Glenn Gilman:

"There are two histories of Hopi Junior/Senior High School. One is the history with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the other is the history post-Bureau of Indian Affairs. And so we look at Hopi Junior/Senior High School is a result of a settlement between the Navajo and Hopi tribes and that settlement was the 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement. And so arising out of the Navajo Hopi Land Settlement was the fact that Hopi would get a Junior/Senior High School to accommodate approximately 800 students and also, the Hopi Tribe would have an Indian Health Service Hospital built in exchange for the Navajos getting clear distinction on what is Navajo-partitioned land, Hopi-partitioned land joint-use area, and also a section somewhere in between Keams Canyon and Jeddito called Jeddito Island and it's a unique piece of land. It's really ceded to the Navajo Nation, but yet, it's surrounded by the Hopi tribal lands.

And so out of that, we had Hopi Junior/Senior High School completed in 1986 and it was a Bureau-operated school. And I think what you'll find is that the facility itself was exquisite. I mean, it's a $26 million facility; a lot of really fine classrooms and a really fine gymnasium and auditorium, but what we found was we didn't have any operating funds. And so from 1986 until 1995, we ran budget deficits of approximately $400,000 per year. And most of those budget deficits rose out of the fact that we have a huge transportation bill and our transportation budget exceeded the amount that was given to us by approximately $400,000. So we transport approximately today 19 buses over 1,700 miles to pick up and deliver children to their homes. That's paid for and we get a certain amount per mile through our ISEP funding, Indian School Equalization Program funds through the Office of Indian Education Programs. What we don't get funded for is the activity runs that we run after school. Those number something like 2,000 miles per day, also. So we run buses to and from and to and from and we pick up the tab. And that was cutting into our educational funds and so can you imagine a school with one photocopier for nine years? And there were times when teachers would run up to the school, such as me, at 2:00 in the morning on Sunday morning just to make sure that I had my photocopies for the week because once the copier broke down, it meant writing all that information on the board so that students could copy it and take it home. So we were really a very poor school and instead of having 800 students attend we had approximately 350. And so the funding issue arose because we were undermanned as far as students. We could not attract the other 500 students.

In 1995, we decided to go grant and what grant means is that under Public Law 100-297 the federal government offered the Hopi Tribe, as part of the Sovereignty Act, the opportunity to take over Hopi Junior/Senior High School. And by taking it over, they would become then the grantee and the school board then would administer that grant for the Hopi Tribe. And so there are three issues here that I'll discuss. One is Hopi tribal sovereignty and I think that's important in this whole decision because without the ability for Hopi Junior/Senior High School to run its own affairs and to localize its own decisions, our success would not be possible. The second item that I think is important is continuity. Before 1995, we had no less than 80 percent turnover rate for those nine years in each consecutive year. And so in order to attract additional students we had to retain the teachers and the staff that we had. So that was an issue that we needed to deal with. Between 1986 and 1995, Hopi Junior/Senior High School had 17 principals and junior high principals, an average of two a year that resigned and were replaced and sometimes they weren't even replaced. And so the system was hurting and it was ill. And so the Hopi Tribe and the Hopi Junior/Senior High governing board decided to go grant and grant really means block grant. And what that is, is that according to our ISEP funding, each student is given a certain dollar amount and the more students we have, the greater the funding. And so when we went grant, we also looked into the fact that we needed to increase enrollment and that perhaps we needed to do other things and what we did at that time then is we applied for state charter status. And so we became a federal grant school and a state charter school. And under the state charter funding formula we were to get so many dollars per student, namely $4,500 per student in addition to our Indian School Equalization Program funds of approximately $3,200 per student, which would have generated somewhere between $6,000 and $7,000 per student, which would increase our funding.

The first year that we went grant/charter, it meant that we were given about $1.8 million from the State of Arizona due to the fact that we had approximately 375 students, close to 400. There were 10 other schools, eight on the Navajo Reservation and two, we were one of them, that went grant/charter. After the first year of grant/charter, our Arizona State Legislature who supposedly is education-friendly enacted what is called the Deduct Law and the Deduct Law stated that if you were receiving federal funds for students enrolled at your school they would deduct the amount of charter funds that you got because they're saying that's double-dipping. And so after the first year we were getting $1.8 million, the second year we were trimmed back down to $12,000. And so that currently is being challenged by the Native American Grant School Association and that's in court right now and if that case wins, we will get all of our money retroactive to the point that the Deduct Law kicked in. But case in point is that the $1.8 million was a significant amount and at that time we decided to invest heavily in technology. And what we did was we threw out all of our old books from Phoenix Indian High School, which we had on loan after they closed, which were no less than 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 or 30 years old, and all the equipment that we had gotten from 1986 until 1995, namely the MacPlus and MacSE80s and really the old, old, old generation of computation, and we started to invest in high-quality hardware and software. And so the question was with all of this technology and with all this investment, what are we going to do with it? And what we were seeing is that no matter how much we could prepare our students for college that if they went off to college there were a number of issues such as culture shock, being in the city for the first time, not being equipped to compete at college. Students would go to college, but then after the first semester they would drop out. And we found very few students completing their first year. And so the question was, how do we rectify that as quickly as possible? And the answer was that we bring college out to Hopi Junior/Senior High School. And to do that then, we had to establish partnerships and we established partnerships with Northern Arizona University and with Northland Pioneer College and that partnership, two years later, became the 2+2+2 Program.

And the 2+2+2 Program, I'm sure you've read about or can read about in the brochure, I'm not going to get into it, but what, in a nutshell it is, is that our students are able to take up to 30 concurrent high school credits for college credit if they pass -- paid for by Hopi Junior/Senior High School -- with the understanding that those students enrolled in the program would then go on to either a two-year junior college and/or a four-year university. And since 1997, we've been conducting that program very successfully and it's meant that many of our students who would have normally gone to either a junior college or a university and not succeeded have been able to transition very successfully into those college programs. And I think that's why we got the High Honors because we are so successful in having that transition. Also there was issue of when our Hopi and Navajo students go off to college they leave their culture behind and many of them really need that culture during the time that they go to school. So the fact that we have a Northland Pioneer College campus at Hopi Junior/Senior High on our 880-acre educational site and we have an interactive instructional television from NAU -- those two elements enable us to successfully proceed with the 2+2+2 Program.

This is shot on digital video technology. This will enable...this is our sign. We're able to afford a lot of things now because our enrollment has climbed over the last five years. Currently, it's 739 students and how we were able to achieve that kind of growth, 70 percent growth in five years, is because of the programs that we were able to establish and offer such as we have a local national junior and national senior Honor Society, we have an academic decathlon team, which was voted most improved in 2000. We also have a long tradition of excellence in athletics with particularly cross country and our boys cross country team has won 13 consecutive state championships, as our girls have won 12 out of 13. Last year we moved from AA to AAA, which AAA begins at the high school level in Arizona at 449 students. So our combined population, we have about 210 students in the junior high and about 525 in high school. Now we're coming into Hopi Junior/Senior High School. This is about a 1.3-mile road. And you can sort of see the condition of the road. The BIA, and I'm not going to slam the BIA because they do provide our funding, but they really don't do a whole lot for road improvement or infrastructure improvements and so we've had to take on a lot of those responsibilities ourself. I think I mentioned yesterday was the fact that when we had the school built in 1986, the BIA felt that a football field was 80 yards long so we had to move our goalposts back 20 yards. But with that they provided us landscaping but no water to water the trees or the football field so everything died within the first year. And since we've gone grant we've installed a new football field, irrigated football field and also just last year we completed a baseball/softball field. So as we're driving in, this is sort of the long and winding road that we've taken from BIA to grant and charter status.

And as I explained yesterday, the first year in the charter we had acquired a $1.8 million allotment from the State of Arizona and we invested heavily in technology. And so we installed about three years ago the T1 line and later upgraded that to a T100 line at the school, which I'm not real familiar with computer infrastructure, but we pretty much have state-of-the-art equipment and you'll see some of that including high-speed internet access at the school. Our 2+2+2 Program relies heavily on various aspects of technology and as we look at what we have at the school, computerization is a huge factor in what we can accomplish. We have business management technologies, which incorporated all of those computer technologies as to our 2+2+2 Program and that program is really a college-transition program, which allows students in their junior and senior year to take concurrent college courses, which can be transferrable to any two- or four-year institution. And we're pulling up right now to the new Northland Pioneer College campus, which was built two years ago. And with the diligence and help of Dr. Ivan Sidney, former Chairman of the Hopi Tribe, and our current governing board president, he was very instrumental along with our board and our administration, Dr. Paul Reynolds, our superintendent in getting this 11,000-square-foot campus built on our 800-acre educational site. And now we're going to through the NPC campus. This is their administrative building. This is totally separate from our building, but a lot of our students will take classes down here, as do our educational aides, and this is their computer lab. I'm just doing a little walk through right now of the NPC campus. Our students can take up to 20 NPC courses. They will take English 101, 102, College English concurrent while they're in high school, they can also take Government, they can also take Bio 101, 102. And what we're planning on doing is strengthening the partnership for their pre-nursing program and pre-educational program and so we're looking at expanding the concurrent courses that we will be offering, not only at our school...

And this is the teacher compound where our teachers and professional staff live. These are our two streets. Now we're driving up to the school and the fencing, the landscape, that was all an issuance that we incorporated. This box up here is what we call 'Checkpoint Charlie' and we are a closed campus and this helps us monitor people coming and going and assuring parents and community that nobody comes and leaves our campus without us knowing and that really maintains a very safe, friendly school environment. On the right is our stadium. We just installed new seats for visiting teams. Since we are a 3A, it attracts a larger number of visitors to our campus. And as you pull up to the school you can see that the area that surrounds us is pretty expansive and we live at about 6,000-feet elevation on the high desert plateau right between Keams Canyon and Polacca, Arizona. Polacca is a first mesa and the Hopi Reservation is three mesa, First, Second and Third Mesas, and it extends all the way down to Highway 264 and Highway 160, which is Moenkopi, and comes all the way east to the Hopi partition land, Highway 264 and Milepost 405. This is approaching our school and our school is 16 years old. It was built in 1985, opened in 1986 and it was BIA controlled until 1995. This is coming into our administrative area. These are a couple of the murals that the students painted a couple years ago as their senior class project. I'm not sure you'll be able to see it, it's sort of like...there, there's another mural. Our Hopi students are outstanding artists and I think, the first year I worked there I taught mathematics and social studies and students used to draw in my class all the time and I got a little bit perturbed that they were drawing rather than paying attention to me, but then once I saw the quality of their artwork, I was amazed at the kind of energy they had and the kind of talent.

Now we're coming into the IITV, the Interactive Instructional TV. This is the Northern Arizona University's interactive classroom and with partnership from NAU, and this is our Northern Arizona University Chemistry 151 class, which we offer for five credits, five college credits. Let me get some sound. This is sort of a funky video here. NAU invested a half million dollars in this equipment to make this possible. There are six IITV rooms throughout the state and we are one campus, we are the Hopi campus and there are four others on the Navajo Nation and one in Yuma and those are considered their satellite learning centers. And Hopi Junior/Senior High School offers a 10-credit college course, Chemistry 151, 152, and the professor teaches that course from NAU. This is our library and we incorporate the Accelerated Reading Program, which is a learning information system and this is one aspect of how we start our seventh- and eighth-graders, even though this is school wide, towards improving their reading skills and getting them started early towards bringing their reading and writing skills up to proficiency because we...there are a lot of students from three different races and they have all sorts of different learning styles and we get them really anywhere from 1st grade reading level up through close to 12th grade and we don't have a unified district. Now this is our Dell Lab, our Business Management Technology. You can see the type of equipment we have. And this is our math lab in the same area. And then across the hall we have a junior high MacIntosh lab. Those are the old computers that we had about three years ago, which we thought were state of the art and now teachers don't even want to...because they're non-internet accessible. But we do recycle those and give those out to the villages for general use for data processing. This is Mr. Loveland's math class and you can see the students are using graphing calculators and the school buys those for all students and they're probably about $140 per issue. This is Mr. Mentzer's class. He's one of our outstanding teachers. These microscopes...we purchased 30 microscopes at $800 each and we're really the envy of many schools when they come and see the kind of equipment and programs that we offer and we're very proud of the fact that we're able to do this in such a short period of time and we were recognized by Harvard University for this program that we've put together. The technology that we have now enables us to do movies like this and students can get into a computer and edit this and make their own movies. A lot of our students now attend colleges and universities and don't drop out after the first year because they're fully acclimated into the university environment when they get there. And that's pretty much my presentation. Any questions at all."

Audience member:

"Can we see the student version of this?"

Glenn Gilman:

"Okay. Yes."

Audience member:

"I do have a question about the funding because it can't all be general funding from grant money?"

Glenn Gilman:

"I'll tell you how the funding works. Generally the students are counted by September 26th and it's called ISEP count week. And so ISEP, Indian School Equalization Program funds, those are tied to whether or not we have Native American students at our school. So if we can show their certificate of Indian blood at one quarter Indian blood or more then we get funding for them and that funding is about...this year, I think it was $3,730 per student. And so with that funding, that's your rate of student [unintelligible], with that funding you have other things that are included like Title I monies, Title II, Title IV, Title IX monies and those are all what they call formula-funded grants. And so with that, with those extra monies, with special education monies and with our charter funds, we come up with a certain dollar amount. And so, if you have 385 students or if you have 785 students or whatever, you're still paying pretty much for the same costs as far as electricity and infrastructure or whatever. And so we do generate more money, but we still pay out almost the same amount in salary for teachers and what not so we've been able to manage that money and by going grant, the BIA has provided what are called administrative funds and administrative funds are those funds that allow us to conduct our own business or whatever, but a lot of times we'll shift over those administrative funds into the educational field to help pay for programs that fund a lot of these programs that we have. So no, they're not all BIA funds, but generally through a lot of it, I would say 98 percent of it is BIA-generated."