San Carlos Unified School District’s strengthened community partnerships and culturally responsive approach

The San Carlos Unified School District (SCUSD) recently held a series of meetings with a broad range of community stakeholders to track the progress of its schools and plot a roadmap for future success.

The meetings, dubbed “A Journey of Progress and Resilience,” explored several aspects of district schools, from curriculum to the learning environment to parent and community participation and student performance, with an emphasis on specific aspects of the state’s letter grading system for public schools.

Stakeholders included the San Carlos Police Department, representatives of state and federal elected officials and a number of academic institutions, including San Carlos Apache College, Gila Pueblo Community College as well as the San Carlos Education Department.

After an initial strategizing session, SCUSD administrators presented their concepts to the District Board and then to the public.

“Students are receiving a well-rounded, culturally responsive education experience and we are excited by what is taking place,” says Assistant Superintendent Shawn Pietila. “We’re producing talented and culturally rich students who have gone on to become entrepreneurs, business owners, architects, engineers, teachers, judges, members of the military and police officers to name a few professions. There are a lot of success stories, but what we commonly hear about is poverty and unemployment on the Reservation.”

Pietila adds that focusing on negatives instead of improvements taking place within the District distracts from progress that is being made.

“We need to abandon the deficit mindset thinking we are ‘less than’ because of the challenges we face,” Pietila says. “Instead, we are in the process of asset mapping and focusing our energy into the tremendous resources available to our community that spans over 1.8 million acres.”

Many of the social indicators presented paint a dire portrait from a statistical point of view, and the school grading system is often slow to react to improvements, particularly for schools in rural Arizona.

The San Carlos Reservation has several disadvantages over its neighbors to the west, with an unemployment rate of 65%, well above the national average. Likewise, the poverty rate is much higher at 44%, with the national average at 12%.

As to higher education, only 4% of San Carlos Apache students are likely to attain a bachelor’s degree or higher, falling behind the U.S. average of 36%.

Another problem with perception is the A-F Accountability System, letter grades the state assigns to public schools. The letter grading system was put in place by the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 to create federal standards of measure for a school’s performance. When NCLB was repealed in 2015, it was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act that relegated the grading system to the states.

Grading is based on various criteria, such as student achievement, growth, and progress, although the criteria for letter grades has changed multiple times since inception of the scale.

In addition to byzantine complexity of the system, grading was suspended twice over the past decade. From 2014-2017, the Arizona Board of Education suspended the program due to problems with a new statewide standardized test. Additionally, when the COVID pandemic shut much of society down in 2019, grading was again suspended from 2019 through 2021.

Several other factors converged to perpetuate low initial grades for the District, but since Dennison began her tenure, school performance and student achievement has improved substantially.

“When I started here in 2016, we had similar types of meetings with different districts in the area,” Dennison says. “We used that to develop our mission and our vision and moved forward from there with our strategic plan, which has been in place since the 2016-17 school year.”

The plan focused on student achievement, but also on improving the lives of San Carlos students suffering the ill-effects of poverty and marginalization.

Many of the improvements have come out of the philosophy of SHIŁ GOZHÓÓ, which means “I am happy; I’m in harmony, I am balanced,” according to Dennison.

The District also created programs focused on teaching and perpetuating San Carlos Apache language and culture in order to provide students with an identity to help them navigate their problems and interpret the wider world.

To provide further stability in the learning environment, SCUSD implemented its Cultural Success Coaching Program to offer a safe space for troubled students as well as counseling and material support during the school year.

“We’ve been designing the systems that will meet a reconciliation of knowledge and wisdom,” Dennison says. “Knowledge is Western academic knowledge and the wisdom is the Apache elders added to the work we do in using cultural relevancy to address the needs of our school district.”

The cultural program is an example of partnerships outside of the District with many of the program’s success coaches coming from the San Carlos Wellness Center. Stephen Pahe, grant coordinator for the Center, was on-hand at the public meeting to show support and seek new ways to partner with the District to improve the lives of students.

“The schools give us a great opportunity to hold classes, sessions, outreach, and prevention presentations we have on drugs, alcohol and suicide,” Pahe says. “We continue to provide services for the school so that we can build on this relationship, and that’s what I like about people seeing the difference we can create, and the importance of collaboration here in the community.”

While cultural heritage plays a prominent role in improved outcomes for San Carlos students, school safety is also important to ensure a good environment for students to function.

San Carlos Police Chief Elliot Sneezy says he attended the meetings to address a need for a School Resource Officer and the possibility of creating a program to recruit candidates to work in the SCPD.

Sneezy says that one reason there is no SRO for the District is because it is hard to find enough officers to patrol the Reservation’s 1.8 million acres. He also wants to increase the number of officers familiar with the Reservation and its people.

“I’m trying to make sure I have contacts with the school so that if somebody doesn’t know what they’re going to do after high school we can develop them and train them, like the Explorer Program,” Sneezy says. “In San Carlos, we lose a lot of good applicants because of the bad activities they sometimes get involved with between the ages of 18 and 21 and they no longer become hireable because of Arizona police standards.”

Thanks partly to stability achieved under Dennison’s leadership, individual school grades are on the upswing. The District is currently appealing the “C” letter grade of San Carlos High School in hopes of raising it to a “B,” and the letter grades for Rice Elementary and San Carlos Middle School are a few points from the next level—Rice is 5.5 points from a “C” and SCMS is 1.97 points from a “C.”

Gilson Wash Councilman Simon Hooke attended the meeting to determine where the Tribe’s visions for the future align with the District’s goals for improved student outcomes.

Hooke says it is important to recruit Tribal members for positions within Tribal government and for concerns such as the San Carlos Apache Healthcare Corporation. He says that about 70% of workers at SCAHC are Tribal members from San Carlos.

“We’ve got the hospital with homegrown nurses and we’ve got San Carlos Apache Telecommunication Utility Incorporated, and 95% of those employees are tribal members,” Hooke says. “We have the tribal farm, those employees, the manager and others, are tribal members, and they’re doing a great job.”

He adds that while improvements take time, the focus on homegrown talent can also benefit the SCUSD and other Tribal entities in the future.

“Students can get involved with the schools, or somewhere in the education field so they will be able to become teachers or part of the school district,” Hooke says. “We just need to encourage them more so we can have more community members involved in the education of our students.”

High points of the District’s recent improvement include increased graduation rates of 70% to 82% at SCHS with chronic absenteeism dropping by more the 20% over the course of the past two years. Teacher retention at all schools has improved and leadership turnover has decreased during Dennison’s time as Superintendent. Increased enrollment and improvements to curriculum and instruction have also played a role in the turnaround.

“Considering where we started in 2016 and how low the school district was, and all the things that went into getting it restructured, reorganized, putting the pieces in places, we’ve moved forward a lot,” Dennison says. “It’s like building a house: you have to put the foundation in place, and you have to build a strong foundation, and then start building up from there. If you build a house without putting down a foundation, you won’t succeed.”