The mandatory, across-the-board budget cuts from the federal sequestration are
causing little noticeable effect on most school campuses, but schools for Native
Americans are already feeling the pinch.
Jacquelyn Power and her students have been living with less since last November.
Power is both superintendent and principal of the tiny Blackwater Community
School on Arizona's Gila River Indian Reservation, one of about 1,300 school
districts nationwide that receives federal Impact Aid for schools that can't
collect local property taxes. So they're preparing for a hard school year,
perhaps one of the hardest since the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs built
Blackwater in 1939.
"We have this amazing little school that is beating the odds," she said, "but
you can't continue to keep it up with no funding."
Schools both on federal Indian land and military bases receive Impact Aid, but
children on Indian lands account for nearly half of Impact Aid dollars, even
though they're outnumbered by military kids. While federal funding generally
accounts for about 10% of most districts' budgets, in schools such as
Blackwater, it can account for one-third or more of the budget.
When Powers' annual check arrived last November, it totaled only about 70% of
what she was expecting. Anticipating the mandatory cuts originally due to hit
this past January, federal bookkeepers cut her a check with a $62,000 hole in
the middle. "That's a huge amount of money in our budget," she said. Add to that
the first round of anticipated federal cuts for both poor and disabled children
and she expects class sizes to rise. She has already spent most of her emergency
fund.
A few hours east, Window Rock, Ariz., Superintendent Deborah Jackson-Dennison
confirmed, "We're already under the sequester, right now." As she spoke
Thursday, principals were gathered in a conference room down the hall from her
Fort Defiance, Ariz., office, trying to figure out how to select teachers for
pink slips. Thirty-five teachers have already said they'll leave the district
this spring, but Jackson-Dennison needs to trim another 17. She began the school
year with 179 teachers and can afford only 127 next fall. "The word has been out
about this," Jackson-Dennison said. "People are leaving on their own."
She plans to close or consolidate three of her seven schools.
John Forkenbrock, executive director of the National Association of Federally
Impacted Schools, said he's getting phone calls and e-mails from superintendents
looking for help putting together their 2013-14 budgets, but uncertainty about
how the sequestration will play out means he can't really help them. Districts
could get a little relief as the federal budget process plays out. Power's 70%
could eventually rise to 80% when final numbers are in.
Jackson-Dennison said she's not sure where her laid-off teachers, 80% of whom
are Navajo, will find work. Albuquerque is a three-hour drive and that district
is feeling the sequestration's effects, too. "They're from here and many
generations have been here," she said. The school district is "the only solid
structure that they can rely on."
