WATONGA, Okla. (AP) — 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 positive college students have garments and college 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 choose them up.
Nationwide, Native college students miss faculty way more steadily than their friends, however not at Watonga Excessive College. Youngbear and her colleagues work to attach with households in a method that acknowledges the historical past and desires of Native communities.
As she thumbed by binders in her workplace with data of each Native scholar within the faculty, Youngbear mentioned 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 school, and her grandma didn’t, and her mother didn’t, it can create a generational cycle,” mentioned Youngbear, a member of the Arapaho tribe who taught the Cheyenne and Arapaho languages on the faculty for 25 years.
Watonga faculties collaborate with a number of Cheyenne and Arapaho applications 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 ingesting 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 obtainable for the 2022-2023 faculty 12 months, Oklahoma was the one one the place Native college students missed faculty at decrease charges than the state common, in keeping with knowledge collected by The Related Press.
At Watonga Excessive, fewer than 4% of Native college students have been chronically absent in 2022-23, in step with the college common, in keeping with state knowledge. Chronically absent college students miss 10% or extra of the college 12 months, for each excused and unexcused causes, which units them behind in studying and heightens their possibilities of dropping out.
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 college’s various training program.
College students are assigned to this system once they wrestle to maintain up their grades or attendance, and most are Native American, classroom trainer Carrie Compton mentioned. College students are rewarded for attendance with incentives like subject journeys.
Compton mentioned she will get outcomes. A Native boy who was absent 38 days one semester spent a short while in Eagle Academy throughout his second 12 months of highschool and went on to graduate final 12 months, she mentioned.
“He had perfect attendance for the first time ever, and it’s because he felt like he was getting something from school,” Compton mentioned.
When college students don’t present up for varsity, Compton and Youngbear take turns visiting their properties.
“I can remember one year, I probably picked five kids up every morning because they didn’t have rides,” Compton mentioned. “So at 7 o’clock in the morning, I just start my little route, and make my circle, and once they get into the habit of it, they would come to school.”
Across the nation, Native college students usually have been enrolled in disproportionately giant numbers in various teaching programs, which may worsen segregation. However the embrace of Native college students by their Eagle Academy trainer units a special tone from what some college students expertise elsewhere within the faculty.
Compton mentioned a criticism she hears steadily from Native college students in her room is, “The teachers just don’t like me.”
Bullying of Native college students by non-Native college students can be an issue, mentioned Watonga senior Blissful Belle Shortman, who’s Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho. She mentioned Cheyenne college students have been teased over features of their conventional ceremonies and powwow music.
“People here, they’re not very open, and they do have their opinions,” Shortman mentioned. “People who are from a different culture, they don’t understand our culture and everything that we have to do, or that we have a different living than they do.”
Poverty may play a task in bullying as effectively, she mentioned. “If you’re not in the latest trends, then you’re kind of just outcasted,” she mentioned.
Watonga employees credit score the work constructing relationships with college students for the low absenteeism charges, regardless of the challenges.
“Native students are never going to feel really welcomed unless the non-Native faculty go out of their way to make sure that those Native students feel welcomed,” mentioned Dallas Pettigrew, director of Oklahoma College’s Heart for Tribal Social Work and a member of the Cherokee Nation.