Depends who's asking. Her adopted Bristol Bay hometown of 2,200 looks pint-sized to visitors from Anchorage, some 350 miles away by air. There's not even a traffic light on the one road that starts at the commercial fishing harbor and dead-ends 25 miles away. For Rosene, Alaska's Teacher of the Year for 2000, Dillingham has proved big enough to carve out a rewarding life. Indeed, not much about teaching in rural Alaska fits outsiders' preconceptions.
Schools here are different from rural schools in other places.
We're inaccessible and unknown to most of the world. In rural Montana, you can get in your truck and drive for four, six, or eight hours and eventually get to a Wal-Mart. This school year started with a new superintendent, several new teachers, a new principal for the secondary school, and an opening for the elementary principal's job. Growing up in the suburbs of Minnesota's Twin Cities, Rosene wanted to be a teacher from a young age. After college, graduate school, and a few years of teaching in Wichita, Kansas, she moved to Anchorage with a girlfriend in 1982, almost on a whim.