South Dakota Native American leaders going ahead with education reforms

Decision made to no longer wait on state government

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RAPID CITY — Early mornings at the new Oceti Sakowin Community Academy are a joyous time for the roughly 28 kindergartners who attend and the two staff members who teach them.

Before classes begin, students join in a circle and sing the “Four Directions” song in Lakota, and students shake one another’s hands and share a positive greeting to promote kinship. Meanwhile, head of school Mary Bowman recites uplifting messages to show gratitude for the day, such as, “Remember, I am beautiful inside and out,” and “I am a sacred being.”

When they go inside, students sit among walls adorned with Lakota numbers, letters and translations. They are taught lessons from books by Native authors and which feature Native folk tales and spiritual messages. Kinship is encouraged among students, who often refer to one another as cousins.

The school, funded with private money, completes its first year of operation in late May. It is the latest among several ongoing efforts to improve Native education in the state outside the traditional public K-12 school system.

Native American educators in South Dakota are no longer waiting on state government or the Legislature to improve teaching and learning for Native students, who have trailed their white peers in every academic measure for generations.

Bowman said the model for teaching at the academy “is basically the same as how our ancestors did it.”

“We really believe in nurturing the whole child, and that if they have that strong nurturing, the academics will come with it,” she said.

The Oceti academy taught only kindergartners in a local church in its first year. But it has plans to expand grade offerings each year and eventually move onto a 40-acre campus in north Rapid City with multiple buildings and affordable housing units.

The academy joins a small cadre of privately funded Indian schools in South Dakota. Others include Red Cloud Indian School and Anpo Wicahpi girls school in Pine Ridge, St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain and Wakanyeja Tokeyahci School in Mission, which opened in 2020 and where students are taught only in the Lakota language.

The new academies in Rapid City and Mission and other Indian schools use evidence-based, culturally focused teaching methods, curricula and environments aimed at improving Native student performance.

Improving academic performance among Native children is intended to create a path to prosperity for a population that has for generations faced numerous social and socioeconomic challenges. It also has long battled high youth and adult suicide rates, incarceration levels and incidence of substance abuse. Native Americans in the U.S. have faced years of oppression and historical traumas, from being moved onto reservations to the forced assimilation implemented at boarding schools.

Attendance at the Oceti academy is free, and enrollees can be Native or non-Native. The per-child cost at the academy is about $25,000, well above the roughly $11,000 per-student cost in the public school system.

The new schools, according to former state senator Troy Heinert, are a partial response to the repeated failure of the Legislature to allow a pilot project in which public funds would be used to open two to four charter schools centered on Native culture and language.

“It seems like our state is going backwards in this effort,” said Heinert, a Democrat who led three unsuccessful attempts to get legislative approval for Native-based charter schools. “What we’re up against is the status quo, the thinking that it’s OK where our Native test scores are, that it’s OK where our Native attendance rates have been.”

Academic achievement for white students in South Dakota is far from stellar compared to some other states. South Dakota has about 137,000 students in the public school system, of which roughly 98,000 (72%) are white and 14,000 (11%) are Native.

According to the 2021-22 South Dakota Report Card published by the state Department of Education, white students were 58% proficient in English, 50% proficient in math and 49% proficient in science. The data show that 21% of Native students were proficient in English, 12% proficient in math and 13% proficient in science last year.

While 95% of white students graduated, 69% of Native students completed high school. And while 58% of white students were considered college or career ready upon graduation, only 13% of Native students were prepared, a rate that was lower than for students classified as homeless (19%). While 92% of white students attended daily, 56% of Native students attended daily.

South Dakota Department of Education Secretary of Education Joseph Graves said, “The Department of Education is absolutely supportive of the grassroots efforts within the Native American community to seize their own educational destiny and will work hard to support those efforts as we can.”

In recent years, the state has tried to reduce teacher shortages in schools with high Native populations. It developed the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings, a voluntary template for teaching Native culture in public schools. Graves added that the DOE and Gov. Kristi Noem supported the Native charter school bills that failed.

A 2023 White House report on Native education indicated that proficiency in Native languages contributes to the overall health and wellbeing of Native individuals and their communities, improved socioeconomic status and “overall richness of life.”

Maggie McGhee has spent five years learning the Lakota language and the past three years teaching it at Red Cloud school near Pine Ridge.

Native students, she said, have flourished in a culturally based education environment.

“When they see themselves in the school, in the teachers and posters on the walls and curriculum that is being taught, they have greater academic success and their emotional development is better,” she said. “I see our students become confident in who they are, with a strong identity, and they’re able to grow up and face any obstacle in life.”

This article was produced by South Dakota News Watch, a non-profit journalism organization located online at sdnewswatch.org.