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The Juneau School District has one of the oldest school-based hunter education programs in Alaska. Its current teacher recently won the state’s Hunter Educator of the Year award after bringing hunter education back into Juneau’s classrooms.
James White went through a list of wants and needs for survival with seventh graders on a recent Friday morning. White is the hunter education teacher at Thunder Mountain Middle School.
Students sat around countertops equipped with sinks, stand mixers and various cooking equipment. Moose antlers were propped up on top of several refrigerators at the front of the classroom, and microwaves were tucked into cabinets in the back.
As part of survival and hunting skills, White teaches students first aid, CPR, firearm safety and basic cooking. White said he cooks game meat for students, and it’s one of the main ways to get buy-in from them.
Seventh grader Scotlyn Beck said she tried mountain goat stew and moose meatballs so far this semester. She’s excited about learning basic cooking skills, which is part of the class.
“I want to learn how to make spaghetti, because that’s my little brother’s favorite meal so I can make it for him,” she said.
White was recently awarded the Hunter Educator of the Year award by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for his work on the program.
He said the skills he teaches allow students to apply many different math and science concepts to something practical.
“What we’re doing here is really unique, but it’s also exactly how education should be when you’re bringing in cooking to math and to science and firearm safety to physics and anatomy, chemistry,” he said. “It really is holistic in the approach that we take.”
The class has changed through the years. It was originally offered to sixth graders at the district’s two former middle schools, Floyd Dryden and Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School.
Though consolidating the middle schools was controversial, he said it’s helped to build up the program to what it currently is.
“It provides more accessibility,” White said. “It’s easier to bring people into one location than it was when we were trying to host it at two different schools and bussing them over to indoor gun range to be able to do some of those skills.”
It took time to make the course a part of the school day. Last year, White taught hunter education as an afterschool club. Though either way – class or club – he said it’s a community effort to teach students these skills.
Guest speakers from Fish and Game and Bartlett Regional Hospital teach about wildlife conservation and first aid skills. And the Taku River Sportsman’s Association donates money to cover the costs of the students’ hunter education certification through the state, which lasts a lifetime.
“So many people are willing to give up time to teach these skills,” White said. “But some of it’s also because I’m going to share the woods with these kids too. I want to make sure that they’re going to be safe when I see them, or when the other instructors share time and come across them, in a muskeg and see them wearing their hunter orange, it’s like, ‘oh, cool, all right. Like, this kid knows what’s up.’“
But the most important part for White is teaching students to be safe and empowered in hunting.
“I’m trying to kind of plant those seeds, those seeds of empowerment, and giving them those opportunities to kind of guide whatever their life ends up being,” he said. “But seeing how unique and how amazing what we have here in Juneau and our community is, and what’s allowed people to live and be successful living here is that connection to the land and that respect for it.”
Students still have a couple more months to go before they can earn their basic hunting certification at the end of the school year in May. When they finish the course, they can move on to the life skills class in eighth grade to take their cooking and survival skills to the next level.
