SITKA, Alaska – It’s 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and college students are trickling into a Zoom call. Groups of three or four students perched on dorm beds crowd around their computer screens. 

They normally meet in a classroom close to their dorm, but it’s the start of a new term, and their professor is still in quarantine. They’ll spend the next seven weeks taking just one class, two hours a day, four days a week. 

“Let’s begin by checking in,” professor David Egan says, once he counts all 14 students on the screen. “We’re going to share some time together, and it’s good to say a sentence or two about what you’re bringing into the room just to allow yourself to be fully present.”

The students are open, engaged and comfortable. They giggle with one another and hand the computer around the group so each person can talk. One laments how tired she is. Another says she brushed her teeth just five minutes before class. Then, they launch into a student-driven discussion about zoos and human-animal interaction. 

The philosophy class is part of a one-year higher education program called Outer Coast based on an old college campus in the remote island town of Sitka, Alaska, and it’s only a small part of the curriculum. Students have traveled from across the state and the country to spend their time working on community service projects, taking weekly Indigenous studies classes, organizing storytelling sessions and cooking for one another. 

“It’s fun to use your brain all day. I never had an experience where I had to do that,” said Amadea Wilhite, a student. “And it just makes you feel so energized. I have so much academic energy and energy for my community.”

Because of the small student population and a pandemic plan that includes rotating germ pods and regular testing, these students are getting the tight-knit college experience that most of their peers are missing out on right now. It’s like a Russian nesting doll of isolated communities.

Sitka is an island community of under 9,000 people in Southeast Alaska, and like most communities in the region, the town isn’t connected to the road system, which means the only way in or out is by a daily flight or a monthly ferry. For the most part, coronavirus case counts have remained low with less than 150 cases in Sitka since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the City and Borough of Sitka.

It’s hard to imagine a more idyllic place to wait out the pandemic. There’s only 14 miles of road here nestled between the shore and the mountains, and the rest is filled with the towering Sitka spruce and Western hemlock forests of the Tongass, the largest temperate rain forest in the country. Sitka Sound is scattered with remote islands where brown bears and Sitka black-tailed deer roam, and local streams brim with spawning salmon in late summer and fall. Spending time outside is an integral part of life here, and spending time in the wilderness can be the most fulfilling kind of social distancing. 

The students recently took a trip to a nearby island and stayed in a cabin for a few nights, to bond and talk about future ideas for a program that they’re actively involved in running. Wilhite, for example, works as the student-faculty liaison, which means she brings student body concerns to staff and vice versa. The students also helped make decisions about how to operate during the pandemic and worked with staff to make admissions decisions.

“Having student voice and having accountability that is centered around the students is really, really powerful,” student Isaiah Bowen-Karlyn, 18, said. “I think part of that stems with a frustration in a more general sense of how higher education has treated student body voices, and I definitely had an experience when I was in high school where I didn’t feel like what I was saying was being listened to.”

Bowen-Karlyn was supposed to start his freshman year of college at a four-year university this fall, but when he found out classes would be mostly online, he decided to apply to the Outer Coast program instead. He didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to get hands on experience and learn from his peers. And he’s not alone. Most of the Outer Coast students planned to start college at a more conventional university in the fall, but the pandemic caused them to pivot.

“A lot of value would be taken out if I wasn’t able to have these really casual conversations with other students that just arise when you’re living in the same space together,” he said. 

His friends from back home in Washington, D.C., aren’t getting that experience right now, but he is. Like a family, he and his “germ pod” cook for each other, hang out in each other’s rooms and walk to the hospital together to get regular COVID tests. 

“It’s almost something that I don’t want to talk about with my friends because I feel as though in some ways I am, one, extremely lucky and, two, almost bragging a little bit,” he said.

This is the first year of Outer Coast’s gap year program. Eventually, its founders are hoping to make the program a two-year accredited college that serves as an antidote to many of the problems they see with more traditional institutions, like affordability, student sovereignty and a disconnect from the local community. They’ve modeled the program after the century-old Deep Springs College in California, which focuses on academics, student self-government and manual labor.

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Part of the Outer Coast curriculum is to spend afternoons volunteering with a local organization. Many of those positions are online this year because of the pandemic, but it’s still one way the students are able to connect with the broader community during a time when events are cancelled and many organizations are closed to the public.

“I think a lot of colleges really do become bubbles in a lot of the communities they are in, and there’s not sort of a greater recognition of the institutions of their location,” Outer Coast program coordinator Johnny Elliott said. “This model flips that on its head and says that students can and should be a part of the community of Sitka and that from there, they can contribute to the mission of different organizations around town.”

About half of this year’s students are from Alaska, and that’s of particular importance, Elliott said. Alaska has only a handful of college programs, and Sitka’s Sheldon Jackson College closed in 2007 because of a budget crisis. Many rural and Alaska Native students face geographic and financial barriers to getting a college degree.

“We’re going to have a recognition of what the history of education is in this place and what the institutional structures are in higher education and how we can make that more equitable for the communities that are around us and that we’re trying to serve,” Elliott said.

Outer Coast has tried to address that by incorporating Indigenous studies and antiracism classes into the curriculum, and only asking students to pay what they can. Tuition costs for this semester’s students range from $100 to $12,000. Scholarship funds from local donors help fill the gap for students like Jing O’Brien, who grew up in Wrangell, Alaska, an even smaller community than Sitka.

“Honestly I was kind of nervous when I was presenting what I could pay, and they were like, yeah, if this is what you can pay, we want to get you into this program in any way we can,” O’Brien said.

After the Zoom class ends and students finish their communal lunch, Imaan Mirza lingers in the cafeteria with a book while the other students head back to their dorms. She smiles as she steps outside into the sunshine to talk. Coming to Alaska has been a totally different experience for her. She lives in Indiana now, but she grew up in Saudi Arabia. She says she’s built relationships with people that she never would’ve met if she’d headed to Harvard in the fall like she planned. When she found out her classes would be online, she deferred admission for a year.

“[Outer Coast] allowed me and permitted me the space to reflect and think about what exactly it is I want to do in my life and in the future and how I can best effect positive change… And so I’ve really just spent the last two months I’ve been here thinking about that and it’s a recurring question and it’s answered in all the different settings that Outer Coast provides. It can happen over a mealtime conversation. It can happen in class, wherever. I feel like I’m constantly reckoning with that question.”

Erin McKinstry is a reporter at Raven Radio, KCAW in Sitka, Alaska, where she also reports for the Alaska Public Radio Network and Alaska’s Energy Desk. This dispatch is part of a series called “On the Ground” with Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project.