Council approves Nation's first school super

Window Rock High School students make their way out the door and toward the buses after the end of their first day of school on Monday afternoon in Ft. Defiance. McKinley County Schools still have a couple of weeks until they are back in session on Aug. 21. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

WINDOW ROCK — The Navajo Nation Council made Tommy Lewis Jr. its first ever superintendent of schools Monday afternoon. But if you ask Lewis, he's been waiting for his chance for a while now.

"I've been preparing for this job ... for a very long time," Lewis said, at least since his first days as an assistant English teacher at Tuba City High School in 1976.

Three decades and many jobs later, Lewis told the Council moments before his confirmation, he was ready to take the tribe's Division of Diné Education "to a higher level."

"I really believe this is a historic time for the Diné people," he said.

The Council laid the groundwork for this "historic time" and Lewis' confirmation over a year ago when it passed the Navajo Sovereignty in Education Act, a sweeping overhaul of the tribe's education laws. In hopes of creating a more state-like education system, the act ushered in a new board of education to oversee the division's work and replaced its director with a superintendent, answerable directly to the board. While president of Diné College in the 1990s, in fact, Lewis was among the professionals the tribe called on to propose the changes that eventually became the Education Act.

So he's not new to the division's work. And he's not exactly "new" to his new job, either. He's actually been doing the superintendent's work in an acting capacity since July 19, just two days after the board of education officially recommended his confirmation.

Because of the timing, that's meant stepping into the middle of the tribe's recent struggles with its embattled Head Start program, a department within the Education Division. Concerned about the criminals the tribe was unwittingly hiring because of poor background check policies and practices, the Administration for Children and Families brought the pre-school program to a complete halt on May 2 by ordering a suspension of all federal funDinég.

The tribe won a partial lifting of that suspension worth $4.1 million Friday. Lewis and his staff are now working to fully restoring the $29 million program as soon as possible.

After casting its votes, the Council welcomed Lewis to his new job with a hardy round of applause. But not all delegates were ready to get behind the tribe's first superintendent of schools just yet. The Council confirmed Lewis 64-13.

Among the holdouts was Francis Redhouse. The Ethics and Rules Committee member raised some unspecified concerns last week about Lewis' departure from Diné College, where he resigned as president in 1999. Before voting against Lewis' confirmation Monday, he asked for references from the governing board of Northwest Indian College, in Bellingham, Wash., where Lewis served as president after leaving Tsaile.

After the confirmation, Redhouse said he had no reliable information on the reasons for Lewis' departure from either school, but wanted evidence that they all parted on good terms.

Lewis could not be reached for comment.

Motivated by the controversies surrounDinég Head Start's failure to screen its employees properly, Redhouse also asked for a check of Lewis' own background. Redhouse said he only wanted to take the necessary precautions in selecting the tribe's first superintendent, and that he only wanted to be fair. If Head Start staff must clear a criminal background check, he said, so should their boss.

"I think the superintendent should be held at a higher level than the staff that is under him," he said. "So I don't see no difference in seeing the superintendent of schools going through the same background check process."

Lewis survived Monday's confirmation despite those concerns, and despite some questions about the legality of the vote itself.

Late last month, Chief Legislative Counsel Raymond Etcitty had concerns that the four board members who recommended Lewis might not have constituted a quorum of what is to become an 11-member board once the last five are elected in November. But accorDinég to an Aug. 3 memorandum from Regina Holyan, an attorney for the tribe's Justice Department, the four members constituted a quorum of the six members President Joe Shirley Jr. appointed last December to serve as the board until the elections.

"That's good enough for me," Etcitty said Monday.

An illegal recommendation by the board could have cast the legitimacy of Monday's confirmation into doubt. Holyan's memo allays those concerns.

Despite his own reservations, Redhouse hoped that Lewis would stick around longer than the Education Division's past two bosses. Outgoing Director Leland Leonard had his position eliminated by the same Education Act that created the job of superintendent. He replaced Karen Dixon Blazer, whom the Council removed in early 2004 before she even came off of acting status because Shirley failed to present her confirmation to the Council in time.