Researching Locations

If you have already learned a little about your potential opportunities and challenges in our state from either the ATP page about Alaska itself, or the one about teaching in Alaska, then you are already ahead of many other candidates. Research is essential to finding "the right fit" with a district and job that meet your specific expectations and skills.

Let Us Help You!

ATP has been compared to a "matchmaker" for job candidates and school districts. It's a good analogy, and we actually studied effective on-line dating systems in designing the earlier versions of this website.

Alaska has opportunities, and challenges you won’t find elsewhere. It is important to be an educated job candidate if you are going to find a good match for both your professional skills and interests, and your lifestyle requirements.

School District Information

The image above links to a very detailed map of Alaska's school districts, and is indexed by village name. Our website has an entire page about Alaska's school districts. So, we won't replicate that information here.

If you haven't been there yet, take a peek at:

Live chart of all of Alaska's school districts

Links to all of the districts' websites
Hot links to all currently open jobs for each district
The same information for other education organizations in the ATP Consortium

Alaska School District Map: Excellent PDF map of all school districts in Alaska.

Not only will districts be impressed when you demonstrate your knowledge about them, they will realize that you are a serious, informed candidate.

Town & Village Information

There are some excellent resources available for researching specific villages. Many of these did not exist even a couple of years ago in a web-accessible format.

Alaska Community Database – The state Division of Community and Regional Affairs keeps a very detailed custom search engine for all Alaska villages. You can look at data by village, region, infrastructure feature (housing, school, etc.), and get a list of dated photographs. This allows you to "see" villages and compare them to others. You can select multiple communities.

Can You See Yourself in this Picture?

Community & Regional Affairs Office - The Alaska CRAO also has an excellent Imagery Viewer for the state. This allows you to look up communities in more detail than Google Maps, and layer on different data points and references.

Don't forget that Google Images and Google Maps, and YouTube all have searchable indexing. Even little tweaks in how you use the search can bring in a wealth of different views by subject. Many are going to be images posted by community members for the "real feel" of a place. You can even search for 360 VR views, although these will not be as common in Rural Alaska as on the road system.

Weather and Climate Information

For many years, the most popular show in rural Alaska has been Alaska Weather.

Why? Weather is essential to travel by small airplane, snowmobile, and skiff. And, for keeping subsistence fishers and hunters safe. Heck, for just about everything. Originally, the show was broadcast statewide on the Rural Alaska Television Network (RATNET), a single television station that combined feeds from all the major networks into one channel. It is now produced by KUAC-TV, KTOO 360TV, and streamed on the Internet.

Alaska Weather is a detailed, daily 30-minute long weather forecast that covers the whole state. You will begin to see how very large, and diverse Alaska is in one or two shows. Trust us. It's great for getting feel for Alaska's weather in the various regions throughout the year.

Drop in on their YouTube channel for daily updates, or scan their archives for different times of year to see what the weather is like in the regions you are considering in October, November, February, April and May. Click the link to the image below, and you will find the talk of "passes" open and closed, icing, turbulence, sea conditions and so on very interesting!

FAA Weather Cameras

The FAA has recently spent significant time and energy putting in a series of high tech Automated Weather Observing Systems (AWOS) throughout the state. Although parts of the FAA weather camera system have existed for a decade or so, the technology has really matured, and the FAA has expanded its efforts aggressively.

The network is coming to completion now (October, 2022), and provides continuous, real-time and accurate weather information, as well as cameras facing in different directions for nearly every village in the state. It's quite impressive, and allows you to look live in the village of your choice in real time by clicking the icon on the map.

Each AWOS station interface shows live views next to "clear view" examples, detailed weather data for pilots, and a series of links to different types of forecasts and alerts. In the example below of False Pass, the view on the right is labeled for elevation of the peaks, and then the live view to the left shows they are socked in. Each view shows the angle of the camera view.

FAA Weather Cam Example - False Pass (KFP)

The detailed maps views area also very useful at getting a feel for how each village is layed out, and what a typical day is like there. Bookmark your favorites...we have. ;-)

Climate / Geography Regions

The geographic, climate and vegetation zones do not match up exactly with the regions described above, but they do in a rough sense. If you click the USGS report image above, it will open a larger, more detailed version of this map, and that will help you understand the descriptions below. There is also another version of this data in large scale PDF format.

Maritime Zone: southeastern Alaska, the south coast, and Aleutian islands. Much less variation in temperature over the year. Warm, wet winters. You may not even need real winter gear. Think about seam seal tape an investment. Lots of rainforest in the southeast and southcentral. Alpine tundra (no trees) in the Aleutians. Big mountains throughout. Ring of Fire.

Maritime Continental Zone: western Bristol Bay, and western coastal. Summer cool because of open waters of the Bering Sea. Winter temperatures are more cold, and continental when the ice comes. Bring your winter gear, and your rain gear…both can be used at any time of year. Some trees. Some not. Some tundra.

Transition Zone: Cook Inlet near Anchorage, and the northern extremes of the south coast zone. Cool summers, but warmer than the Maritime, winter not as serious as north of the Alaska Range. Your spiffy REI stuff is probably good enough. You'll be in a car anyway. Ocean, trees and mountains.

Continental Zone: Interior, west central and Copper River area. The coldest part of Alaska. Temperatures to -70 F, and hot enough for thunderstorms in the summer. Many areas with trees, some to the north and west without. Lots of rivers. Great Northern Lights in the winter.

Arctic Zone: Brooks Range and north drainages. Serious cold, but not as cold as the Continental Zone. You are above the Arctic Circle, so daylight is a seasonal thing. Sea ice and polar bears. No trees.

Hopefully, these resources, when combined with our other pages, will allow teacher candidates to research regions and school districts around the state as they proceed through the stages of their job search.