Great lessons are learned outside the classroom among towering stands of Sitka spruce trees with songs of thrushes filling the air. Which is where you’ll find Mariah Vantrease as she’s preparing for school. As a teacher at Discovery Southeast, she’s helping students explore the outdoors while learning science in a whole new way. It’s the perfect combination of all her interests in life and school coming together in one place.  

Growing up in Homer, she valued her community and enjoyed helping others. It came naturally living in a town with a population of around 5,000 people, filled with families like hers who made their way to Bristol Bay to do commercial fishing in the summer. It was also an isolated town at the end of the road where, in the cold dark winter, people looked after one another.

Mariah always liked helping youth, first through her church and later with members of her senior class and did community service prior to graduation. While assisting grade school teachers, she really connected with one student – a sixth grader who had moved to Alaska from Honduras. Mariah enjoyed tutoring her in English, helping her overcome the language barrier she had with her classmates and watching her blossom.

Instructing and bringing out the best in those around her was very much a part of Mariah’s DNA. An avid runner, she helped conduct an after-school coaching program called Girls on The Run. Through it, she helped her students find a positive mindset, encouraging them toward better social and emotional health and enabling them to become better members of the community. It also enabled Mariah to get her heart rate up in preparation for the ski race season and keeping up with her older siblings.

Whether it was in sports or in school, Mariah was competitive. This mentality served her well as she strived for the UA Scholars Award. Only awarded to students in the top ten percent of their Alaska high school class, this meant she had to watch her grades like she watched the clock in every race. However, she met the challenge, received the award, and pointed her sights southeast to a part of Alaska she had never seen, but always wanted to explore: Juneau. It helped that she would know someone there, her brother who was attending the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS), and she’d heard good things about the teaching program. Off she went, and quickly got into her groove.

Moving to Juneau and attending UAS, Mariah didn’t know many people – maybe five from high school, tops. Yet she was introduced to people from all over including places like Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Wisconsin. She was also exposed to a bigger world beyond Alaska, thanks to interactions with many transfer and international students.  

This group encouraged her to get outside her comfort zone, to take some chances at trying new things and further develop her current skills. All things that would later be beneficial as a teacher as she shaped her own students’ minds.

Upon graduation, she would have her chance to bring all these things together as a fourth-grade teacher at a local elementary school. With her running, she prided herself on being fast. But with her students she took a decidedly slower approach to try and build relationships with them. This would be key as she knew she’d be with the same 25 students for seven hours a day, every day, and doing this would bring her closer to them and help form a community. Throughout it all though, she noticed something common among students that really hit home: they weren’t getting outside very much.

Mariah’s grade school had a partnership with Discovery Southeast that she decided to fully use. The organization comes into the classroom and works in partnership with the teachers. Then they take trips into the natural areas surrounding Juneau to study plants, watersheds, and wildlife areas, letting students literally learn in the field. Mariah loved seeing the reactions from her students and the positive impact it made on them, and she was hooked.

That fall, she took some time off from teaching to explore the deserts and canyons in Utah and the forests of the Pacific Northwest, but the pull of Alaska was too great. She moved back home to Juneau, landed a role with Discovery Southeast, and taught her first class with them in January of 2023. Through her lessons, young Alaskans will learn about one of Alaska’s greatest classrooms, the great outdoors.