Life At an Indian School

Scott Mahaskey:

The Navajo reservation that stretches across vast swaths of desert in northern Arizona and New Mexico is home to 66 schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education. The landscape might be breathtaking, but the dilapidated condition of the schools is eye-popping for another reason. Despite well-documented needs for renovations, the schools linger unattended for years. The buildings that often need the most attention is housing for teachers, who sometimes must commute hours to reach the remote campuses. This makes hiring qualified instructors more difficult and hinders efforts to improve abysmally low scores on reading and math tests.