Council tables education overhaul

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

WINDOW ROCK — Fear and petty politics are what kept the Navajo Nation Council from approving a sweeping overhaul of the tribe's education laws Wednesday, disappointed education officials said.

After wasting most of the day listening to the 106-page law being tediously read into the record, the Council passed a few modest amendments to the bill before finally voting 40-31 to table the whole issue until the summer.

The tribe's Education Committee and Division of Diné Education had been preparing the bill which proposes among many other things the creation of a Navajo Nation Board of Education in the hopes of imposing some uniformity on the six school systems that now teach more than 90,000 Navajo students on and around the reservation and are frustrated with the delay.

The longer the tribe waits to get started with the reforms, they say, the longer it will take their Navajo students to close the prominent and persistent academic achievement gap between them and the rest of the country.

Even before the bill arrived before the Council Wednesday, educators, who are more-or-less behind the thrust of the tribe's plan, began to raise concerns at public hearings the Committee and Division were hosting across the reservation. A popular concern was the tribe's proposal to officially recognize only one of the three associations each with a slightly different focus currently representing the 60-odd BIA-funded schools on the reservation. In response, the tribe proposed replacing all three with an entirely new association.

The Council, however, decided Wednesday to change the composition of the proposed advisory board anyway.

Turf wars
The amendment the Council passed assures that the different associations each retain some say. Education Division Director Leland Leonard believes the associations are just trying to protect their turf, and killed the entire bill's chances of passing this winter in the process.

"It's about the three associations," he said of the amendment. "It's not about the children."

Education Committee Chairman Leonard Chee and Vice-Chairman Wallace Charley, who sponsored the bill, agree that the associations' instincts of self-preservation probably had a lot to do with the Council's decision to put the bill on ice Wednesday. But they believe the public schools had more than a little to do with it, too.

Public schools on the reservation receive millions of federal dollars each year to compensate them for the tribal land in their boundaries that keep them from raising revenue though property taxes. Some of those schools say they fear that the tribe will claim that money for itself should the education reform bill pass. Although the tribe's education leaders aren't exactly shy about their hopes of one day claiming those millions some day 10 to 15 years from now, with luck Charley's bill wouldn't, and couldn't, do that on its own.

Even so, those schools, Chee and Charley believe, are afraid of the bills would open the door to more and more tribal control over public education, which is still the exclusive domain of the states. And they believe those schools are leaning on many of the Council delegates to toe their line.

Breaking point
"He felt the pressure, he bit, and he broke," said Charley of Councilman Larry Noble, a member of the Ganado Unified School District's governing board, who made the motion to table the bill until summer.

Noble rejected the idea of a turf war between the three associations and said he proposed delaying the bill in order to give everyone more time to work out the many concerns they still have with the overhaul the Education Committee and Division are proposing.

"I support the issue, but I want it done with ease," said Noble. "I want them to come together and iron out their issues first."

The Education Committee hasn't given up on getting the Council to vote on the bill this session entirely. With two more days in the session left, Chee and Charley consider their chances of recalling the issue "fair;" however, chances are that it will be summer by the time the Council takes another look at the bill.

Although its critics want a number of revisions at the very least, Chee and Charley say it will be the exact same bill they looked at Wednesday. Although they could revise and refine the bill between now and then, the two Education Committee members say it would be a serious drain on their time and resources, and they don't plan on going through the trouble just to please what they consider a few extreme, fringe interests.