BIA cuts scholarship money by $407,000

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — While thousands of Navajo students continue to turn to the tribe for scholarships, the federal government is giving the tribe less money to help them with.

There's no reason to expect the demands on the Navajo Nation's Office of Scholarship and Financial Assistance to fall this year. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs is giving the Office $10,750,000 this year anyway, roughly $407,000 less than the year before, according to Department Manager Rose Graham.

Graham said she got a call from Paulette Johns, the Bureau's budget officer in Gallup, with the news Dec. 7, but no explanation.

Johns said she did speak with Graham that day, but would not say what they spoke about, let alone why the funds were being cut. The Independent left messages with higher-ups in the Bureau, but received no explanation.

Cordell Shorty, of the Navajo Nation's Finance Division, is handling the transfer of funds on the tribe's end and said he's heard no explanation for this particular cut either. But when the federal government has cut tribal funding in recent years, he said, it's usually justified by the increase in military spending.

"(The U.S.) Congress says that a lot of the money is diverted to the war in Iraq, so all the federal departments ... each of them took a cut," he said.

So when the Department of the Interior gets a cut in funding, it has to cut funding to the bureaus it's responsible for, he explained. That includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And when the Bureau of Indian Affairs has its funding cut, it has to make cuts to its own programs, which include tribal scholarships.

Even with the federal funding it had last year, the tribe's Scholarship Office still had to turn away more than half of the nearly 17,000 college or college-bound students who applied for financial aid. With over $400,000 less to give in 2005, the tribe will have to turn away even more students, possibly hundreds, though Graham did not have an estimate.

When the Scholarship Office faced a shortfall in the fall of 2004 because of Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr.'s decision to increase the size of individual awards the previous spring, it cut the cap on how much each undergraduate could receive per semester from $2,000 to $1,500.

Any cap on the size of individual awards from a given pool of money is a tradeoff between how many students it can benefit and how much it can benefit each student. With the cap on undergraduate awards back to $2,000 $10,000 for students pursuing advanced degrees Graham said there were no plans to lower it this time.

With thousands of students turned down for scholarships each year, the Navajo Nation Division of Diné Education has set up an Annual Fund it plans to fill with money from ongoing fund-raisers to bolster the Scholarship Office's coffers. The Education Division held its first event Saturday, a black-tie dinner at the Gallup Best Western Inn. The fund is intended to help the Scholarship Office serve more and turn away fewer students. With this year's cut in federal funding, it won't even be enough to allow the Scholarship Office to match last year's awards.

While the tribe is popular financial aid source for Navajo students, it certainly isn't their only source.

Among the most popular sources of aid, said Colleen Johnson, a grant and scholarship specialist for Diné College, are the U.S. Education Department's Pell Grants, which are capped at $4,000 per student, per year. Johnson said the size of the average individual Pell Grant award has slowly been rising over the years, but leveled off this year and aren't keeping up with the increasing costs of a college education.

She tells her students to apply for Pell Grants, but encourages them to apply to the Navajo Nation Scholarship Office as well, since the tribe's awards have fewer restrictions on what education-related needs they can be spent on.

With the federal government funneling less money to the Scholarship Office, however, that will be less of an option this year.