SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
As the school year winds down in many parts of the U.S., kids are saying goodbye to teachers, friends and bus drivers. In one part of Alaska, the end-of-the-year ritual looks a little different. Alaska Public Media's Rachel Cassandra joined a student on one of her last trips to school on a tiny airplane.
RACHEL CASSANDRA, BYLINE: The 60-person village of South Naknek has no roads to connect to the rest of the state. It's on river-hewn tundra in remote Alaska. Here, many people fish for sockeye salmon, commercially or for their families. And in this community, kids must take a small plane about 2 miles across a river to their school in a nearby village. Because the river typically freezes in the winter, a plane is the only reliable year-round transit. Pilot Jon King greets 16-year-old Tess Stewart as she climbs into his six-seater.
JON KING: Is it just you?
TESS STEWART: Yeah.
KING: Where - what happened to the rest of them?
TESS: They're sick. They got me sick too, but Grandma's only allowing them to stay home.
KING: Oh.
(SOUNDBITE OF AIRPLANE ENGINE)
CASSANDRA: For Tess, this is all perfectly normal. She's been flying to school for the last seven years.
TESS: I like looking over and seeing the houses and stuff and, like, seeing the trees and the lakes and the river.
CASSANDRA: It's old hat for King too. He's been flying kids most school days for more than four decades.
KING: I was flying the kids across the river when I was 21 years old, so - and some of them weren't that much younger than me.
CASSANDRA: This is just one example of how essential small planes are to rural Alaska. Much of the state isn't on a larger road system, so people use boats and planes to get to all kinds of events.
KING: Weddings and funerals happen and everything in between, and that's what these little air taxis do for these people.
CASSANDRA: in this area, high school students used to have to leave their communities for boarding schools in other parts of the state or country. In the 1960s, the borough formalized and pooled students from three villages to make a local school, so some kids have to be flown in. Now it's three kids, but King says in the past it's been as many as 20.
KING: I try to say hello to them in the morning and be nice to them. So I think they feel like they're going on a school bus.
(SOUNDBITE OF AIRPLANE ENGINE)
CASSANDRA: Back in the plane, King lands and Tess grabs her bag.
KING: You're already a junior in high school now, Tess?
TESS: Mm-hmm, yeah.
KING: I can't believe that happened to you.
CASSANDRA: Soon, she'll be a senior flying one more year with King before she graduates.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR CLOSING)
CASSANDRA: For NPR News, I'm Rachel Cassandra in Naknek, Alaska.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE HIT CREW'S "FLY ME TO THE MOON") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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