This story is a part of a collaboration on continual absenteeism amongst Native American college students between The Related Press and ICT, a information outlet that covers Indigenous points. It’s reprinted with permission.
WATONGA, Okla. — Because the Watonga faculty system’s Indian training director, Hollie Youngbear works to assist Native American college students succeed — a job that begins with getting them to high school.
She makes certain college students have garments and faculty provides. She connects them with federal and tribal assets. And when college students don’t present as much as faculty, she and a colleague drive out and decide them up.
Nationwide, Native college students miss faculty much more regularly than their friends, however not at Watonga Excessive College. Youngbear and her colleagues work to attach with households in a manner that acknowledges the historical past and wishes of Native communities.
As she thumbed by binders in her workplace with information of each Native scholar within the faculty, Youngbear stated a cycle of skipping faculty goes again to the abuse generations of Native college students suffered at U.S. authorities boarding faculties.
“If grandma didn’t go to high school, and her grandma didn’t, and her mom didn’t, it may well create a generational cycle,” stated Youngbear, a member of the Arapaho tribe who taught the Cheyenne and Arapaho languages on the faculty for 25 years.
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Watonga faculties collaborate with a number of Cheyenne and Arapaho packages that intention to decrease Native scholar absenteeism. One helps college students with faculty bills and promotes conferences for tribal youth. One other holds month-to-month conferences with Watonga’s Native highschool college students throughout lunch hours to discourage underage consuming and drug use.
Oklahoma is residence to 38 federally acknowledged tribes, many with their very own training departments — and help from these tribes contributes to college students’ success. Of 34 states with knowledge accessible for the 2022-2023 faculty yr, Oklahoma was the one one the place Native college students missed faculty at decrease charges than the state common, based on knowledge collected by The Related Press.
At Watonga Excessive, fewer than 4 % of Native college students have been chronically absent in 2022-23, consistent with the varsity common, based on state knowledge. Chronically absent college students miss 10 % or extra of the varsity yr, for each excused and unexcused causes, which units them behind in studying and heightens their possibilities of dropping out.
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About 14 % of scholars on the Watonga faculty on the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation are Native American. With black-lettered Bible verses on the partitions of its hallways, the highschool resembles many others in rural Oklahoma. However student-made Native artwork decorates the classroom reserved for Eagle Academy, the varsity’s various training program.
College students are assigned to this system after they wrestle to maintain up their grades or attendance, and most are Native American, classroom instructor Carrie Compton stated. College students are rewarded for attendance with incentives like discipline journeys.
Compton stated she will get outcomes. A Native boy who was absent 38 days one semester spent a short while in Eagle Academy throughout his second yr of highschool and went on to graduate final yr, she stated.
“He had excellent attendance for the primary time ever, and it’s as a result of he felt like he was getting one thing from faculty,” Compton stated.
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When college students don’t present up for college, Compton and Youngbear take turns visiting their properties.
“I can bear in mind one yr, I in all probability picked 5 youngsters up each morning as a result of they didn’t have rides,” Compton stated. “So at 7 o’clock within the morning, I simply begin my little route, and make my circle, and as soon as they get into the behavior of it, they might come to high school.”
Across the nation, Native college students usually have been enrolled in disproportionately giant numbers in various teaching programs, which might worsen segregation. However the embrace of Native college students by their Eagle Academy instructor units a unique tone from what some college students expertise elsewhere within the faculty.
Compton stated a grievance she hears regularly from Native college students in her room is, “The lecturers simply don’t like me.”
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Bullying of Native college students by non-Native college students can be an issue, stated Watonga senior Blissful Belle Shortman, who’s Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho. She stated Cheyenne college students have been teased over facets of their conventional ceremonies and powwow music.
“Individuals right here, they’re not very open, and so they do have their opinions,” Shortman stated. “People who find themselves from a unique tradition, they don’t perceive our tradition and every part that now we have to do, or that now we have a unique dwelling than they do.”
Poverty would possibly play a task in bullying as nicely, she stated. “For those who’re not within the newest tendencies, then you definitely’re sort of simply outcasted,” she stated.
Watonga workers credit score the work constructing relationships with college students for the low absenteeism charges, regardless of the challenges.
“Native college students are by no means going to really feel actually welcomed except the non-Native school exit of their solution to guarantee that these Native college students really feel welcomed,” stated Dallas Pettigrew, director of Oklahoma College’s Heart for Tribal Social Work and a member of the Cherokee Nation.
Related Press author Sharon Lurye in New Orleans contributed to this report.
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