Greenwood teacher helps Alaskan students celebrate graduation

The impact was so great it transcended the years and thousands of miles of separation.

Kayla Ashe had never forgotten her time teaching in the small Alaskan village of Eek. The University of Indianapolis graduate was hired to teach on the tundra for her first job out of college, and the experience left its imprint on her.

Her influence stayed with her students after all that time, too.

“Kayla is the kind of teacher you want your child to have. She truly cares about her students and her students respond to her, they want to be around her,” said Loni Hoover, administrative secretary for Eek School. “She is calm, soft spoken and just has a way about her, it’s actually not easy to describe.”

Ashe, now a second-grade teacher at Northeast Elementary School in Greenwood, received a moving request from three of the students she taught so many years ago. The three graduating seniors in Eek School’s Class of 2024 wanted their former teacher to deliver their address during graduation.

She put together a presentation to show during the ceremony. Ashe spoke about how much they changed her life, allowing her to fall in love with Eek and the whole community.

“The word I kept coming back to was ‘impact.’ I’m thankful I had an impact on them, that they remembered me and asked me to be their speaker. But I also wanted them to know they had a lasting impact on me,” she said. “It’s something that will always stick with me so deeply.”

Ashe’s Alaskan adventure started in 2013, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Indianapolis. The job market was tight, and she struggled to find a teaching job.

During a local education job fair, she blanketed available job openings with her resume.

“I put my resume in all of the envelopes. I did not pay attention closely, but some of those envelopes were Alaskan school districts,” she said.

Slowly, Ashe started hearing from some of the school districts she had applied to. One of those was Lower Kuskokwim School District, which is Eek School part of.

The village of Eek is situated in the far western portion of Alaska, about 400 miles from Anchorage, the state’s largest city. About 400 people live there, almost entirely Native Alaskan.

Besides the school, the village features a U.S. Post Office, a health clinic and a town store.

Ashe wasn’t deterred from the challenge. This was not the first small teaching experience she had; while at UIndy, she had taken part in a program teaching in a village in Belize. By chance, one of the friends who had also taught in Belize was in Alaska. Ashe wondered if the two situations were similar.

“(Belize) was very tight-knit and small, which really appealed to me,” she said. “And I figured, I could do anything for a year, so I decided to take this adventure.”

Over the next two months, Ashe had countless conversations with the school superintendent learning all she could about the region — housing options, where to get food, who she’d be teaching. Her assignment was at Eek School, a pre-K to 12th grade school with about 120 students.

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Ashe would be teaching first and second graders.

“That was the perfect placement for me,” she said.

Not that there weren’t challenges. People got around on four-wheelers and by airplane, since there were few roads. Everyone addressed each other by first names, from the students to her superiors. Family dinner at teacher housing was a big part of daily life in Eek. Her students and their families would regularly stop over to Ashe’s home.

“I quickly learned it was very much a community,” she said. “That closeness is something I’ll always value.”

Ashe’s students helped her adjust to life. They helped her find edible berries on the tundra without sinking into the unstable land. They took her ice fishing and out into the wilderness of rural Alaska. She learned how to speak the Native Alaskan language, eventually joining a master’s degree program for dual language.

“In our small community, she became friends with many people and was invited to their homes as well as invited to steam baths and ice fishing trips,” Hoover said. “When she left Eek for the last time, many people went to the airport to see her off. I can’t remember the last time villagers did that.”

Ashe ended up staying in Eek for six years, before moving back to Indiana in 2019. She has been at Northeast Elementary for the past five years and now teaches her own second-graders in Greenwood.

Still, she never lost track of the friends she made in Alaska. And they never lost track of her, either.

Three of those students she connected with were the ones who invited her to be their graduation speaker.

”I was surprised that they asked me to be their speaker. They were my first group of second graders there, and I only had them for one year,” she said. “But I grew very close with the village, so it was great to hear that they wanted me to speak.”

Hoover was one of Ashe’s closest friends in the village. She worked with the graduating seniors about who their speaker would be, and got in touch with Ashe to see if she’d like to do it.

She accepted.

“To have Kayla as a guest speaker was a great choice because if I remember correctly, the three students were among her first students in Eek. They remembered her fondly. They had big smiles as they listened to her speech,” Hoover said. “Seeing her and hearing her voice made a couple of us staff members tear up because we miss her so much.”

In years past, graduation speakers would fly to the village and give their remarks in person. But after the COVID-19 pandemic, school officials changed it to a virtual address instead.

Ashe had some help putting everything together. Her class at Northeast offered up their own thoughts, which were woven into the video message.

“She pulled her second-grade students into this, with them writing some messages to the graduates which she used in her speech,” said Amy Sander, principal at Northeast. “It was really cool how it worked out.”

Ashe’s video message was attached to the graduation slides shown during the ceremony at Eek on May 17. Since then, she received thankful feedback, not only from the graduates, but from others in the community.

“I literally dream about Eek all the time. I want to go back. But even though I wasn’t there, so many people messaged me to say it was so good to see me. I just loved that positivity; even if I wasn’t there, they still saw me. It made me feel good,” she said.