Alaska school safety

Anchorage School District brings 96 schools into its scored set for 2021-22, and 54 of them filed records complete enough to grade. The other schools in that set did not, and that pattern repeats across Alaska. It is the single most useful thing to understand before you look up your own school.

What this page can tell you is whether a school's incident reporting holds up. We compare each school to roughly 1,500 American schools closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grades, look at what those peers reported, and set the bar at the 25th percentile of that group — deliberately low. A school that reports less than a quarter of what its size implies has not given us evidence of safety. Of Alaska's 509 schools, 201 carry a published safety score. The rest do not, because we only publish scores for records we believe. A blank is the method working, not a hole in it.

Fifty schools in the state fall into our doubtful-reporting grades, D or E. That is 9.8 percent of Alaska's schools, against 11.3 percent nationally. Read that carefully: it means a slightly larger share of Alaska's paperwork is verifiable than the country's, and nothing more. It is not a statement about how safe Alaska children are. Our comparison is national and is not adjusted by state, so gaps between states in this data reflect how districts fill out federal forms, not what happens in their hallways.

Why only nine districts are ranked

Alaska has 54 school districts. Nine have enough scoreable schools to rank at all — a consequence of how thinly the state's schools are spread, and of how many left their counts blank.

Among those nine, Fairbanks North Star Borough School District and Lower Kuskokwim School District each rank safer than 52 percent of ranked U.S. districts, on 23 of 36 and 14 of 29 scoreable schools. Matanuska-Susitna Borough is at 47 percent, Kenai Peninsula Borough at 46 percent, and Anchorage at 41 percent. They cluster near the middle of the national field.

Safest ranked cities in Alaska

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Alaska city with schools

Every Alaska school district