Navajo school, students fight to overcome amid COVID-19
PINON, Arizona — One student runs 85 feet up a hill every morning, just to get a cellphone signal so he can call in his attendance. Another moved to Phoenix by himself, after his only parent died of COVID-19, to work construction while going to school online.
Then there’s the high school senior who spends six hours most days doing homework in a car next to a school bus turned Wi-Fi hotspot — the only way some kids on the Navajo Nation can get assignments to their teachers.
These kids share a dream: to graduate high school, find a way to go to college, get a degree, land a dream job — get out of their small town, succeed and soar.
Even in the best of times, that dream is harder for Native American students to attain. And now COVID-19 has brought one of the greatest challenges yet to these young people.
For them, it’s about so much more than being separated from friends or having to figure out how to use Zoom. All that isolation and upheaval has been accompanied by death and great loss.
Across the Navajo reservation, victims of COVD-19 include parents and grandparents, sole guardians and providers, mentors and teachers. Without them, some students have lost their way or, quite literally, fallen off the map.
Said one district superintendent: “We have some kids that we just don’t know where they are.”
A SCHOOL DISTRICT FIGHTS TO SURVIVE
The drive from Flagstaff northeast to Piñon takes more than two hours over a two-lane highway and dirt road. Just a few hundred families live in this community, in modest houses scattered across hills roamed by horses and dotted with brush.
A single campus accommodates the elementary, middle and high schools.
Here, on a reservation the size of West Virginia, the COVID-19 death rate has been higher than that of any U.S. state. So even as some schools reopened for in-person learning this fall, those on the Navajo reservation did not.
Without the 300 students who normally fill its cafeteria, crowd its lockers and seek help in its counseling offices, Piñon High’s cavernous hallways are unnaturally quiet. Do-not-disturb signs hang on classroom doors, indicating Zoom sessions in progress.
Inside one empty room, a carpentry teacher plays heavy metal music and bobs his head at his desk. In another, science teacher James Gustafson’s lab tables are covered with surplus VHS videos that he’s sorting through for hidden gems.
“‘ Citizen Kane!’” he says. “That makes it all worth it.”
On Gustafson’s desk are printed progress reports adhered to colorful construction paper. They identify students anonymously by a number, tracking their scores on weekly quizzes. He’s preparing to hang them in the halls for other teachers to see.
The grades are far worse than what he saw last year.
“These are ungodly low compared to how they should be,” he said, “because I’ve given the students who’ve turned nothing in — and there’s a lot of them — I’ve given the students who’ve turned nothing in a zero.”
Even before the pandemic, Native youth had the highest dropout rates in the U.S., leaving school at more than twice the rate of white children, according to federal statistics.
Likewise, the graduation rate for American Indian and Alaska Native children is the lowest in the country — 72%, compared with a national average of 85%.
“Distressing” is how a report from the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators described the state of education for K-12 schools for Native students. And the pandemic has only served to further spotlight disparities.
More than 600 of the Navajo reservation’s 173,000 residents have died from COVID- 19. Compare that rate of 347 for every 100,000 people to Maricopa County — Arizona’s largest — where the death rate is 86 per 100,000 people.
The risk of returning to class is greater on the reservation, and the price of keeping schools closed is steeper.
Piñon High School Principal Timothy Nelson said COVID-19 has claimed at least six parents and two district staff members — a front office worker and a teaching assistant.
“Some people may think it’s a joke and it’s not a big deal,” Nelson said of the disease. “But when you’re living with it and you see it, it’s not so much a joke anymore.”
Darrick Franklin, an education program manager with the Department of Diné Education, spent months working with officials in New Mexico and Arizona to keep schools on the reservation closed as others around them reopened or went to hybrid learning.
The focus for Franklin’s department, he said, is to “protect the Navajo people” — a sentiment shared across Navajo leadership. In August, President Jonathan Nez issued a statement urging schools to remain virtual until at least 2021 to protect the safety of students, teachers and staff members.
“At this point in time, we have to protect our children, our families, our elderly,” Franklin said. “Especially our elderly, because they are the storytellers … they are the heart of the Navajo Nation.”
Shaken by the personal impact of the pandemic, teachers, parents and students are overcoming uncommon obstacles to learn at a distance.
Chris Ostgaard, superintendent of the Piñon district, said only about 50% of students have some form of internet connection — whether it be broadband, a slow satellite connection or just a phone with a data plan.