allas Sprout awoke in the night to a sound he had not immediately recognized. Groggy from the nearly two-day trip, not to mention being responsible for eight travel companions, Dallas brought himself to the window to investigate the source of this disturbance.

Looking out onto a nondescript St. Louis, Missouri, street, he noticed nothing peculiar at all. Just some aggressive drivers honking their horns, angry at some pedestrians who chose to jaywalk as opposed to walking at the designated crosswalk just up the street.

Content with his findings, Dallas returned to bed, smiling as he realized just how far he and his travel companions had come.

For most, this everyday occurrence would not be enough to wake someone up in the middle of the night, especially in St. Louis, a metropolitan area larger than any in Alaska but still relatively calm compared to New York City or Los Angeles.

But for Dallas, principal of Diomede School on Little Diomede Island, and for his students from Little Diomede, St. Louis is practically as far away as the Moon.

A small island off the west coast of Alaska, Little Diomede has the distinction of being the only territory in the United States accessible only by helicopter. Mostly, though, it’s the answer to the trivia question, “Where in Alaska can you see Russia from your house?” Across the maritime boundary, neighboring Big Diomede Island is visible 2.3 miles away. Straddling the International Dateline, the pair are also known as Tomorrow Island and Yesterday Island.

There are no cars. No stoplights. Outside of housing, there are relatively few buildings on Little Diomede, just a government building, a grocery store, and the school, which serves as the unofficial community hub. The population is in constant flux; the 2020 census counted 83 residents and falling ever since the peak in 1990 of 178.

Anyone who is not native to the area, traditionally home to the Ingalikmiut people, doesn’t stay long. With few professions available, harsh winters, unstable electricity and water, and no ability to own land unless you are indigenous, there is a lot of turnover in the area.

Any of those things would scare most people. Dallas welcomes the challenge.

“When I first started teaching out of college, I knew that I wanted to live in Alaska,” Dallas says. Originally from Colorado, Dallas moved to Alaska in 2019 to work as a teacher in Gambell, another Bering Strait community like Diomede but comparatively large with 620 or so residents.

He recalls, “After four years there, my now wife and I wanted a new challenge. There were always whispers about Little Diomede, and we had heard stories of the turnover. We wanted to make a difference, so we decided to roll the dice.”

After moving to Little Diomede, Dallas began to work as an English and social studies teacher in the middle and high school while his wife, Samantha, worked in special education. Because they were not native to the area, they had to live in subsidized housing provided by the school district. In fact, like the other teachers and principals, Dallas and Samantha lived right on campus, something they struggled with at first.

Dallas says, “At first, that took a bit of getting used to. You don’t really have that separation between work and home life if you’re always at school.”

That wasn’t the only thing that took some getting used to.

“It took a bit to adjust to this new arrangement. You really need to prepare to live in a place like this. My wife and I had to actually ship our clothes in the mail so we could carry frozen meals in totes with us on the helicopter. It can be hard. You have to plan ahead.”

Despite the necessity of plans, Alaska is notorious for having an agenda of its own. In 2023, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving while the rest of the country was enjoying leftovers and preparing for the week ahead, Little Diomede faced an unexpected windstorm.

“The school building is two buildings, and the one with the apartments sits just a little higher than the school building,” says Dallas. “We were in our apartment trying to get ready for the week ahead, and we could feel our building moving back and forth. And then I just heard a loud boom.”

The cause? The city building, which is just a bit higher on the edge of the ridge, had crashed down into the school.

“At first, we thought that the school’s stilts had broken, and we were sliding into the ocean,” Dallas recounts. “We went outside and saw that the city building was just leaning against the school, and we knew this would be a problem. Then the power went out.”

Soon Governor Mike Dunleavy declared the incident a disaster, and the school was closed indefinitely. However, while Alaska may be notorious for the unexpected, Alaskans are notorious for weathering any storm that comes their way, especially when it comes to their children.

Within hours, Chromebook laptop computers were prepared and delivered to students. Teachers and administrators mobilized instantly, going door to door to help each student set up and troubleshoot any issues with the internet, and they created contingency plans for any student whose house could not accommodate distance learning.

Just a few days later, every student was back to school, albeit virtually. But education was not the only thing they missed because of the school closure, something Dallas knows firsthand.

“In Little Diomede, like a lot of other villages in the area, the school is the epicenter of the community,” he says. “At any moment, you have basketball games, Native dancing, library access. We often host large presentations since the school gym has the most room to accommodate everyone. And while I haven’t seen it, I have heard that funerals sometimes take place at the school as well.”

The school is also where doctors, dentists, veterinarians, and other traveling professionals set up to serve the community. Given Little Diomede’s size, there is only a full-time nurse practitioner, so other professionals visit periodically to serve the community. The school is also home to the only “hotel” on the island.

Luckily for the citizens of Little Diomede, especially the students, the school closure was temporary. By early 2024, the school had reopened and things returned to normal. Relatively normal, at least; tensions were starting to rise with neighboring Russia, and tension on the island also increased. Dallas says he was not concerned, but he could tell people were on edge.

“There is a lot of patriotism here. There are a lot of people that lived here during the Cold War, and they remember what it was like to have to be the eyes and ears of America’s back door and have to report to the government what they saw,” he says. “While it’s different now, the love of the United States still remains.”

The rest of the 2023–2024 school year went mostly without incident, but with all the turmoil the faculty faced that year, there was significant turnover last fall. By the beginning of the 2024–2025 school year, the faculty had dwindled to two teachers—Dallas and Samantha themselves—and a small number of support staff.

Dallas was asked to be the principal, as well as the middle and high school teacher, while Samantha was tasked with teaching elementary school and special education.

With their two classrooms, one for each teacher, the young couple—who had just married the previous May—set up a plan on how to teach twenty-one students spread across grades from kindergarten to high school seniors.

Dallas set up small groups among the middle and high school students so that whichever group wasn’t getting direct instructions could work independently or on group projects.

The system was far from perfect—it’s almost impossible not to be overwhelmed listening to a teacher explain the intricacies of calculus to the group next door while you’re still trying to comprehend pre-algebra—but the students made it work.

The newlyweds adjusted to their new roles as the only faculty for the entire school, and they tackled each challenge together.

While newlyweds often face unexpected challenges during the first year of marriage, nobody could have predicted what would happen next.

On December 24, 2024, the Sprouts were preparing for their first Christmas together as husband and wife when the power went out in the whole community. While not an immediate cause for concern, the backup generator did not immediately turn on.

Three hours later, after the power returned, Dallas discovered a new issue. There was no more running water due to a problem at the water plant.

He says, “We always plan ahead for these things, so we had plenty of bottled water available. But given the holiday season, we couldn’t get a hold of anyone for a while.”

It was January before the water plant issue was fixed, but there was still no water at the school. Dallas, as principal, closed the school at first, but he ultimately determined that the students needed to be in school.

To make that happen, Dallas and his custodial and maintenance staff carried buckets of water every day for students to use, while at night they worked to fix the problem, something that proved challenging.

“It’s not like we could just go to the hardware store. We had to find a way to fix it ourselves,” says Sprout. “And I’m a teacher, not a plumber; I didn’t know the first thing about the water pump system.”

Still, Dallas—never one to shy away from the challenge—worked continuously to locate the problem. Eventually, a broken pump was determined to be the cause, and by February the water was back on.

The students went back to their daily learning, and the Sprouts went back to teaching. A week later, help finally came in the form of a new teacher, giving the principal time to step back from day-to-day teaching to focus on some bigger issues.

He immediately set his sights on a long-forgotten project: the Saint Louis Zoo.

Dallas recalls, “Right before the pandemic, the students here were involved with a project for the Saint Louis Zoo whereby they created audio recordings and signs for the polar bear exhibits. They were invited to the zoo to unveil the signs in spring 2020, but obviously that didn’t happen.”

The project became a distant memory for most students and a pipe dream for the others. By spring 2025, the last group of students who had worked on the project were about to graduate.

Dallas was determined to not let them finish school until they saw their hard work pay off. Through the efforts of students, teachers, administration, and the zoo, Dallas and the students embarked on April 23 to the Show Me State. What followed was a week of museum visits, Cardinals baseball games, and amusement park stops, all capped off by the unveiling of the signs at the zoo.

Dallas says, “The students deserved to go to St. Louis and see that things that they do really do make it into the world. There is something tangible out there that they did and got to see. It’s important the students realize that they are more than just what they think they have to be. They can explore new worlds and have radical ideas and experience the world in a way that they didn’t think possible before. This can only happen through education.”