Tia Grant (left) and North Bishop (right) board Klukwan school’s bus on March 6, 2025, in Haines. The neighboring Haines Borough school district has struggled to provide busing services to students this year due to rising costs and asked the Klukwan school to coordinate student transportation. Ultimately the Haines school administration decided to lease and operate its own buses. (Will Steinfeld/Chillkat Valley News).

After months of wrangling and a controversial decision to drop busing for…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...