An LCO Today poll reveals that 52% of voters support the
merging of the LCO K-12 School and the Wadookadaading Ojibwe Language Immersion
School. 41% said they were against the merger while another 7% had no opinion
on the matter.
The school merger became a very significant topic at the LCO
General Membership meeting held on Friday morning with several members
directing comments and questions to the tribal council. Council member Jason
Schlender, who is liaison to the schools, answered questions.
Jeff Tribble asked why the K-12 school has a $652,000 debt
that has to be paid back to the Bureau of Indian Education. Schlender responded
by saying that there is no money that has to be paid back, but rather, it is
money that the school doesn’t have. He said it is a budget shortfall due to the
across-the-board education cuts Congress made in 2013 called “sequestration.”
Nearly $3 billion was cut from education resulting in less
after-school programs, cuts to head starts, special education, and financial
aid for college students, and has resulted in ballooning class sizes.
“We’ve had to make some very difficult cuts at the school,”
Schlender said. Some of these cuts were the elimination of several teaching
jobs which resulted in a student protest march in early May when students
walked out of school and marched to the Monday morning tribal council meeting.
Students were concerned that Native teachers are the ones losing their jobs
while non-Native teachers at the school were retained.
The two schools were merged this school year because the
Wadookadaading school, formerly a charter school through the Hayward School
system, gave up its charter. Rather than close the school, which as Schlender
pointed out, has produced over 80 Ojibwe language speakers since its conception
in 2004. Schlender strongly believes in the importance of continuing to teach
the Ojibwe language and says he will fight to keep the schools going, and that
the success of the LCO School (including Wadookadaading) is at his core.
One tribal member, an employee of the school, told Schlender
that prior to the merging of the schools, LCO School stayed within their budget
and maintained their operations but now are at a $652,000 budget shortfall and
having to endure these cuts. He said that the debt cannot be blamed on the
school.
Schlender said that the real enemy is the federal
government. “The money for our schools is just not there.”
Schlender also said in response to why LCO School doesn’t
have an independent school board yet, and still operates with the tribal
council acting as the board, is because statistics from the Bureau of Indian
Education showed that most schools throughout Indian country fail when they
have an independent school board.
The accusation of abuse of students by non-Native teachers
and staff was also brought up before the council, which they didn’t respond to.
A recent Sawyer County Record article about the protest march back in May mentioning
the abuse accusations received a strongly-worded backlash from tribal council
through a letter to the editor. The tribal council denied that such things
occurred at our school but some tribal members have photographic evidence of
punishments being doled out they said were unacceptable and shouldn’t happen at
LCO.
Another issue brought up at the membership meeting Friday
was about the retention of students at the school. It was asked why so many
students are leaving the school and going to Hayward. Chairman Mic Isham said
that they are concerned about it and that when students leave, they survey
them.
“The number one reason we’ve found why they are leaving is because we don’t
enough sports programs. We’re trying to fix that by having co-op sports
programs with area schools like Hayward and Winter,” Isham said.
No comments:
Post a Comment