Sitka shelter benefits students and timber industry
- Daily Sitka Sentinel
- 16 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By Anna Laffrey
Daily Sitka Sentinel
Sitka organizations are celebrating local young-growth timber production while giving rise to an outdoor education shelter at Pacific High School that’s being built with Southeast second-growth timber.
The wood is primarily Sitka spruce harvested from a previously logged area on Mitkof Island near Petersburg. It arrived in Sitka last week aboard the Alaska Marine Highway ferry M/V Kennicott.
Local contractors are using the sawn lumber from the 50-year-old trees to build the long-envisioned shelter near the Pacific High garden. It will provide a space sheltered from the weather where students can work with garden produce for the school lunch program, as well as local foods like fish and deer.
The learning shelter is meant to expand the school's garden and food program, and has been in the works for at least 10 years, Pacific High principal Matt Groen said today.
“What’s anchoring this project is the fact that we are a place-based, experimental, hands-on school that is also project-based,” Groen said. "It's rooted in how we do school: you actually just do it, you build the garden beds, you plant the seeds.”
In 2023, the school opened a 1,100-square-foot greenhouse near the extensive garden behind the Lincoln Street-Baranof Street school. The greenhouse was originally funded by a joint Sitka Tribe of Alaska and Sitka School District grant; the Sitka Conservation Society leveraged additional resources, conducted fundraising and organized skilled volunteers for the project.
Mandy Summer, former PHS principal and current Sitka School District food service director, along with PHS science teacher Bridget Reynolds and school garden coordinator Andrea Fraga, have been integral to developing the gardening, harvesting and cooking programs at the school, Groen said.
“Being in Southeast Alaska, being in a place where subsistence harvesting, living in tune with the seasons, is such an integral part of how we live – we really want to provide that opportunity for students,” Groen said.
With the learning shelter, which should be complete by the end of the current school year, "we will have a designated space to harvest, to clean produce, to do outdoor activities, and do our own unique brand of education to the best of our ability," Groen said.
Senior Ty Waldron said today that in his time as a Pacific High student he's seen the local food program come to life, with the addition of the outdoor greenhouse where students and teachers start many different types of plants.
“I’ve been in cooking class for about three years; we harvest vegetables from the garden, cook it in the kitchen with other food as well,” Waldron said. “My favorite part of the cooking class is just being outdoors, and getting my hands dirty… Like every year we gather seaweed from the beach and use it to insulate the beds for our garlic and our winter plants."
Laurel Breeze Smathers, a sophomore, said the enclosed classroom space will aid students in focusing and engaging with outdoor education.
“A big reason kids would not want to go up to the garden is if there’s bad weather,” Smathers said today. “I think having the shelter will make us all more excited.”
“Being outdoors is beneficial for students’ learning, so this will help with getting those meaningful learning opportunities,” said Zianna Collins, a first-year student at the school.
And then there are the school outings for beach cleanups and camping trips. "Being outdoors brings people together,” Collins said.
Principal Goren said the student body held a vote to select a color for the new shelter's metal roofing. They chose red.
The Sitka Conservation Society is supporting the learning shelter project, and worked with the U.S. Forest Service Petersburg Ranger District to find lumber from regional second-growth trees.
Among the benefits of using Southeast young-growth timber are saving the cost of shipping the wood from outside the state, and also supporting milling and logging jobs within Alaska, SCS staff said in an email.
“Often it is said that young-growth does not provide a quality product to be used in construction,” SCS said. “Projects like this show how local young-growth wood can be utilized to create durable, useful structures that meet community priorities and needs.”
Alaska Timber & Truss Inc. of Petersburg logged and milled the trees into construction lumber and drafted the initial engineered designs for the Pacific High shelter. Hard Rock Construction is in charge of onsite construction and woodworking, and local contractors K&E Excavation and Sitka Electric are also taking part.
SCS said that “this work seeks to support a Southeast Alaska young-growth timber industry where local builders and craftspeople have easy access to young-growth wood products for construction and design,” materials can be moved easily and efficiently to supply regional and statewide markets, and timber sales are predictable and appropriately scaled to support local logging operations.
In recent decades, SCS has helped with other proof-of-concept young-growth buildings in Sitka such as the Tongass Tiny Home project, the bike shelter on the Seawalk, the Starrigavan public use cabin, and supplying Sitka High School classes with wood to build sheds.
Sitka High School and the Sitka School District have been important partners in the Pacific High School learning shelter project, SCS said.
• This article originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
