School Tutor!

Our school has a tutor this year. She arrived January31^st   she will be leaving April 7^th.  Her name is Whitney Diehl, she is from Pennsylvania. She is 23 years old. She went to Bloomsburg University and graduated with a teaching degree. She said the reason why she wanted to become a teacher was because she, “Always wanted to become a teacher since she was in high school. She loves working with kids and couldn’t see herself doing anything else.”  The reason why she came to Alaska was because Administration from LPSD came to her college and offered an amazing opportunity, so, she took it. She doesn’t know what her plans are after she leaves. She might stay in Alaska or go back home to teach. She thinks that Chignik Bay is a beautiful place.  She is also engaged.  She has been with him for four years now. 

Chignik Bay Weather Since the Beginning of December

            The weather in Chignik has been cold and filled with snow since the end of November and begining of December. Now it is February and it is wet and warm. This is the time the avalanches come down. So we take caution when driving and walking around these mountainsides. And most of the elders here know about the casualties of messing around near the avalanche areas. We’ve had three avalanches in one night. And that tells you that we should not be near these destructive path makers. Just last winter, an avalanche came down behind a locally owned shop and destroyed crab pots and some old boats that were stored in the back.  One village elder told me that the winters have been getting worse since the late 80’s and early 90’s. About ten years ago an avalanche-forced people to evacuate their homes. The slide was so massive that it took them one week to clean. It also through a chunk that was thirty or forty feet tall into the bay and when it hit the water sounded like a airplane ran out of gas and crashed. And as I was typing this article, another avalanche came down, it was enormous. It had to be forty to fifty feet tall. As it came down it destroyed everything in sight. We are going to need some warm weather and rain to melt the snow away. But that is not going to happen with the weather we’ve been receiving.  

Avalanche engulfs locally owned shop.

Caylen digging out snow that stacked up more then 7 feet.
 

Extra picture of the shop, everything inside got pushed forward.

            

New Lights for the School!

            Anna Hilbruner, working for the Alaska Building Network, came to Chignik Bay School to work on changing the lights to use energy efficient light bulbs. This helps the environment and save our school money. Their guess is that the school will save about $4,579 per year. I think it is pretty cool because that saves the school more money and we can do more stuff with that money.

She said her favorite part of the job is seeing new communities’ and meeting new people. She got her job by meeting the right people and talking about the right things. She said her college degree helped out when she was getting her job.   

The crew getting lights to put up. 

Finishing up the lights. 

The tree in the libary.

The biggest tree cookie in town.

  There is a tree cookie in our library.  Ron Richter was the one that brought it here.  He found the tree cookie in Montana.  He thinks it’s a Ponderosa Pine from the west fork of the Bitter Root Valley.   The tree started to grow in 1512 and the tree died in 1992. The Ponderosa Pine was 480 years old. It has a paper on it that tells when it was born and when it died. There’s a lot of history on it. The paper was written when Ron Richter was helping build the school.

The tree has rings that tell how old it is. Dendrochronology is how to tell time by a tree.  I want to be a Dendrochronology person when I get older and grow up.

 

Science project

 We are having a wonderful year, we started with taking weight from the gym trash to the kitchen trash. Now we have red wiggler worms that are for the compost that has started right after thanksgiving. The experiment was to see how much trash could be reduced. The amount of data collected over the first couple months showed the average was found 25.3 pounds per day. It was then multiplied by the amount of days we had of school. Which was then equaled to a total of 4,630 pounds of trash a year. Our goal this year is to reduce the pounds of trash wasted every day. By doing so we will feed the left overs to the red wiggler worms. As for the metal cans we are going to find new uses and ways to reuse it in projects. I will tell you what those projects will be as soon as we start them.

Do we have enough cans.

Bread anyone it has it's own flavor.

Do i have to weigh this?

Dose this garbage smell funny to you and it weighs more in the kitchen then it dose in the gym.