Navajo immersion school expanding

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Karen Francis
Diné Bureau

FORT DEFIANCE — At the Tséhotsooi Diné Bi´ ó´lta´ immersion school, students in kindergarten through eighth grade are taught mostly in the Navajo language.

Now, thanks to a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the only immersion school on the Navajo Nation is expanding to a secondary school and is being designated an “early college.”

On Friday, school Principal Maggie Benally accepted a check for $400,000 to begin the expansion. Leaders from Antioch University in Seattle, the Navajo Nation and Jemez Pueblo were on-hand to congratulate Tséhotsooi Diné Bi´ ó´lta´ immersion school for becoming one of two schools serving Native students in the Southwest that is being funded as part of the early college high school initiative.

Delores Noble, Diné language and culture coordinator for the school, said that 2009 will be used to plan for the implementation of the secondary school.

“This is going to be a planning year beginning 2009 and we will be beginning to implement the early college in 2010,”

Noble said. “The early college doesn’t mean that the college is going to be there. It’s just that we’re going to be preparing students at even sixth, seventh, eighth grades to slowly prepare them for college.”

Planning for expanding to serve high school students will include scheduling classes, getting teachers in place and identifying the number of students who will attend the school.

“We’re going to be looking at how many students are going to be applying and how many teachers are going to be coming in,” Noble said.

Right now, the immersion school students go to Window Rock High School after being promoted from eighth grade, but some parents want their children to continue the same type of learning as at Tséhotsooi Diné Bi´ ó´lta´.

Each of Eugenio and Molly Antonio’s three children attended the immersion school, and they are appreciative for the opportunity given to them.

He and his wife work with children with emotional and social problems, Eugenio Antonio said.

“When I see what’s absent in their lives, I see a lot of it has to do with the absence of traditional ways,” he said. “When I see the kids here, when I see how much tradition is part of their life, and how much parental involvement that they have, I really see a difference in these kids.”

Maria Tenorio, acting director of the Center for Native Education at Antioch University , said that when Bill and Melinda Gates were deciding what to do with their education foundation money, they looked at statistics of children around the country who were dropping out of school.

“No group is more at risk than Indian nations,” Tenorio said.
Gates then went to the university and the center was created to fund schools for Native children.

“It was his own mother who said to him, ‘Do not forget the Native children.’ So there’s a very special place in their heart, the foundation’s heart, for the work you are embarking on,” Tenorio said.

She added that it is a bold initiative for the immersion school to change the education paradigm and she was thrilled that a secondary school would be established.

“We are looking to you as a beacon of hope, as a model, for some of our other schools,” Tenorio said.