Native American students miss school at higher rates. It only got worse during the pandemic
For decades, she said, the federal Bureau of Indian Education had offered kids from Arizona’s remote Havasupai Indian Reservation a substandard education in an understaffed school.
That federal office is calling out the BIE for allowing a range of problems to persist at Havasupai Elementary School — problems that endanger student health, safety and security. The lawsuit, which uses pseudonyms for students, alleged a litany of excessive punishments and abuses at the school, including:
Some of the issues pertain to the state of the school facility, where investigators found"an unreliable heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system and a roof in poor condition.""We also found that the school did not implement a comprehensive emergency management program, did not develop a security plan, did not train staff, and did not conduct all required emergency drills," the report’s authors wrote.
While his letter did not say whether any additional staff had been hired, Dearman wrote that the BIE"waived the Indian Preference policy otherwise in place for BIE vacancies to ensure consideration for both Indian and non-Indian applicants" and"conducted outreach" to organizations like Teach for America.
And Havasupai Elementary, which serves some 70 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, is the only school on the tribe’s almost 188,000-acre reservation. Filed when nine minor students of Havasupai Elementary School joined with the Native American Disability Law Center to demand improvement, that lawsuit alleged that the"U.S. government has dismally failed to fulfill these responsibilities."
Three years later, in 2023, the BIE settled further elements of the lawsuit and agreed to comply with 13 federal regulations, including those that provide for adequate staffing, counseling services and facilities."And we were counting on the BIE to take a significant number of important steps to improve the quality of education it was making available to students in Havasupai," Ford said.
SolutionsKaska said the BIE’s ongoing shortcomings at Havasupai Elementary School aren’t just items in a government report.
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