School Faces Endless Challenges on Scanty Funds

Two monuments sit on a grassy knoll at the Chemawa Indian School.

One carries the names of two former students who died in an alcohol-related car crash in 1996. The other, a granite marker, memorializes four former students who died in the 1997 crash of a stolen pickup truck.

Other areas of the campus are marred by the scrawls of graffiti, but the monuments are clean. Scattered around them are the offerings of grieving students. A few votive candles, forlorn in the Oregon mist. Some grimy coins. A handful of withering wildflowers. Several purple plastic packages of Jolly Rancher jellybeans.

For those who work here, it’s a reminder of what happens to the students the cash-strapped Indian boarding school cannot reach.

“We’re on the front lines of life and death here,” says the school’s principal, Larry Byers, a Cherokee. “The destructive behavior we see makes me wonder, if they go home, are they going to be alive in five years?”

Chemawa is the end of the line, the last hope before jail, reform school or life as a dropout for hundreds of deeply troubled American Indian teenagers. And at nearly 120 years old, it’s the oldest continually operated federal boarding school in the United States.

The boarding school system of years past tried to forcibly assimilate American Indians into white culture. Now Chemawa and the other seven off-reservation boarding schools are primarily dedicated to giving their students tools to cope with their problems and a measure of pride in who they are.

“In the early years, there was an attempt to change students, to take the Indian out of them,” said Supt. Louis King, an Oklahoma Seminole. “Today’s boarding schools are much more in tune with cultural issues and trying to protect them.”

That task can be daunting. About 400 students begin each school year at Chemawa. More than two dozen are homeless. More than 90% will be required to get some form of alcohol or drug treatment during their stay. Some are as many as three years behind in their classwork.

Only about 200 remain at the end of the school year, with around 50 graduating. Some students return to school or enroll in treatment programs back home, but many more fall through the cracks. Chemawa sent surveys to the more than 200 students who left last year, but only about 25 responded.

Chemawa and other federal boarding schools got $3,067 per student for their educational programs last year. That’s $600 less than the lowest statewide average spending by public school systems for the 1996-97 school year. The national average per-pupil spending that year was $5,661, according to the National Education Assn.

The school’s facilities and maintenance budget has been cut every year for the eight years King has been Chemawa’s superintendent.

Chemawa’s agricultural program, once the pride of the school, now runs only through donations from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Carpet hasn’t been replaced in some dorms and academic areas since the buildings opened in 1980--before most students were born.

“When these cuts build up year after year, things will eventually come crashing down on you,” King said.