Educational support goes a long way with Native students

Teaching wasn’t something the Oglala Lakota woman had anticipated pursuing. She was interning in Washington, D.C., when she stumbled upon a Teach for America Native Alliance booth.

“I think it was my own educational experience that led me to consider teaching,” she said. “But I thought, ‘What is this organization that’s trying to get Native people in front of Native kids?’ I was intrigued.”

Green applied, and by chance was sent to her home state in 2014 to teach second and third grades on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the Spring Creek Community. Two years later she joined the Teach for America staff.

Today, 10 years later, she serves as the waawanglake, or executive director, for Teach for America’s South Dakota region.

Teach for America is among several Indigenous-led organizations across Indian Country working to teach others to work with Native students to welcome and engage them.

The program is among several operating across Indian Country — in public and private schools — that work to help Native students struggling with low attendance rates, difficulty graduating on time, or feelings that they don’t belong.

The programs are drawing new attention in light of a scathing report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights that found Rapid City Area Schools have “discriminated” against Native students in how they are disciplined and their access to advanced placement courses.

The civil rights report includes an agreement by Rapid City schools to reexamine the handling of Native students and provide new resources to help them succeed.

“The way that most kids in modern-day experience education is not necessarily what the community wants, and that is something that the community has said over and over,” Green said. “We should teach these kids through Wotakuye, which means being a good relative, and Woksape, which means the pursuit of wisdom.”

Teach for America works with several schools on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations and with 21 teachers to focus on what communities would like out of education and achievements. Teach for America does not currently partner with any state-operated schools.

Sense of belonging

Children living in poverty are two to three times more likely to be chronically absent from school, with African-American, Native American, Pacific Islander and Latino students all disproportionately affected.

Research now shows what Indigenous educators have been saying all along — that when students feel heard, seen and welcomed, attendance rates often increase, according to Attendance Works, a national nonprofit organization that works with schools to reduce chronic absentee rates.

“I think there’s something about a sense of belonging, of, ‘Is this a place where I can show up who and how I am?’” Green said. “I think kids are immediately gauging if that is an answer they can say ‘yes’ to, and it isn’t necessarily the case right now.”

A sense of belonging can be created in many different ways, by modeling the community in classroom decorations, in classroom lessons, and in the relationships that educators build with their students, Green said.

“I think what it boils down to is [whether they are] loved and cared for by the adults and therefore the system that we’re working within,” Green said. “As an Indigenous student, I didn’t always understand the lessons as they were being presented to me. I didn’t necessarily have a relationship with my teachers, or my teachers weren’t viewed to me as family in the same way I looked up to my family.”

Green’s message of creating family rings true as well for other Indigenous-led education initiatives.

Creating a family-like environment is one of the key pillars of the Oceti Sakowin Community Academy, Rapid City’s first Indigenous-led school.

After working in Rapid City Area Schools for more than two decades, Executive Director Mary Bowman decided to pursue something else. The Hunkpapa/Oglala Lakota woman joined the new innovative programs at the Oceti Sakowin Community Academy.

The academy aims to engage students in Indigenous culture throughout the day, not just for one class. For now, the program is offered only for kindergarten through second grade, but the academy plans to eventually expand it to K-12.

“We want it to be homey,” Bowman said. “We welcome the kids like a relative. They call me grandma, they call their teachers auntie. It’s truly how we treat them like a relative.”

Bowman was raised in the Rapid City school district. Growing up as an Indigenous student, she often found herself the only Native person in the classroom. She tried going out for sports and extracurricular activities, but said nothing made her feel that she fit in.

“I never felt I had a sense of belonging in the district,” Bowman said. “I did everything I could and I still never felt that I belonged.”

As an educator, Bowman said she made it her mission to make sure kids feel that they belong, that they’re part of a family.

“Something I realized really quickly is that I needed to build a relationship with these kids, there needs to be mutual trust between us,” Bowman said. “One thing I’ve heard over and over is that it just takes one person in the building to be supportive and at-risk students will do well. When I worked in the school building, I always tried to be a cheerleader for them, an advocate for them.”

She worked for more than 10 years at North Middle School, which has the highest concentration of Indigenous students in the district. At North, she heard other educators express that students weren’t engaged in lessons, that they didn’t have a drive to learn.

“But I had the opportunity to work one-on-one with kids, and I’ll tell you what, they care very much,” Bowman said. “I just feel that sometimes they lose hope.”

Acting as a cheerleader or trusted figure for students is key, Bowman emphasized.

This fall, the Oceti Sakowin Community Academy will open on its own property in its own facility on the north side, after operating inside the He Sapa New Life Wesleyan Church since 2022.

Culture-based education

Another way of creating a welcoming environment for students is by infusing lessons with Indigenous culture, as Rapid City Area Schools have been working to do.

In 2022, the district launched its Indigenous Education Task Force to reach out to Native communities and parents about ways to improve the educational experience. The task force found that an overwhelming majority of parents surveyed wanted a Lakota immersion program for their children.

Families also wanted more Indigenous staff in schools, more culture incorporated into lessons, and for the district to have a better understanding of the more than 50 tribes represented in the district.

“We have anecdotal evidence that when cultural lessons have been implemented into daily classroom lessons it has an effect on our American Indian students attendance-wise, classroom management-wise and in minimizing behavioral issues,” said Ira Taken Alive, director of the district’s Title VI Office of Indian Education. “It’s our common history, it’s our common culture.”

The district boasts the largest collection of Oceti Sakowin Essential Understanding Lessons in the state, Taken Alive said, which classroom teachers can use to implement standards into their daily lessons.

“This not only benefits our Native students but also allows our non-Native students to become aware of American Indian culture and language,” Taken Alive said.

While a recent survey published by the South Dakota Office of Tribal Relations indicated nearly two-thirds of educators are using the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings in their classrooms, the number of survey participants was lower than in previous years.

The standards were approved in 2018 to outline teaching students about Indigenous culture. The use of the standards is optional, and the survey no longer identifies which district participants are from. In 2022, a bill requiring the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings to be taught in all public schools failed by one vote in the South Dakota House.

Another initiative the district has taken is in preserving and enhancing the presence of Lakota language in classrooms.

“You don’t have to be a medicine man or woman to use Lakota language in your classroom,” said Taken Alive, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “To have the initiative, from our perspective, is to build that confidence within our teachers so that more awareness about our culture is raised throughout the school district.”

Getting the diploma

Taken Alive said the district has also been working to incorporate “graduation success” coaches into district schools to help boost the number of Native students receiving their diplomas each year.

In June 2024, the district graduated a record number of Native students, with more than 150. Many more Indigenous students, however, never made it to their senior year; the district struggles with high dropout rates among Indigenous students, as does the nation as a whole.

American Indian and Pacific Islander students were the two groups with the highest dropout rates nationwide in 2022, a trend that’s continued for years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

In Rapid City, the dropout rate among all races rose throughout the district from 4.2% in the 2021-2022 school year to 7.4% in 2022-2023, according to data from the South Dakota Department of Education. The overall attendance rate dropped from 91.3% for the 2021-2022 school year to 90.9% the next year. These reports do not break down the rates by race or ethnicity.

Students with high rates of absenteeism are more at risk of dropping out.

“Absenteeism has many causes that depend on the individual student’s situation,” the Department of Education said in an email to ICT and the Rapid City Journal. “Some of the more common issues that cause absenteeism include lack of transportation to school, health issues for the student or family members of the student, and a feeling of disconnection to the school.”

The DOE said it is studying solutions through absenteeism grants and is working to improve educational outcomes for Native students through programs such as Jobs for America’s Graduates, which is aimed at middle and high school students who face barriers to success in school.

Heading into the next school year, the district will hire two more graduation success coaches who will be located in Central High School, the high school with the highest number of Indigenous students. One success coach will be dedicated just to freshmen, the group most at-risk.

“Once we get to freshman year we see a huge drop-off in terms of the enrollment of American Indian students, not only here in the city, but I’ve noticed the same phenomenon across Indian Country in South Dakota,” Taken Alive said.

By November, under terms of the agreement signed by the district in response to the civil rights findings, the district must submit a corrective action plan to the Office of Civil Rights that includes an analysis of the root causes of educational problems facing Native students.

If the Office of Civil Rights approves the plan, the district will have 30 days to begin implementing it, and by February will need to have evaluated its discipline and truancy policies and procedures.

“Let’s increase the retention rate for our students and reduce the dropout rate and get more students across the graduation stage,” Taken Alive said. “To see the possibility of even having two separate venues to accommodate the number of [Native] graduates that we will likely have, that makes me work even harder.”

This story is co-published by the Rapid City Journal and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the South Dakota area.