At the ‘Edge of Tomorrow,’ Diomede School fights its way back

More than a century ago, the United States embarked on an ambitious project to educate Alaska Natives in some of the most remote places. That goal has been met with challenges ever since. 
But today, one of Alaska’s northernmost schools is making gains after years of poor performance, according to the State of Alaska’s System for School Success overview.  The performance metric system was implemented in Alaska in 2019 to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015. Since then, the state education department has used the data to produce school reports each fall. 
For the second year running, Diomede is a designated “Universal Support” school, meaning it is generally meeting statewide accountability benchmarks just like any other well-performing school.
This is a vast improvement from when Principal Dallas Sprout and his wife Samantha Umali Sprout arrived to teach at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year.  For two of the three years they’ve been stationed on the small island, Diomede was ranked among the lowest five percent in the state.  This delivered the school what is known as a federal “Comprehensive Support and Improvement” school designation.  
“There’s technically a middle tier and we skipped that middle tier entirely and went to Universal Support,” said Principal Sprout. “So, this is really good news.”
In Diomede, an Inupiat subsistence community with plenty of baked-in challenges — the state education department, for example, notes the school’s “high poverty” level— the very location for learning here is among its biggest obstacles. 
Colloquially described as sitting on the ‘Edge of Tomorrow,” Little Diomede’s geography, opposite the International Date Line, underscores its extreme remoteness – nearly a full day apart from Big Diomede Island in Russia, just miles away. 
But for the kids, Diomede's unique setting is proudly embraced.  Rather than getting discouraged by the fact that it takes an expensive helicopter flight to freely travel to and from the island — and only on days when the winds are low and the waves calm – students here celebrate such novelty.  A testament to this is the school’s sports team name: the Dateliners.
This resonated with Umali-Sprout who helped write stanzas of the chant that the cheerleading squad performed at a recent district-wide competition last month in Unalakleet:

From the Island
Loud and Proud
We Cheer Diomede
Say it Loud!

“It’s very unique, and the girls are so passionate,” she said of the squad, noting how rare it is for any team to travel off the island for extracurricular activities — and even rarer to avoid weather delays. “I’m glad they went.”
Umali-Sprout grew up a single child in the Philippines, thousands of miles away from Alaska’s Far North.  And she said she found herself in the Bering Strait region by simply following her mother’s advice. “My mom always say, ‘You need to spread your wings.’”
So, after teaching for a few years in her home country, Umali-Sprout eventually obtained a visa through the J-1 Visa Exchange Program.  Her first job abroad was in Gambell in 2021.  There, she met Dallas, where the two fell in love.
The couple epitomizes what has long been an Alaska tradition: thrill-seeking, and in some of the most extreme environments on earth.  For Dallas and Sam, who have free-dived deep oceans, hiked grand canyons and floated for days along the widest rivers, their teaching interests in Diomede, while a mode of employment, was along this same intrepid path.
Dallas, raised in the Colorado suburbs with a love for rural America, set his sights on roadless Alaska after a colleague, already teaching in Gambell, piqued his interest. He arrived fresh out of college in the fall of 2019 and braced for the unpredictability brought by the pandemic.  Seven fast years later, now married and with a miniature husky named Freya, he is somewhat amazed at how quickly his life plans changed.  “My third year in Gambell was going to be my last,” he said.  When two job vacancies opened at Diomede School in 2023 – a lead teaching position for himself, and a special education role for Sam (her specialty) – the pair hardly hesitated when they decided to apply.
“I think it is one of the greatest adventures,” Umali-Sprout recalls telling her partner.  “We should go there!”
At the time, the teacher turnover rate was low.  Two teachers, also from the Philippines and also married, were already stationed on the island with three children – two who were enrolled in school.  And there was a full-time principal.  But such dynamics quickly changed as they often do in Diomede.  The following school year, after the Filipino family left, another Filipino teacher didn’t arrive on the island until February 2025, roughly six months into the school year. It was a taste of what was next to come.  At the start of the Sprout’s third academic year, the couple learned on the eve that classes were to resume that they would be managing the entire K-12 student body alone.  At first, an incoming teacher backed out, then a district-wide hiring freeze was imposed.  “So we couldn’t even advertise or look for applicants until July,” said Principal Sprout.
The staffing struggle is nothing new at Diomede School. For more than a century, the majority of teachers have arrived with instant wonder only to leave quite quickly.  In the beginning, after the first schoolhouse was built in 1907, perhaps the hope was that the teacher Charles Menadelook would have maintained his position for at least a few years.  But the Inupiat missionary from Wales, like the Sprouts, was driven by his own curiosity.  Though he remained teaching throughout the Bering Strait region as chronicled in his rare collection of black and white photographs, Menadelook routinely left each Native village within a year, and never longer than three years, according to his biographer granddaughter Eileen Norbert.

By 1915, when the Presbyterian minister, Arthur Hansin Eide, turned up on Diomede Island, he wrote about the icy reception he and wife felt upon their arrival – and he wasn’t referencing the weather. “We were by no means welcome visitors,” Eide later wrote in The New York Times.  “They were not the type of Eskimo who were friendly to foreign invasion. I discovered later that they were the descendants of families who had migrated to this cast-off island in order to escape the teachings of members of the white race sent by the churches and the Government.”
Today, such animosity toward visiting teachers has all but faded, though it is difficult to ignore what aspects of Western education have remained the same.  Teachers in many Alaska Native villages, for instance, maintain many tasks beyond educating children including tending to those in need, maintaining vital strands of village history, and at times, providing emergency care especially in the midst of brutal storms.  While Dallas and Sam did not have to build the schoolhouse they currently operate alone, their role as married educators harkens back to the days when little to no formal government helped dictate village life, particularly where school-aged children are involved.
Because of the staffing shortages, Sam manages the elementary school along with her special education duties while Dallas does his best to pace himself to avoid burnout over teaching six classes a day to middle and high school students.
The student’s recent success of continuing to rise above being the lowest five percent in the state is but one example. 
“We’re a small school, so maintaining our status as a Universal School was a big deal because it means that every student represents that bigger percentage,” said Sprout.  “We maintained that, so that is great.”
At the end of this school year, the Sprouts will retire from Diomede so that Sam can fulfill her visa requirements by returning to the Philippines.  As part of her cultural exchange program, she must return to her home country no later than June 30 for at least two years. But the couple has a dream of making a life back in Alaska – a place where they can own property, mush sled dogs, and remain connected to Inupiat life. 
What this spells for Diomede remains to be seen.  A visiting substitute teacher arrived to the island in November to assist the Sprouts but will leave at the end of February.  And the Bering Strait School District has a job listing for a middle school - high school teacher, but only to complete the school year.  Calls made to the district, meanwhile, were not returned to The Nome Nugget.
For now, student success at Diomede is what matters most to the Sprouts.  “We’re doing this, not for us, said Sam, “but for the kids.”