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.”

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 American 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.

In May, research published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University predicted that springtime school shutdowns would result in children returning for the fall semester with 63% to 68% of the typical gains in reading and 37% to 50% in math.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers noted that setbacks would likely be greater for children of color and those who live in poverty — especially those without reliable internet.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/37crgUA