Mt. Edgecumbe High School is a public boarding school operated by the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.
The school was established in 1947 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and initially provided education to Alaska Native students from rural areas. It closed temporarily in 1983 and opened two years later, transferred from the BIA to the Alaska Department of Education.
Mt. Edgecumbe currently has about 400 students in grades 9-12 from some 110 Alaskan villages. The school’s role, states its website, is to “provide a broad range of academic and extra-curricular opportunities that are unavailable to students in isolated home schools and communities.”
Part of the campus utilizes buildings re-purposed from a World War II naval operating base, now a National Historic Landmark. The current large gymnasium was once a hangar for amphibious airplanes, and a visitor can find a ceiling-to-floor map of Gulf of Alaska military bases in a former flight tower.
The school is located at 1330 Seward Ave on Japonski Island. Its phone number is (907) 966-3200.
