Navajos turn sights on schools

For many American Indian youths, the educational outlook is bleak. In some cases, youths are more likely to drop out of high school than to graduate.

The Navajo Nation has taken a step towards putting education into its own hands by creating a department of education.

Leland Leonard, Navajo tribal education director, said there hasn't been much improvement for Navajo youths since No Child Left Behind became law in 2001. In 2004, the State Office of Education reported that just under 71 percent of American Indian youths in Utah graduated from high school.

"The states and the (Bureau of Indian Affairs) are not doing it," Leonard said. "This is an initiative of exercising our sovereignty, our inherited right to reform the educational system on the Navajo Nation."

Leonard said in July the Navajo Nation amended its Title 10 education code to create its own department of education and is also establishing a school board. The department will look at the "unique language and culture and incorporating those into the curriculum" over the next decade at about 180 schools in the Four Corners region.

"The Navajo language and character development, those are all essential tools our kids need to learn," he said.

Shirlee Silversmith, Indian education specialist at the State Office of Education, said the Navajo Nation already had an education director, and the restructuring provides more authority in areas such as accessing data.

"There would be a greater direction for cooperation as well as collaboration," she said. "A lot of this is based on sovereignty rights of tribes. It puts our American Indians in a unique status that will allow tribes to establish themselves as state departments of education."

Many tribes, she said, conduct their own research and analysis of data so they can better assist students and parents.

"The Navajo Nation is probably one of the largest tribes across the nation and is in the forefront as far as developing and establishing themselves as a tribal education department," she said.

Silversmith said every Utah tribe has an education director, and she believes that eventually, the others may move in the same direction as the Navajos. She pointed to a charter high school on the Uintah-Ouray Indian Reservation in eastern Utah as another empowering move.

Toni Turk, federal programs administrator for San Juan School District in southeastern Utah, said his district's graduation rate is about 95 percent. Last year, his district reported five dropouts — three were American Indian, two were white.