Pencils, Shoes and Food: Pine Ridge Principals Help Children Face Daunting Odds

Oct. 19, 2011 — -- For the children of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, educators can often be a guiding light amid the darkness that poverty and alcoholism bring into the lives of many students here.

For Robert Looks Twice, 13, a star student who aspires to be the country's first Native American president, Monica Whirlwind Horse has been that light.

"The principal's like my mom," Robert said, adding that her daughter Danielle is like a sister to him.

Whirlwind Horse has been the principal at Rockyford School in Porcupine, S.D., for seven years now. Before, she worked for a decade as a special education and literacy teacher at the school. "It's their second home actually. They are here more than they are at home," she said.

Like most families on the reservation, her life has been tragically affected by alcohol. Three years ago, the night before her son's 23rd birthday, he was killed by a drunk driver who swerved off the road. Her son's name was also Robert.

Get Involved: How to Help the Children of the Plains

Rockyford is a public school run by the state. Funding is tied to student performance so the school has to meet government benchmarks for "adequate yearly progress," which is no easy task. "We all face the same kind of obstacles in our paths, attendance, test scores," said Whirlwind Horse.

The school has implemented incentives to motivate students. "Perfect attendance earns them field trips," said Whirlwind Horse, who is proud of her students' progress. "Every year we are going up in test scores."

But the odds are stacked against Native American children. According to the principal, students face cultural barriers on standardized tests which are designed for middle class students whose lives are not comparable to life on the reservation.

Unlike most schools across the country, Rockyford provides each student with the needed school supplies as the families cannot afford them. Pencils and paper notebooks are often donated from church groups.

"People have good hearts and they want to help our kids and we are grateful for that," said Whirlwind Horse, remembering how once an organization donated brand new coats and "it was like Christmas, the kids were so excited."

The principal and the school staff often buy out-of-pocket and anonymously shoes for students who wear one pair year round. Whirlwind Horse says the school has sent letters to well-known sports brands and professional basketball teams sharing their need, but has gotten no response.

According to Whirlwind Horse, the students' need start back at home. Children live on dilapidated government housing fighting the constant pressures of multi-family living. Students are unable to get the sleep they need or find a quiet corner to get school work done.

Most face long bus rides -- 30 minutes to an hour -- to school. That time, Whirlwind Horse said, could be spent catching up on schoolwork. She said she'd love to get iPads for her students so they could do just that, but it's just one of a long list of needs and wants that she struggles to meet.

Marnee White Wolf, 74, the principal at Wounded Knee District School, knows the dire needs of the children on the reservation all too well. One of her students is Louise Clifford, a young girl with a tough home life but a brave spirit who found some of her biggest supporters at Wounded Knee.

White Wolf has dedicated her life to education and has been at the helm of Wounded Knee for five years now despite poor health. In her 40 years as an educator, she has seen the suffering of many of her students, "I see a lot of things in children now that is so sad," she said. "Children have to be just treated like a beautiful flower garden. You should polish them every day, water them, nurture [them]. And here they grow up like weeds."

Unlike Rockyford, Wounded Knee is tribal-run school which receives federal funding, but not enough. White Wolf tells ABC News they don't have enough money for books, a librarian, a science lab, or gym equipment.

"Usually we exceed our budget because we don't get enough money to really be able to keep the food service." White Wolf says proving food is of vital importance as most children are chronically underfed and dive into their school lunches. "A lot of times when the kids come on Mondays, they're really hungry because they haven't had anything to eat through the weekend."

In addition to being hungry, students often come into school sleep-deprived on Mondays, making that day one of the most stressful of the week. White Wolf says Fridays are also difficult for her students: some are so anxious about going home to a house without food and dealing with alcohol addicted parents that they cannot concentrate.

The Wounded Knee school building, constructed in the 1960s, is in need of repair. White Wolf worries about the asbestos under the floors and in the floor tiles. But there's too little money to fix it, when there is greater need for school supplies and more trained staff which, at other schools, are taken for granted.

"We don't have a school nurse," she said. "We are a smaller school and we just don't have a budget for it."

Change at the Policy Level

This week, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee is scheduled to vote on a bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA. The act would overhaul the No Child Left Behind act, and specifically includes provisions aimed at American Indian students. According to the chairman of the committee, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the legislation "…includes language that will provide flexibility to tribes and tribal educational agencies, granting them more authority over education of Native students, improves early childhood education and care services, and authorizes funding to restore and protect Native languages."

But The National Congress of American Indians says that it has lobbied for certain points to be included in the bill on behalf of Indian schools and so far, many of their recommendations have been ignored. The NCAI would like the bill to include programs that would strengthen tribal control of education, better allowing principals like Marnee White Wolf to incorporate the Lakota language into math and science classes – which they say could help improve cognitive skills -- and give tribal schools input on the use of alternative assessments for their students.

Watch "Children of the Plains," a "20/20" special with Diane Sawyer, online here.