A diploma from Wolf Point High School could be a ticket out of this isolated prairie town in eastern Montana. Instead, Fourstar, 17, sees her school as a dead end.
The tutoring she was promised to get her back on track did not materialize. An agreement with the high school principal to let her apply credits earned in summer courses toward graduation fell through, Fourstar said. The special education plan that the school district developed for her, supposedly to help her catch up, instead laid out how she should be disciplined.
Her family fears that she will inflict the pain of not graduating on herself.
“I’m just there,” Fourstar said. “I feel invisible.”
Her despondency is shared by other Native students at Wolf Point and across the United States. Often ignored in the national conversation about the public school achievement gap, these students post some of the worst academic outcomes of any demographic group, which has been exacerbated by decades of discrimination, according to federal reports.
The population is also among the most at risk: Underachievement and limited emotional support at school can contribute to a number of negative outcomes for Native youths — even suicide. Among people 18 to 24, Native Americans have the highest rate of suicide in the nation: 23 per 100,000, compared with 15 per 100,000 among white youths.
While the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education runs about 180 Native-only schools, more than 90 percent of Native students attend integrated public schools near or on reservations, like Wolf Point. A wealth of rarely tapped data documents their plight.
In public schools, white students are twice as likely as Native students to take at least one advanced placement course, and Native students are more than twice as likely to be suspended, according to an analysis of federal civil-rights data conducted by ProPublica and The New York Times. Native students also score lower than nearly all other demographic groups on national tests, and only 72 percent of Native students graduate, the lowest of any demographic group.
In Wolf Point, the academic disparities between Native students and other groups are even wider, federal data shows.
In June 2017, the Tribal Executive Board of Fort Peck filed a civil-rights complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights requesting a federal investigation into the tribe’s contention that the Wolf Point school system discriminates against Native students.
According to the complaint and to interviews with dozens of students and families, Wolf Point schools provide fewer opportunities and fewer social and academic supports to Native students, who make up more than half of the student body, than to the white minority. The junior and senior high schools, which together have an enrollment of about 300, shunt struggling Native students into a poorly funded, understaffed program for remedial and truant students, often against their will.
Rob Osborne, who has been the superintendent of Wolf Point’s school district for 2 1/2 years, said he has read the board’s complaint three times but is not familiar enough with its contents to comment.
“I’m not going to get into this Native American thing,” he said. “All I’m trying to do is make sure all our kids have a quality education. And is there some discontent up there? Yeah, probably.”
The Education Department has not opened an investigation into the complaint, a year and a half after it was filed. A senior official for the department said it was under evaluation.
A Long History of Failure
Since passage of the Indian Education Act in 1972, Congress has tried to give tribes more resources and responsibility for educating their children. But most schools that serve Native youths remain under the authority of states and municipalities, which have historically rejected tribal input and insisted on control over curriculum, funding and staffing.
The Obama administration instituted initiatives on Native education, such as grants to strengthen partnerships between tribes, states and school districts. The new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, requires states to consult with tribes about education plans.
After President Barack Obama visited with students in June 2014 on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in the Dakotas, a report from his administration called for remedies to a “long history” of “deeply troubling and destructive federal policies.”
But Education Secretary Betsy DeVos scaled back the Obama administration’s emphasis on investigating claims of systemic civil-rights violations,and the future of complaints based on wide disparities like those seen in Wolf Point remains uncertain.
Liz Hill, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said that DeVos was “keenly aware” of the challenges facing Native students and has been aggressive in holding federal schools accountable for improving their education. In March, the department withheld funds from the Bureau of Indian Education because the agency had not complied with ESSA, according to a letter sent by the department.
In 1886, Washington designated Fort Peck, a remote area now composed of 2 million acres of Montana’s northeastern plains, to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes. It also agreed to educate the tribes’ youth.
Initially, that meant forcing Fort Peck’s parents to send their children to boarding schools on and off the reservation. Native children had their hair chopped off, their traditional garments replaced with uniforms and their names westernized. Students were disciplined for speaking their languages and practicing their rituals.
“The federal government created a policy to culturally annihilate us,” said Diana Cournoyer, interim executivedirector of the National Indian Education Association, an advocacy organization.
‘Broken Promises — That’s All You Get From the School’
Multiple generations of Native families have floundered in Wolf Point’s schools.
Fourstar’s grandmother, Louella Contreras, dropped out of a Wolf Point school in ninth grade. She went on to earn her high school equivalency diploma and a bachelor’s degree in business management from the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota.
Ineighth and ninth grade, Fourstar was hospitalized four times for post-traumatic stress. She was also cutting herself. Her grades plummeted to F’s and D’s, after being high enough to earn her a spot on the honor roll. At the end of eighth grade, as she recovered in a treatment center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Contreras begged school officials for accommodations to help her granddaughter when she returned. Fourstar never got the help she was promised, her family said, and still struggles in classes.
“Broken promises — that’s all you get from the school,” Fourstar said.
One year after Contreras requested it, the school drafted a formal education plan that was supposed to help Fourstar academically. Instead, it set out disciplinary procedures for slow learning. Its solution: Fourstar would have “approximately five minutes to make a choice” on tasks and questions or face an in-school suspension.
When reached by phone, the principal of Wolf Point High School, Kim Hanks, referred questions to the superintendent.
One of the few places where Fourstar has flourished at the high school is the Opportunity Learning Center, an “alternative” program with more than 50 students — about 95 percent of them Native. They spend a couple of periods to most of the school day there.
Cookie Ragland, the program’s director and only full-time staff member, is white and grew up just west of the reservation. She has devoted her career to students who “don’t fit into mainstream, traditional educational classrooms” and was drawn to Wolf Point in 2003 because it had the only alternative program in northeastern Montana.
In recent years, though, school administration has given Ragland “little financial or other support,” according to the tribal board’s complaint. It has ordered her to stop developing Native-centered curricula and taking students on field trips.
Ragland’s approach has been criticized by some Native students who say Ragland appears to have lower expectations for them.
“I’m not saying I’m a miracle worker,” she said. “I’ve lost students, and there are students that aren’t happy with me. I try to be consistent and fair, but I’m not perfect.”
Native Hopelessness and a Tragic Solution: Teen Suicide
Despair can be deadly.
Jayden Joe, a once-gregarious honor roll student, began to withdraw from friends after his father died from liver cancer in August 2010. His grades at Wolf Point High School plummeted, and he was steered into Ragland’s remedial program.
“My son was pushed to the side,” said his mother, Michelle Barsness.
Like many Native parents on the reservation did with their own children, Barsness spoke with her son about suicide.
“That’s the chicken-shit way out, Mom,” she said Joe told her.
By the winter of his junior year, he seemed to be doing better. But he struggled to stay on track at school.
When Angeline Cheek, an advocate for Native students in Wolf Point’s schools, saw his name on a tribal court list of truants in March 2017, she told the school’s guidance counselor that Joe needed immediate help. According to Cheek, the counselor said, “I’ll follow up on it if I have time. I have a lot of things I have to do.”
As the high school’s only guidance counselor, she was responsible for about 200 students. The counselor, who retired this past year, would not respond to questions by phone or email. The district declined to answer questions about her work.
Twenty-four hours later, in a heated hallway exchange, Principal Hanks reprimanded Joe for missing class and warned him his graduating was in jeopardy.
A broad-shouldered 17-year-old with a mop of thick, dark brown hair, Joe walked home at lunchtime and took his mother’s truck to Borge Park, a teenage hangout 1 mile away from his school. He parked next to a baseball diamond, put the muzzle of a .22 rifle borrowed from his grandfather to his head, and pulled the trigger.
Barsness learned at a suicide awareness training session that teenagers typically kill themselves within a half-hour of deciding to do it.
“So half an hour before my son did it, where was he? He was at school,” she said.
A Native Advocate Is Shown the Door
Cheek, a Lakota educator and community organizer, was hired in 2016 as a Native student advocate for a half-dozen schools on the west end of the Fort Peck reservation.
She tried to make school more tolerable. She gave students awards, like T-shirts and gift bags, to motivate them to stay in school and excel. She introduced them to Native cultural events, like local dance and drumming groups.
The administration did not welcome her initiatives. She was told that she also had to give rewards to white students. (She did not.) She was given a public bench in the hallway to speak with students about sensitive issues like abuse and pregnancy. When she referred Native students to high school counselors, she said, she was frequently brushed off.
“I started to feel like the students,” she said.
Distraught after hearing about Joe’s death, Cheek asked the high school counselor if she had followed up on her urgent request to check in on him. She had not, Cheek said. About a week later, Superintendent Osborne banned Cheek from the district’s schools.
In a complaint to the tribe’s education director, Osborne wrote that Cheek had a “negative attitude towards our school district, staff, putting parents and school district against each other and critical of how the district handled the tragic loss of one of our students without knowing all the facts.”
The education director fired her, accusing Cheek of disrespect toward Wolf Point administrators.
Much as white authorities suppressed Native culture for generations, the schools hinder Native students from succeeding and forming the next generation of tribal leadership, Cheek said.
“History is repeating itself,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.