As winter break is on the horizon for many students across the country, high schoolers typically spend their final few weeks of the semester armed with pencils and laptops on their desks, studiously preparing for final exams. But this morning at Pacific High School, Jud Kirkness is leading a group of four students in removing the fur from a deer pelt to demonstrate one of the first steps in making leather.
While Kirkness wields a ruler-esque block of wood to scrape the fur off the pelt, students equip gloves and pluck out the fur by hand, braving the pelt’s odor as a video of a roaring fireplace plays on the classroom’s large screen in the background.
This class is part of Pacific High’s Friday Lifeskills curriculum, where students develop practical skills relevant to Sitkans, from deer skinning to boat and trail maintenance.
“Pacific High has always tried to, with the lens of their education, is [ask] how can we better the community, or better just like real world knowledge for the students who come here?” says Hailey Rinella, a Pacific High support staff member through Youth Advocates of Sitka.
“And so I think that’s kind of where the Friday skills were born from was [asking] how can we use our partners in the community to better inform the students and educate the students?” Rinella says. “Because I think a big thing that we care about is how the students’ happiness and education in the school, but also outside of school.”
One such community partner is Sitka Trail Works, which has been collaborating with Pacific High School to provide practical environmental education to young Sitkans for many years. Pacific High School’s principal, Matt Groen, is a board member for the organization. For Sitka Trail Work’s Programs Manager, Emily Pound, a big part of their curriculum involves drawing upon the knowledge the students already have from living in Alaska.
“We do try to lead with the lens of not assuming that the youth don’t know what we’re leading,” says Pound. “[We’re] just coming from a place of saying, ‘Okay, this is your experience. What do you know? What can we learn from you?'”
In the classroom, the students learn that leftover deer fur can be used as effective compost. But one student requests the fur for a different purpose, to send to her grandmother so she can make her a hat from it. Kirkness then encourages her to take as much fur as she can carry, offering to prepare tome plastic bags for her to use.
Progressing into the self-described “show and tell” section of the class, Kirkness passes around a variety of animal goods from a pouch made of deer stomach to various samples of leather strips, much to the Pacific High School’s staff and students’ amazement.
Rinella has been sitting in on the Friday Lifeskills class for over a year. She thinks the curriculum uniquely helps students not only develop a stronger understanding of the land they live on, but also establish a connection to and curiosity about it as well.
“Knowing where your food comes from, and having that respect for nature, I think is really important,” says Rinella, “[It’s] something that I didn’t have in my education growing up, and [the] students ask really big questions about the environment and about their place and world. And having that space, I think [it] is really important for them to have those big questions.”
As the class comes to a close and students file out for lunch, some curious students wander in to observe the pelt, which now has a large, fur-less patch. As one student picks up her promised fur to send to her grandparents, she draws another connection between the leather she got to touch in class and that in her own life–the leather purse she’s carrying. Now, she can walk away with a greater appreciation for the process behind preparing the leather that can bag like her own… as well material for a new deer hat.
