Education
Dear Editor: Reference: Sitka School Board Policy 6164.1 Education of Native/Indian Children.
I note with interest the contentions of Sitka School District systemic defect in Native student education, allegations offered by various parties on this subject in both the local newspaper and public radio coverage.
Given the averred intractability of this problem by members of the Sitka School Board and others, I wonder at the insistence that this is somehow the School District’s failing. While no great defender of the Educational Edifice, I don’t feel any compunction about leaping to its defense here. The referenced policy is chock-a-block with reporting requirements, cyclical assessments and information provisions to stakeholders, all in service of Federal and State statutes.
The District has on staff a Cultural Director. Ladies and gentlemen, from where I’m sitting, it isn’t the opportunities that aren’t there, it is the failure to seize them.
As an employee of the Sheldon Jackson Museum, I assisted in regular and frequent visits by Sitka School District classes from both elementary and middle schools and assisted in a host of programs for those classes in the interest of informing and magnifying the richness of Alaska Native material culture and cultural practices for all students attending.
The host of programs and recognitions for Native heritage provided by the School District during the course of the school year, together with supporting activity from the Sitka Native Education Program, the Sitka Sound Science Center, even programs offered at the Sitka Public Library are plenteous. In sum, there is no deficit of opportunity for Native students to thrive academically in the Sitka School District, or indeed, in Sitka more generally.
Rather, I think, as Michael Gerson has coined, the soft bigotry of low expectations obtains in this matter: Low expectations for parental and guardian responsibility and their student oversight, low expectations for student application of effort. In any event, the failure is not institutional.
It is a foregone conclusion that Native students are no less intellectually capable than any others. Therefore, unless some harder questions are posed on the part of the Sitka School Board, the uncomfortable kind, and excuses cease to be made, the sitting School Board or its successors will be talking about this purported problem years from now. Count on it.
Charles B. Dean, Sitka
