Senators want accurate count of Native students
CHINLE
Three U.S. senators have accused the Bureau of Indian Education of using severely outdated data to determine distribution of Johnson-O’Malley funds, and have introduced legislation requiring the U.S. Department of the Interior to update its records and the BIE to recalculate the distribution.
According to senators Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.), the BIE is currently basing its distribution on demographic data from 1995. Since then, two U.S. Censuses have taken place, with the last one — in 2010 — finding the country’s Native American population had increased by nearly one-third since 2000.
This has resulted, the lawmakers say, in severely underfunding Johnson-O’Malley, the federal program that guarantees cultural education in public schools and aims at increasing Native students’ success in school and graduation rates.
Additionally, using old population data has likely affected the distribution of these funds to individual school districts since the Native population in some areas may have grown more than others in the 20 years since the last data were collected.
While the last official count by the BIA identified 271,884 Native students eligible for Johnson-O’Malley resources, the National Congress of American Indians, in a 2013 resolution supporting the recount, cites a Senate report that found 690,000 school-age Native children, 93 percent of whom attend public schools and should be eligible for the funding.
That works out to 641,700, leaving almost 370,000 qualified children who are not benefitting from the current program.
The BIE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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