Sitka Fine Arts Camp writers, illustrators show talents

Illustration by Adelaide Costello, Eagle River.

DAILY SITKA SENTINEL EDITOR’S NOTE: The two stories below were written by students taking Reporting 101 at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp for high school teens. Instructor is Sarah Diamond, audio producer and writer for The New York Times. Illustrations are by students taking Illustrative Reporting, instructed by Medar de la Cruz, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for illustrative reporting. Four illustrated articles were published in Thursday’s Sentinel. The Sitka Fine Arts Camp ends Saturday with art share performances at the Performing Art Center and on the SJ campus.

Heating at SFAC

By Madeline Branch, Juneau, Alaska

It was a dark and cloudy day. My Illustrative Reporting partner and I headed for the Sitka Fine Arts Camp office to ask about the camp’s heating systems. There, we found Drew Sherman. Mr. Sherman, is the Business Director and Custodial Manager at SFAC. We told him about how we were reporting on the heating on campus and he offered to let us interview him. He told us about the heating as well as some of the history of the campus. Drew explained that in 2011 when SFAC inherited the campus, the old heating system gave out completely. Frozen and busted pipes, everything just needed to be removed.

The Oddess Theater was the first building to get a new heating system. He told us that they got air to air heat pumps, then came Sweetland with their diesel boilers. Now, he said, the camp spends thousands of dollars a month on heating. When we asked him why it still feels cold to us, he explained the following. He said that Sweetland dorm’s heating is self adjustable but no one ever really turns the knob to change it. When something actually is broken you’re supposed to put in a maintenance request, but hardly anyone ever does. As for other buildings like the Yaw art building, the staff can put in a request to have the temperature changed but that rarely ever happens. “I say this all the time, I’d rather have 20 maintenance requests than none,” he said. “If you see it, say something.”

SFAC Classes Contain Multitudes

By Charlotte Underhill, Gulfport, Mississippi

At Sitka Fine Arts Camp, students attend five class periods a day for two weeks on various fine arts such as music, writing, visual arts, theater, dance, and more.

The classes in SFAC include some of more niche arts such as masked theater and printmaking, as well as more known classes like symphonic band, storytelling, and painting.

The camp allows students to take classes in many different artistic fields, providing learning opportunities in an abundance of skills in different arts that they might not find many places elsewhere. In this space, students are allowed to explore their many possible interests in an environment specifically built to do so.

• This article originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.