Volume 24 Number 1
January 1985

Stuecher, U.; Grossman, E.; Hakala, N.; and Kozlowski, G.

THERE EXISTS A great need in Minnesota Indian communities for trained Indian personnel to work with Indian children and parents in Public Schools and residential programs. The training program described in this paper represents a step toward fulfilling this need by training Indian community members as support personnel in "paraprofessional" roles. The project which will be described was administered cooperatively by the Indian Education Field/Office State Department of Education in Duluth, MN, the Indian Education Department of the Duluth Public Schools and faculty of the University of Minnesota, Duluth campus. The approximately 55 participants were drawn from Minnesota Ojibwe and Sioux Communities across the State. It should be noted that the basic concepts, content and methods of this training project were developed during a six-year training project for the Special Education Program on the Navajo Reservation at St. Michaels/Window Rock, AZ. A parallel program, conducted by the authors, is entering its third year in Southwestern Ontario, Canada, with members of the Ojibwe reserves.

The majority of the participants in the Minnesota project were primarily women, ranging in age from the early twenties to the early sixties. Approximately one-third provide service in urban settings while two-thirds serve in rural programs, usually connected to reservations. All the participants were hired from the Indian community for the most part without any previous professional experience in the human service field. Their level of education varied from no post secondary education for the great majority to a graduate school degree in a single case. They were considered "para-professionals" by the educational establishment since they lacked regular academic credentials and training for working with school-aged children and their families. On the other hand, they brought with them very valuable life and child-rearing experiences specific to the Indian urban and reservation realities. In other words, they had experienced first hand the many struggles involved in growing up Indian in today’s world and thus were qualified in an empirical sense to support Indian children and families and their involvement with a non-Indian Public School system.

The main functions of the Indian school liaison person (also referred to as Indian Social Work Aides) may be summarized as follows:

The content and format of the program which was developed to help the Indian Social Work Aides meet the challenges of their jobs is the topic of the first half of the following article. The second half offers a detailed evaluation of both the training program and the performance effectiveness of the Aides in their work.

Nearly all the participants in the training program lacked background in the theories, concepts, philosophy and terminology used in the Social Sciences and in Special Education. In order for the Aides to work as partners with other professionals aiding Indian children, it was of primary importance to close this educational gap. The Level I and Level II training phases (first and second year training) put an emphasis on the study of Special Education since a disproportionate number of Indian children are enrolled in special programs and the education and management of these children is of much concern to the public schools. The content of the four levels of training, each level representing a year’s work, focused on the following specific areas:

This level focused on interpersonal communication and social skills in order to allow the Indian Social Work Aides to interact more effectively with others; to help them better understand the behavior of others and to help them overcome anxieties and frustrations in professional and social situations. The content of this level was broken down into two main components:

The entire fourth level was dedicated to the problem of "burn-out" and stress in the human service field. Many aides expressed signs of work-related stress after two years in the field and the following topics were chosen to address this situation:

The aforementioned levels of training were established over the four-year period of the project and each year a new Level I group was formed to accommodate new Aides being hired. In order to accommodate the working schedules of the participants, the program was divided into four sessions spread over the academic year, each lasting two full days. For the first three sessions, each level of training met separately; the fourth session included all levels together, sharing ideas, experiences and suggestions.

Lecture presentations and group discussions were the major teaching modes employed in the program. Each two-day instruction session ended with a competency-based examination which had to be passed in order to receive the certificate of completion awarded to each level at the end of the year. In addition, a mandatory attendance regulation was enforced in order to emphasize the seriousness of the program. This condition plus the rigorous examinations had the effect of distinguishing this project from the average workshop, where socializing rather than learning often prevails. After a brief period of adjustment to the demands of the training program, the Indian Social Work Aides clearly enjoyed the challenges and achievements, which gave them a sense of professionalism and self-confidence based on knowledge and skills. During the final session of each year, a feast and Pow Wow was held, which included gift-giving and the honoring of the graduates with certificates and pins.

Descriptive data were collected to address four types of program objectives during the initial formative evaluation of the training project. These objectives were to (1) provide a high quality workshop training experience, (2) increase the problem advocacy abilities of the aides, (3) effectively impact problems of Indian students in the schools, and (4) describe the intervention role of the aides within the educational community.

To address objective one, the Indian Education Section, Minnesota State Department of Education, conducted an independent evaluation of the quality of the training experiences by requesting each participant to anonymously complete an opinion questionnaire at the end of each workshop. The participants were asked to rate the workshop presentations, the nominal group process employed, the background materials provided, the products developed, and the overall workshop experiences on four-step rating scales. These five scales were scored with I through 4 representing the scale anchors "poor," "good," "very good," and "excellent," respectively.

The 55 opinion survey respondents who evaluated the training workshops consisted of 30 first-year project participants (10 of whom left the project prior to their third year), an additional 15 second-year participants, and an additional 10 third-year participants. Each respondent participated in and evaluated three workshops during each year they were involved in the project. Consequently, a total of 360 workshop evaluation questionnaires were completed by these 55 respondents during the project’s first three years. A random sample of 231 (64%) of these questionnaires was selected as the data for addressing the quality of the workshop training experience.

A random sample of 15 of the 45 (33.3%) Indian Social Work Aides available at the end of the project’s third year provided the focal sample for assessing the effectiveness of the aides in advocating the resolution of student problems. A five-item attitude questionnaire was administered to each of these participants by staff members from the Indian Education Section, Minnesota State Department of Education. In addition, these staff members administered the same attitude questionnaire to random samples of six students, six school system personnel, and six parents who had been involved in an advocacy situation with each of the sampled aides during the academic year. A table of random numbers was used to select the respondent samples from each of the population listings. Respondents were assured their responses would be treated anonymously and confidentially and were asked to be as honest and frank as possible in completing the questionnaire.

The four samples of respondents were requested to rate the Indian Social Work Aide’s abilities to diagnose and identify the causes of advocated problems, to professionally manage a solution to the problem, to discuss problems with school system personnel, to discuss problems understandably with parents, and to help resolve problems in a manner suitable to all concerned parties. The rating for each item was to be indicated on a seven-step semantic differential evaluative dimension scale (Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum, 1957). The scale was scored from 1 through 7; with 1 representing the "extremely harmful" scale step, 4 representing the "neutral" or "indifferent" category, and 7 representing the "extremely helpful" scale step.

Random samples of 43, 30 and 31 students who were involved in advocacy contacts with the aides concerning attendance problems during the 1980 through 1983 academic years, respectively, constituted the participant samples for the absenteeism variable. A single-group pre-test/post-test design was used to structure fall semester (first two quarters) versus spring semester (second two quarters) data for each year. The actual number of days absent during each semester as recorded in each student’s official school record was used as the raw data in these comparisons.

Similarly, random samples of 68, 79, and 68 students who were involved in advocacy contacts of any kind during the 1980 through 1983 academic years, respectively, constituted the participant samples for the attitude toward education variable. A static-group comparison design was used to structure the data for this variable, however, with random samples of 14, 19, and 15 Indian students who were not involved in advocacy contacts with the aides serving as control respondents during the same academic years, respectively. A group-administered attitude toward education inventory consisting of ten Likert-type items (with a score of 5 representing the positive attitude end of each scale and a score of 1 representing the negative attitude end) was used a as the dependent variable measure. The mean score obtained across all ten items provided each student’s raw score for the analyses. The items consisted of generalized statements concerning various potential effects of education on citizenship, career success, personal happiness, job placement, and problem solving.

Data was also collected during the four year duration of the project from the same urban school system to describe the extent of the intervention role of the Indian Social Work Aides. All five Aides were required by the Indian Education Department to submit a formal report of each advocacy contact on a standardized form denoting the location (home visitation or in-school), purpose, number, and type(s) of people (student, parent, teacher, counselor, principal, other) involved in the contact. This record-keeping system worked well for major personal contacts, but failed to reflect the many phone calls and briefer contacts that occurred on a momentary, spontaneous basis. The advocacy contact locations, number, and types of people were coded, and verified as computer files for subsequent analyses.

Table 1 contains the means, standard deviations, and sample sizes for the evaluative scale ratings assigned components of the Indian Social Work Aide training workshops in a random sample of 64% of the opinion questionnaires completed by the workshop participants. A mean rating of four would represent the highest possible positive opinion ("excellent") of the workshop component, whereas a mean rating of one would represent the lowest possible negative opinion ("poor"). The sample sizes in the first two tables vary significantly due to missing data on some questionnaire items.

An inspection of the means and standard deviations in Table I reveals that the participants accorded all workshop components a mean rating between the "very good" and "excellent" anchors on the rating scales with little variability in their responses.

TABLE 1
MEAN EVALUATIVE RATINGS ASSIGNED
TRAINING WORKSHOP COMPONENTS BY PARTICIPANTS

Table 2 contains the means, standard deviation, and sample sizes for all attitude scale ratings assigned to components of the Indian Social Work Aides’ ability to advocate problem solutions for Indian students by affected students, parents, school system personnel, and the Aides themselves. A mean rating of seven would represent the highest possible positive attitudinal statement ("extremely helpful"), whereas a mean rating of one would represent the most negative attitudinal statement ("extremely harmful").

An inspection of the means and standard deviations in Table 2 reveals that each of the four personnel samples rated all components of the Indian Social Work Aides’ abilities to resolve student problems through advocacy very high and with little disagreement within the samples. The mean ratings across the five advocacy competencies ranged from a low of 6.013 to a high of 6.430 indicating that all mean ratings would be somewhere between the verbal scale anchors of "quite helpful" and "extremely".

TABLE 2
MEAN ATTITUDINAL RATINGS ASSIGNED TO COMPONENTS
OF THE AIDE’S PROBLEM ADVOCACY ABILITIES BY FOUR
INVOLVED PERSONNEL SAMPLES

Table 3 contains the means, standard deviations, and sample sizes for a three-year comparison of fall semester absences with spring semester absences for three samples of Indian students who received advocacy services for absenteeism during fall semester of each respective academic year. All students represented in Table 3 and Table 4 were from one large urban school system.

Three t-tests for dependent groups indicated that the mean number of fall absences obtained by the three groups of advocated students was significantly greater than the mean number of spring absences obtained by the same groups during each of the three academic years.

Table 4 contains the means, standard deviations, and sample sizes for a comparison of three different groups of advocated students with control groups of non-advocated students on the attitude toward education measure over three academic years. A mean score of five on the measure would indicate the most positive attitude possible, whereas a mean score of one would indicate the most negative attitude.

The t-tests for independent groups revealed that the mean attitude toward education obtained from advocated students was significantly greater than the mean attitude toward education obtained from non-advocated students during all three academic years.

Data tabulated from the formal advocacy contact reports submitted by each of the five Indian Social Work Aides from the fall of 1980 through the spring of 1983 provided a means of describing the degree to which the aides were involved with students and the educational community at large. Each advocate completed a mean of 363.4 reported advocacy contacts per year. Home visits accounted for a mean of 117. 1 of these contacts, in-school meetings accounted for a mean of 228.1 contacts, while other types of visits (telephone, street, corridor, etc.) accounted for a mean of 18.2 contacts. Overall, then, the five advocates completed and reported 5,451 formal advocacy contacts over the three year duration of the training project.

TABLE 3
MEAN NUMBER OF FALL VERSUS SPRING
ABSENCES FOR ADVOCATED STUDENTS

TABLE 4
MEAN ATTITUDE TOWARD EDUCATION
FOR ADVOCATED AND NONADVOCATED STUDENTS

A final measure tabulated from the formal advocacy contact reports was the number of advocacy contacts participated in by different types of people over the three year reporting period. This was considered another measure of Aide involvement in the educational system since the formal contacts involved a mean of 3.95 persons per contact (including the Aide). On the average (means), students were involved in 1,725 advocacy contacts per year, parents in 1,466.5 contacts per year, teachers in 1,095.5 contacts per year, counselors in 493, principals in 376.5, psychologists in 86, and other individuals in 621.5 contacts per year.

The above results establish convincingly that the Indian school liaison personnel performed their duties remarkably given a modicum of professional training. As a professional group they made a strong impact on the schooling process of Indian youth, and in their roles as advocates for Indian children and Indian culture they had a significant impact on the community as a whole--Indian and non-Indian. Furthermore, the extraordinarily high caseloads and many contact hours demonstrate the great need for the Indian advocate service in the schools.

As the Indian Social Work Aides advanced in the training program, the attitudes towards them held by other professionals changed dramatically. Initially, the program participants complained that other professionals resisted accepting them as partners. However, the data indicates that by the third year of training the Aides were receiving very high ratings across the board for their professional performance by these same professionals. Of special note are the high marks accorded for professional communication abilities, one of the major components of the training program.

All of the above suggests that, given a quality training program, Indian people with only a minimum of prior experience will rapidly assume professional roles and will be effective in improving Indian children’s chances in the education process as well as significantly facilitate the non-Indian school system’s goals of an appropriate and relevant education for Indian children.

But training programs for Indian "paraprofessionals" should be regarded as a first step in Indian professional involvement in the educational process. The next important goal should be to help as many of the Aides as possible to solidify their skills and knowledge through courses of study leading to formal academic credentials and professional status. Thus, such a training program could act as an important stepping stone towards ever-greater Indian participation in, and impact on, the educational process.

1. Felton, Gary S. The Counselor Aide for Special Education Training Program: A New Two-Year Paraprofessional Curriculum in the Community College. Community College Social Science Journal, v2, n3, p. 17-26, 1978.

2. Felton, Gary S. and Hall, Howard B. Changing Roles in Special Education. A New Paraprofessional Comes to the Classroom. College Student Journal: 10; 204-211, 1976.

3. Hayes, Susanna. The Counselor Aide: Helping Services for Native American Students. Journal of American Indian Education; v18, n3, p. 5-11, May 1979.

Dr. Uwe’Stuecher is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, Duluth, MN 55812. Nora Hakala is a Supervisor with the Indian Education Field Office, State Department of Education, Duluth, MN 55802. Dr. Eugene Grossman is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. Geraldine Hozlowski is Director of the Indian Education Department, Duluth Public Schools, Duluth, MN 55802.