BENA, Minn. — When temperatures drop and snow falls, students bundle themselves in heavy coats inside Marlene Stately’s classroom. Winter comes early and hits hard on this Indian reservation in Minnesota, and the pole barn that houses part of the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School offers limited protection from the elements.
“I think we need a new school,” Stately said last month after her upper-grade students practiced introducing themselves in the Ojibwe language. “It’s cold here in the wintertime. And how can you learn when you’re freezing?”
In the US Bureau of Indian Education system, the facilities of Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig, named for a late member of the tribe, are far from unique. The network of 185 congressionally funded schools in 23 states is in the midst of a broad overhaul, but decades of neglect have left reservations with schools where students struggle to meet academic standards, turnover among educators is high; and buildings are in decay.
Students at Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig speak highly of their teachers — the school is “like a family,” said Terrance Warner, a senior — and administrators work to ingrain Ojibwe culture in the curriculum. Still, school leaders say, there is a toll taken by cold rooms and the poorly ventilated science lab.
“If the kids are going into a school with a leaky roof and a bad smell, that’s a value thing, that nobody cares,” said Crystal Redgrave, the school superintendent, who said she suspected the building’s condition had contributed to a steep drop in enrollment, which is now about 200 students. “But if they go to a well-equipped school, they’d see people really do care.”
Officials at the US Department of the Interior say they are working to improve schools.
But with limited funding and a backlog of repairs — the government estimates that it would cost $1.3 billion to restore all buildings to good condition — some administrators and students wonder when they will see the fruits of those policies.