Historian

Conference Seeks Solutions for Indian Education
by Andrea J. Cook, Staff Writer
Rapid City Journal - 19 Oct 2005

RAPID CITY, SD — Too many of his classmates don’t understand or participate in their Lakota culture, which could be one reason they don’t stay in school, according to Robert Watters, a freshman at Pine Ridge High School.

Robert, 15, is one of two Pine Ridge students who spoke Monday to the Strengthening Partnerships for American Indian, Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian Students Education Project conference at Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. About 100 state and tribal school officials representing 16 states are attending the conference, which is sponsored in part by the Council of Chief State School Officers, the South Dakota Department of Education and the federal Department of Education.

“A lot of kids don’t care that they’re Lakota,” he said. “They’re trying to be black and white. They don’t want to be Lakota because they know it’s a hard life, and they want to take the easy way out.”

That easier way often includes joining gangs, drinking and dropping out of school, he said.

Most of the kids involved in gangs don’t come to school because gang-related fighting carries into school, according to Robert’s classmate, Dusti Michaud, 14.

And some kids stay away from school because their parents drink, and there is no one to give them rides to school, Robert said.

“There’s no one pushing them to learn,” he said.

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation covers 11,000 square miles. The high school has 500 students. About 50 percent of the students who attend school at Pine Ridge ride buses, according to Luann Werdel.

Werdel is the director of Freshman Academy, a new program at Pine Ridge High School created to help keep new ninth-graders in school. Students are divided into small learning communities or cohorts and attend all of their classes with that same group of students. By the end of their freshman year, the students will have visited a college and a vocational school and will have completed a life and learning skills course, Werdel said.

Now in its second year, the program is making a difference, Werdel said. Reading levels improved among last year’s freshman, and the dropout rate decreased dramatically.

“We still have a long way to go with academic achievement, but all of the students moved at least one reading level,” Werdel said. “We made AYP (adequate yearly progress) with our freshman for the first time in 31 years.”

There is still a lot that needs to be done.

“We need more classrooms and more teachers,” Robert said. And more teachers who understand the Lakota culture and life on the reservation, he added.

Changes in Indian education won’t come overnight, according to Victoria Vasques, an assistant deputy secretary for Indian Education for the U.S. Department of Education.

“But if we do not work together, we will not close the achievement gap for our Indian students.”

Vasques praised conference organizers for their efforts at strengthening partnerships between state departments of education and their BIA and tribal counterparts.

There are 600,000 Indian children in schools, and 92 percent of them are in public schools, Vasques said. The federal No Child Left Behind legislation holds great promise for improving education for children in BIA and public schools, she said.

“We all need to work together,” Vasques said. “We can improve the education system, and once we do, we can improve upon the economy of our Indian nations.”

Vasques and James Cason, assistant deputy secretary of the Department of Interior, who oversees Bureau of Indian Affairs, spoke at the conference Monday morning.

Cason assumed management of education for BIA earlier this year. He said he intends to give Indian education the attention it deserves. Of the 172 BIA schools in the nation, only a third met AYP. It isn’t acceptable that two-thirds of the students educated in BIA schools are not meeting AYP, he said.

Cason said that after a recent tour of BIA schools, he was disturbed by schools’ low educational objectives for students. One tribal college official said that 70 percent of students entering college need remedial work. Going down the educational chain to a K-12 system, Cason learned that one high school’s goal was to get students to an eighth-grade reading level. In middle school, the goal was a fifth-grade reading level.

“It’s not acceptable to plan for a level of expectancy that’s unacceptable,” Cason said.

Under Cason’s leadership, BIA is entering into memorandums of understanding with individual states to adopt the state standards and state accountability systems.

That is exciting news, according to Keith Moore, South Dakota’s director of Indian Education.

“What they’ve done is going to force us all to come together and work collaboratively on finding solutions,” Moore said.

Moore said it is time for tribal councils, tribal school boards and public education to move forward and start working together to find solutions to the improve literacy and drop out rates among American Indian students.

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"Be good, be kind, help each other. Respect the ground, respect the drum, respect each other."
--Abe Conklin, Ponca/Osage (1926-1995)