Annette McNamee:
Early Childhood in "The Land Of The Midnight Sun"

Annette McNamee isn’t bragging, but she thinks she might have made history when she was hired in March of 2002 as Director of the Betty Eliaison Child Care Center in Sitka, Alaska.

“I think I’m the first Early Childhood Education graduate from UMC to jump right into a director’s position,” said McNamee, who graduated from the University of Minnesota, Crookston (UMC) in December 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in Primary Education and Program Management. “I could be wrong, but it’s still kind of fun to at least think I’m the first.”

Annette McNamee in front of the Betty Eliason Child Care Center and Preschool, Sitka, Alaska

Family connections are what brought McNamee to Alaska in the first place. Two of her brothers, Kevin and Chuck – both UMC graduates as well – each run sports fishing lodges in Alaska. Each summer for five years during high school and then college, McNamee traveled to Alaska to work for her brothers. After graduating from UMC, she again headed north for a summer of work.

“My options were wide open at that point; I was thinking about heading to the West Coast, but I wasn’t ruling out Alaska if something opened up at some point,” McNamee recalled.

“At some point” turned out to be two weeks later, when she was hired at the child care center in Sitka. The community-based center, licensed to care for 99 children ages 18 months to five years old, also rents out half of its space to the Sitka School District, which operates a preschool there. Nine full-time employees are on staff.

“Everything goes through me; it’s just like owning or running your own business,” McNamee said when asked about her responsibilities as director. “Essentially, I’m in charge of making sure all the children are developing on schedule. I make sure the staff is doing things the right way. I’m in charge of budgeting, working with the school district, financing, building renovation, billing…you name it, I do it.”

Culture Shock?

McNamee knows the questions will come at some point. It seems she can’t mention in any conversation that she lives in Alaska without having to answer questions about the climate and the culture there. With all those summers under her belt spent working for her brothers, she said there was no culture shock when Alaska grew from a summer destination to a full-time home for her.

“And even for a first-time visitor, I don’t think anything here is really that shocking,” McNamee said. “In Sitka, things are pretty mellow.”
Sitka is located on a small island in southern Alaska. A tourist trap in the summer, its population balloons from 8,000 to 10,000 when all the people come up to fish and take in the breath-taking sites.

“Tourism is the main economy here, with everyone coming up to fish,” McNamee said. “We get four or five cruise ships per day coming in.” There’s a younger crowd in the summer composed mostly of people coming up to take jobs that cater to the tourists, she added, but in the winter Sitka more closely resembles a retirement community.

While it’s plenty dark in the winter and light is abundant in the summer, she said she’s too far south to witness “The Land of the Midnight Sun” or winter days that are entirely dark. In the heart of the winter, the sun rises around 9 a.m. and sets around 3 p.m., McNamee explained, and in mid-July the sun sets around 10:30 p.m. and rises around 3:30 a.m. “It gets dusk in July but never entirely dark unless it’s really overcast,” she said. “As for the short winter days, how you handle it depends on your attitude and personality. It didn’t affect me at all.”

To prevent the onset of any winter doldrums, McNamee tries to take little weekend trips every few weeks in the winter just to shake up her routine. She also said she’s simply too busy to get down in the dumps. “My workdays are obviously busy, and I fish, hike, camp and do all kinds of stuff,” she said.

Since Sitka is on the ocean, extreme low temperatures simply don’t exist, McNamee said, and snowfall is minimal. This past winter temperatures never dipped below 30 degrees. “The mountains all around us get colder and get lots of snow, but we’re subject to the ocean currents and we just don’t get all of that stuff Alaska is famous for here in Sitka,” she said.

The cost of living in Alaska is higher than in most states, but so is the pay, McNamee said, especially if you’re a teacher. “If you come here with an education degree, you have a lot going for you, especially if you’re willing to travel to the bush, where the pay is even higher,” she said. “We have a lot of native history and culture here in Sitka, but it’s not as intense as in some of the small native villages. It’s really something to experience.”

In many respects, Sitka is much like Mahnomen, MN, where Annette and her 13 brothers and sisters grew up. “Sitka is a wonderful community, just small enough where you know almost everybody, but big enough where you can still have your space,” McNamee said.
McNamee rents an apartment by herself. Her younger sister, UMC student Bev McNamee, is spending the summer with her now, following in her older sister’s footsteps by working for brothers Kevin and Chuck.

Well-prepared

Considering that the Betty Eliaison Child Care Center went 18 months without a director before hiring McNamee, she had her work cut out for her when she started her job. The fact that she felt so confident in her abilities to handle everything that was thrown on her plate is a tribute to UMC, McNamee said.

“That’s probably the best thing I can say about how UMC prepared me for something like this, that I was so sure of myself that I was able to jump right in and get going,” she said. “I’m learning new things every day and implementing a lot of the ideas I got from UMC’s program and the Early Childhood Center there.”

UMC’s ample student teaching opportunities and the constant exposure to children at the Early Childhood Center are critical when it comes to preparing students, McNamee said.

“The quality of the Eliaison Center has improved since I arrived, and I think it’s because of the things instilled in me by my instructors and experiences at UMC,” she said.

Written by:
Mike Christopherson, Assistant Director of Service Learning, UMC