FAR WEST of the lush farm lands of eastern South Dakota are the rolling, barren prairies along the White River, which is Todd County and the western quarter of the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation.
Todd County is a school district encompassing 2,400 square miles, with a student enrollment of 1,800, two-thirds of whom are Indian. Almost 20 percent of the 1,200 to 1,300 Indian students who are enrolled in the Todd County school district live in dormitories in Mission, a town of about 800 persons that is the trading post for the ranch families in that area.
There is little to set Mission apart from similar small towns in western South Dakota. The streets are as dusty as most, the wooden frame buildings need paint, and trees are few and far between.
Most conspicuous, however, is the education facility. In the spring of 1966, a $4-million school complex was completed. It involved an ultra-modern high school, two dormitories, a cafeteria, and housing for the teaching staff and for Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) personnel.
The plant previously used as the high school was converted to a grade school for grades 4-6 and the old 1-6 grade school is now used for the first three grades and kindergarten.
The boys’ and girls’ dormitories and cafeteria were built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Federal and school district funds were used to construct the high school.
Glenn Barnes, superintendent of schools, says the BIA went out of the school business three years ago when the complex was completed. "The bureau now has control over the dormitories and the district runs the schools," said Barnes.
The bureau, the school district and the U. S. Office of Education are partners in an experiment with the dormitories, the school, faculty and parents involved. That experiment, described as "tremendously successful" by Barnes, is one involving dormitory and classroom aides whose purpose is two-fold: To help the teacher with routine work and to serve as a substitute parent for many of the Indian children.
The aide program, employing 26 Caucasian and Indian men and women throughout the school district, is supported by the U. S. Office of Education through the Follow Through program and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and by the district.
The aides, many of whom have children attending school, are selected not for their educational achievements but for the particular skills needed to fulfill the duties. "We screen them very carefully," Barnes says, "and we pick the aide to fit the situation. We want aides with whom the youngsters can identify easily and who can also fit into the classroom situation."
Marvin Pickner, an elementary school principal, says the aides serve even a third purpose, that of providing the parents with someone with whom they can identify and so help bring about closer ties between home and school. He said two of the main problems on the reservation involve making Indian parents aware of the needs of the school and, frequently, of their own youngsters’ need for an education.
"Many of the aides come from the same environment these youngsters are accustomed to," Pickner says, "and the parents are willing to talk more freely with them than with a teacher or administrator. As a result, we are bringing the adults closer to the school and, in many cases, closer to their own children."
"A large group of the Indians would be designated impoverished by most standards," Pickner says. "Most of the youngsters in the dormitories are living what they would call the ‘good life’ compared to what they are used to. They are enjoying a balanced diet, warm quarters and adequate clothing for the first time. The one thing . . . lacking is the parental image and that’s why we have aides," Pickner says.
The guidance supervisor for the Bureau of Indian Affairs dormitory operation, George Keller, himself an Indian and a native of the Rosebud Reservation, says he doubts that many of the Indian youngsters have a parental image.
"The kids get lonesome for their families and try to run away once in awhile, but I don’t think there is any parental image there. . . . We should be able to give these youngsters more than board and room in our program," Keller says, "because if we don’t, then this home life section isn’t succeeding."
Keller does believe the dormitory and classroom aide program is succeeding with the younger children, but he thinks it needs expanding. "These kids have been banged around from house to house, from town to town and from school to school. You can’t heal in two years what has been lifelong damage. They have known irresponsibility most of their lives and what is really needed is for them to assume more responsibility for themselves, for what they do, for what they haven’t done."
One who agrees with Keller is a high school faculty member for seven years, Floyd Lomica, driver training instructor and varsity basketball ball coach. "I know these kids are living much better in the dorms they would at home and it is helping the young ones, but something is missing. "Perhaps," Lomica muses, "it’s not having someone to answer to for bad or mediocre grades. The dad, the mother isn’t there to crack the whip. The youngsters have better attitudes today then they had five years ago, but something—call it motivation, for lack of a better word—is missing. It’s just that too many of the older ones are satisfied with mediocrity."
Why are the youngsters living in dormitories, who are they, where do they come from?
Pickner says there are three reasons why students live in dormitories: "Either, their homes are too far from school to travel back and forth each day, they are welfare charges or they have social problems." "Most," he says, "fit into the latter two categories. Some live in the far reaches of the county and would find it practically impossible to commute daily."
Many Indian parents, lacking the skill, training or education for employment, live in economic chaos. One-, two- and three-room shacks account for much of the housing on the reservation although in the past couple of years the BIA has helped Indian families construct new housing through self-help, community co-operation and long-term, lowinterest loans.
"Some of these kids have never seen their dad go to work," Keller says. "Many cannot visualize what most youngsters take for granted."
Not all the students in the dormitories are from the Rosebud Reservation. "We get youngsters from many of the larger cities in the state and from some neighboring towns," Pickner says. "Those young people are sent here by welfare authorities either because they are being neglected or because they have social problems, or both." He said many authorities feel the semi-controlled dormitory situation can best solve minor delinquency problems. Pickner, who has worked closely with the program since its inception, agrees.
The children in the dormitories range from kindergarteners to high school seniors. Dormitory aides work with five-to-eight-year-old youngsters while classroom aides work in kindergarten and the first three grades.
Other aides in the upper primary grades and the junior and senior high school divide their time between helping teachers with routine work so that teachers can provide more individual help to students and serving as substitute parents, so to speak, for the students.
The dormitory facilities accommodate about 320 youngsters. During one week last fall there were 125 boys and 121 girls in residence. "The numbers vary," says boys’ dormitory supervisor Charles Gustafson, "because we have a certain percentage of parents who either pick up or drop their children on short notice."
Before youngsters are admitted to the dormitories, clearance must be gained through BIA officials. If the need is apparent—for the child’s welfare—the process is a simple one. Gustafson recalled that just two days before, parents had left a son and two daughters at the dorm. "They had lived in Rapid City (150 miles west) and then had gone to California and came back to drop the kids off here before heading for Denver," Gustafson said.
Gustafson, who quit coaching at nearby Pine Ridge High School last year to accept the supervisor’s job, is most familiar with the difficulties the Indian youngsters encounter as they try to adjust to a strange and sometimes complex society. He spent eight years at the predominantly-Indian Pine Ridge school.
"These youngsters live only for today," Gustafson says. "Tomorrow is not important to them. We’re trying to change all that and I think we are succeeding. But who can tell? We’ll know the answer in several years."
Gustafson says he believes the aides work well within the framework of the present age group served now, but doubts that children older than eight would accept that type of supervision.
His counterpart, Mrs. Catherine Bordeaux, girls’ dormitory supervisor, disagrees. She says her fourth-graders feel left out. "Sometimes they follow the younger children and the aides, wanting to join the activities, so we have to place them off by themselves."
The six dormitory aides are Indian women. Most, like Mrs. Leona Waln, have raised large families of their own. Mrs. Waln, whose own eight children range in age from 20 to 36, says of the second grade girls to whom she acts as parent: "We have no special difficulties, just our little problems everyday. You have to baby them a little and you have to scold them once in awhile."
The cafeteria serves three meals daily to the dormitory children and lunch to day students at South Elementary School and the Todd County Junior-Senior High School. The cafeteria also has a role in the overall program of social adjustment, which the aides seek to instill in their young charges. While the rest of the dormitory residents walk through the buffet-style line for the evening meal, one class from the first three grades spends two consecutive weeks learning the social graces of family style dining in a room set apart from the main dining hall. The little ones set their own tables, serve themselves and clean up afterwards
Mrs. Bordeaux says, "They certainly eat a lot better there than in the cafeteria with all its distractions and, just as important, they are learning good table manners. Learning by doing is the secret to whatever success we may have here. We try to make this as much like home as possible. They learn to hang up their clothes and put them in closets and take care of the little things—just like they would be doing at home."
Gustafson carries the "just like home" theory a bit further. Although "lights out" for the dormitories range from 8 until 9:30 p.m. depending upon age, he lets aides break the curfew hours once in awhile. "If there is a particularly good television show on—one which I think the kids would enjoy—I tell the aides to let them stay up late. After all," Gustafson says, "we’re trying to have a family setting here and I think most parents bend the bedtime rule once in awhile."
The aides also take the little ones uptown on occasional Saturday afternoons. "We want to teach them how to spend money, what to spend it on and so forth," says Mrs. Bordeaux.
The dormitory aides are a spin-off from Head Start and Follow Through programs. The Todd County district was one of the original 40 funded for pilot Follow Through programs in 1967 and the first to receive funds for an Indian reservation.
Follow Through is designed to do exactly what the name implies, to build and augment in the primary grades the gains that children have made in a full-year Head Start or similar preschool program. Authorized under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, as amended, Follow Through is administered by the U. S. Office of Education. A comprehensive program, it includes special programs of instruction, health and dental care, nutrition, social and psychological services, staff training and the active involvement of parents in its planning and operation.
The first Follow Through program in Todd County was funded for the 1967-68 school year, the second for 1968-69. The program has been expanded for the 1969-70 school year and will be operated from kindergarten through third grade. Barnes and Pickner say their long-range ambition is to conduct Follow Through programs through the first six grades, money permitting, by adding a grade a year. During the 1968-69 school year 100 students were enrolled in Follow Through programs in Todd County; in 1969-70 about 500 students will be affected.
In the spring of 1967, the Title I aide program was written by Barnes and Pickner to supplement the Follow Through program, which was then limited to first grade. "We had youngsters who would have been neglected because they were not included in other programs," Pickner says, "so we applied for Title I funds to fill in these gaps."
Pickner says the Follow Through programs affect not only the students enrolled in them but scores of others who benefit by being in the classrooms. Many, however, were being left out. "We felt that exclusion would hurt those youngsters emotionally and academically and we decided to do something about it," he says.
Specifically, the children who would be neglected were the dormitory residents. Aides in the classrooms could handle only so many children and could not provide that necessary "parental image" to the others.
Dormitory aides, on the other hand, can help provide resident youngsters with some of the benefits other children receive from the involvement of parents in the schools, which is part of the Follow Through program.
Formerly, salaries for the dormitory aides - there are three in the girls’ dormitory and three in the boys’—were paid through Title I (one aide for each dormitory) and through Follow Through funds (two for each dormitory). For the present school year, all aides will be paid through Follow Through funds.
Maurice Aird, school librarian, exclaims the aide program is "the best thing that ever happened" at the school. He believes aides are "practically indispensable in the lower grades" and says he wouldn’t know what to do without aides’ help as he continues to build the library.
The classroom aides have been paid $1.60 an hour for a 35-hour week. The dormitory aides receive an extra 15 cents an hour because of the night work and Saturday duties. In the 1969-70 school year new classroom aides are receiving $1.60 an hour and experienced classroom aides $1.70. New dormitory aides will receive $1.70 an hour, experienced ones, $1.80.
One of the aides in the North Elementary School last year, Mrs. Janet McLean, was a certified teacher, former instructor and wife of a senior English teacher. Because of a new baby in the family, she didn’t accept a teacher’s contract but took an aide position. She ended in the classroom anyway, where she had almost the same duties as her boss, Tom Raymond, a developmental reading teacher.
Another elementary school had enough aides so that practically every teacher had one assigned to the classroom, to help as "secondary teachers," as Gladys Larsen, then principal of South Elementary School, explained, and to do routine work such as correcting papers and helping organize activities.
One high school aide worked with girls’ physical education, another helped in the guidance department and others were on call for clerical help from the faculty. "It just gives our teachers more time to do what they’re paid to do," Barnes says, "teach."
Dormitory aides all have the same role, substitute mother, and none enjoys it more than does Mrs. Waln.
"A couple youngsters keep telling me, ‘I wish you were my grandma.’ I get six kisses every night," Mrs. Waln smiled. "What more could a woman ask?"
