and safety risks facing students and staff in the state’s public education system.

At least one powerful lawmaker has deemed Sleetmute’s school “the poster child” for Alaska’s backlog of deferred major maintenance projects and its failure to find a way to pay for it all. The school building was declared unsafe years ago and yet, year after year, a request to fund a roof repair never rose to the top of the state education department’s prioritized list of capital projects. The deeper I dug, the clearer it became: the system that funds Alaska’s rural public schools is inadequate.

School buildings are not just physical spaces. They reflect the value we place on the future of our children. In Alaska, most rural schools serve predominantly Alaska Native communities. This story became less about how much money was available in the budget to fix failing infrastructure and more about the slow violence of neglectful policy and funding procedures, and policymakers’ lack of response to a fiscal crisis that legislators have seen coming for decades.

After the state lost a legal battle with Native families in the 1970s, Alaska was forced to build more than 100 public high schools in rural communities. But the funding system that followed hasn’t kept up with maintenance needs. While urban districts can raise money through local bonds and local tax revenue, rural districts rely entirely on the state, because they serve communities that are unincorporated. They don’t have any incoming tax revenue and without state funds, the schools and arguably the system stays broken.

I am only one among many who have discovered these problems. In fact, the lack of state investment in rural public education and infrastructure was highlighted in a case filed in 1997 by a group of parents in Western Alaska. The Kasayulie Case, as it’s now known, resulted in a 2011 consent decree that called on the state to replace five decaying schools. Sadly, the conditions inside schools that were outlined in the original complaint nearly three decades ago still exits inside dozens of rural public schools today.

One key piece of this reporting was to go see for myself the conditions so many people had told me about. This is my number one recommendation for other reporters. We have to see for ourselves the extent of the problem we are reporting on. Alaska’s rural communities can’t be reached by road and instead require travel in small airplanes that land on icy runways. My visits to classrooms held together by ingenuity and, in at least one case, leftover plaster of Paris found in an abandoned pile of art supplies, were essential because I could deliver firsthand accounts of these conditions to my listeners, readers and the state lawmakers tasked with making annual budgetary decisions. They frequently visit these places.

Compounding these overlooked classroom conditions is the lack of clarity on their health impacts. Compared to other populations, Alaska Natives suffer from some of the highest chronic illness rates in the United States. If data does exist that can help explain the long-term impacts of public school conditions on students and teachers, that information is not publicly available. Both the state and private health care providers declined to provide it, citing privacy concerns. However, the adverse impacts of long-term exposure to things like black mold and raw sewage are well documented and were supported in some cases by anecdotal evidence from parents who said their children came home sick or with headaches on occasion. My advice to other reporters is to spend as much time as possible getting to know local sources and listening more to their stories than asking technical questions.

In my reporting, state funding data was readily available and it became essential to the story telling. Organizing this data was perhaps the most complicated part about reporting this story. The state’s data systems aren’t set up in a way that provides immediate transparency. So, I had to come up with a way to organize nearly 30 years of data to calculate the number of schools that had been waiting for state funding for a specific number of years. With patience and a lot of trial and error, we finally uncovered a pattern: Many rural public school districts have waited decades to fix problems that have ballooned over the years.

This project taught me that infrastructure stories are multi-layered. When a school’s ceiling is on the verge of collapse, it’s not just damage to the building that’s at stake. It damages trust — in the state and the public systems that are supposed to provide for people equally, regardless of ZIP code.