NORTHWEST
EDUCATION
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BOX ELDER, Montana—U.S. Route 87 between Great Falls and Havre, Montana, is a wide open road. The two-lane ribbon of blacktop spools out over what locals call the “west bench”—a part of the Great Plains that sits high above the Missouri River and stretches westward to the Continental Divide. To the east, the wide Missouri flows just out of sight and the low buttes and soft slopes of the Bear’s Paw Mountains beckon in the distance. It’s a landscape of grain fields and prairie, where the slightest vertical—a telephone pole, a grain silo, a small stand of willows—can take on the iconic status of a skyscraper. You can see things coming from a long way off.
On a clear spring day in 2002 Dave Nelson was riding his Harley-Davidson down Route 87. A native Minnesotan who still speaks in a rapid-fire upper-Midwest accent, Nelson had been a PE teacher for the past four years in the Box Elder School District. Before that he had spent two decades teaching in the grain-growing town of Big Sandy, 20 minutes to the south. Nelson loved the area. An avid motorcyclist, he took every opportunity to ride over the sparsely traveled prairie roads.
That same day, Box Elder School District Superintendent Robert Heppner was heading down Route 87 in the opposite direction. Heppner, wild-haired and all western—from his lanky frame to his drawling storyteller’s voice—had come to the district at the beginning of the school year. Outwardly, he gave the impression of an old-timer slouched over coffee at the local diner trading tall tales, but he was passionate about education. He’d been “in the game” for nearly three decades. He’d taught and been an administrator in several far-flung outposts of the West, including a previous five-year stint at Box Elder near the beginning of his career. Along the way, he’d formed the opinion that hiring was more than half the battle. Find the right person for the job and so many other things would fall into place. As an administrator, Heppner was a firm believer in research, professional development, and careful planning. But when it came to people, he’d learned to trust his instincts.
At the moment, Heppner was in search of the right principal. The Box Elder school district—a single K–12 campus with approximately 360 students—was in disarray. Everyone agreed on that. It’s why the school board offered him the job and it’s why he took it. Like Nelson, he loved the area and he knew the people. He knew these kids could learn.
Nearing the end of his first year, however, he could tell he was in over his head. Not only did he serve as superintendent, he was also the only principal. There was simply too much work for one person. Just dealing with disciplinary problems was taking more than half his time.
Nelson may not have seemed like the obvious choice. Yes, he was a veteran teacher, the athletic director, and the football coach for the school’s ragtag six-person football team—but he had no administrator’s license, no experience, and had never expressed an interest in taking an administrative leadership role. But Heppner had a hunch. He’d seen Nelson successfully argue a case before the state athletic board and he’d seen him in staff meetings. He was great with his fellow teachers, great with kids, great with parents. Heppner saw real leadership potential, but was the desire there? Driving down U.S. 87 that day he decided there was no better time to find out.
As Nelson remembers it, Heppner waved him down on an empty stretch of highway and put it straight to him. “He told me he needed a principal for the elementary school and he thought I’d make a good one. He offered to get the district to help [pay for the coursework needed to get an administrator’s license]. And he gave me five minutes to make up my mind.”
As it turned out, Nelson had been doing his own thinking. He had some opinions about the problems in the district and also some ideas about fixing them. “I wanted to make a change here,” he says. “I’d been feeling that way for quite a while, so it didn’t take me five minutes to say yes.”
Heppner had his principal, though it would take two summers and a lot of online courses before Nelson earned his license. In the meantime he would serve as an administrative intern and start taking some of the load. “I thought it was really important to hire somebody who knew the community and the school and had already built trust,” says Heppner. “That was critical. In order to turn things around we needed to create ties to the parents and the community, and Dave was already doing that.”
The Rocky Boy Indian Reservation is the smallest in the state of Montana, with close to 2,600 Chippewa-Cree tribal members in residence. Box Elder, population 800, is the largest community on the reservation, although part of the town actually extends beyond the reservation boundary. On that sliver of land—just over the “border” and adjacent to Route 87—sits the Box Elder Public Schools campus. Less than 15 minutes to the east, the reservation has its own school system, Rocky Boy Public Schools. It’s a less than ideal situation. In the past, Box Elder schools were seen as the “off-reservation” district and had an uneasy relationship with the Indian community. Fifty percent of the student body and nearly all the staff were white. But that has changed. White “west benchers” began sending their kids to Big Sandy in the early 1990s. Gradually, reservation residents looking for alternatives began sending their kids to Box Elder. Ninety-eight percent of the current student body—and a growing number of certified staff members—are now Native Americans of Chippewa and Cree heritage.
Dave Nelson likes to begin presentations about the Box Elder School District with a list of then-versus-now statistics that are undeniably attention grabbing. In the 2002–2003 school year the district had 1,200 student “write-ups” for disciplinary problems. In a single semester, 114 students transferred in and 112 transferred out—a turnover of almost one-third the total student body. Teacher turnover was nearly as bad. An average of five teachers left each year at the elementary school and 15 districtwide. Out of 35 students who entered as freshmen only six would typically graduate. Several elementary classrooms were housed in World War II-era prefabs bought from the military, which were literally falling apart. Both morale and test scores were extremely low, and the elementary, middle, and high schools were all in improvement status for not making adequate yearly progress (AYP) for two consecutive years.
By spring 2006, things had changed dramatically. The elementary school was off improvement status, the middle school had made AYP for one year, and the high school came tantalizingly close. In January 2007, the National Association of Title I Directors named Box Elder Elementary a National Title I Distinguished School. Test scores were up across the board. The third-grade reading scores were among the highest in the state at 89.5 percent proficient. Student disciplinary write-ups were a quarter of what they had been. The student transfer rate had been cut in half and there was zero staff turnover the previous year. A new wing of the school had been built and most of the prefabs either torn down or remodeled for nonclassroom use. Morale was high. The district—and especially the elementary school—were thriving. What had happened?
Both Heppner and Nelson are quick to deflect the credit. When Nelson says “it starts at the top” he’s not referring to his superintendent, he’s talking about the community and the school board. And Heppner agrees. “Community and school board support—that’s what has made the difference,” he says. “We have an extremely aggressive board. They want the best education for their kids that they can possibly have and they do what it takes to get there.”
One area of support might sound insignificant to an outsider, but in many ways set the tone for all that followed. “In Indian Country basketball is a way of life,” says Heppner. “I’ve been around Indian schools where that was the number one priority, no doubt about it. From the school board on down, academics were a distant second. And that’s not the case here. We appreciate the importance of basketball to the community, but we took the stance that academics would be number one here. That starts with the board and goes on down the line.”
The Box Elder story is one of systemic reform—from a change in management style to what’s served in the cafeteria to nearly everything in between. Nelson gives credit to B.J. Granberry and the Title I staff at the Montana Office of Public Instruction for their ongoing support, and also lists a multitude of grants that have provided everything from new equipment to new staff positions to a new wing of the elementary school. Those include a K–3 Reading First grant that radically changed the elementary reading curriculum; a 21st Century Community Learning Center grant that funds after-school tutoring and summer school courses; and a very generous Carol M. White Physical Education Program grant from the U.S. Department of Education, among others. That funding is essential in a school that is 100 percent high poverty. But, as Heppner is quick to point out, money alone is not the answer. “You can compare us to other districts with the same kind of high-minority, high-poverty population and the same kind of funding opportunities based on that population, and you’re not going to see this kind of success very often,” he says.
The key, according to both Heppner and Nelson, is people. The school board, yes, but also parents, community leaders, and tribal elders, as well as a dedicated, highly qualified staff that understands and is closely tied to that larger community. To foster that kind of support, the school had to overcome some heavy baggage.
“A lot of the people in this community still associated public schools with the boarding school concept,” says Heppner. “They were scared of the school. They saw it as a place where you’re always getting your hand slapped; a place that steals your culture. They really didn’t want anything to do with it.”
When Nelson started as full-time principal, parent-teacher conferences were attended by “maybe two or three parents,” he says. “It was pretty bleak.”
Heppner paints an even grimmer picture. “I’d often be in the office and a parent would come in wanting to pick up their student, for one reason or another,” he says, “and they wouldn’t know where they were. I’d ask, What grade are they in? Elementary. Which grade? I don’t know. Well, who’s their teacher? I don’t know. What does that say about their relationship to the school?”
Sitting back and waiting for that relationship to change was not going to work. Nelson, in particular, pulled out all the stops at the elementary school. Among other things, he made an offer to students: Get a parent or family member to come to the next parent-teacher conference and I’ll take you on a trip to Havre for pizza. The results were startling. The next conferences were overflowing, and the school used their new charter bus for a triumphant trip to Havre. It helped set the tone. From that time forward, parent participation has continued to be around 100 percent, no gimmicks necessary. “We had to get them in here,” says Nelson. “We had to make that original contact. They had to meet the teachers and the staff and develop a relationship. They needed to see us as human beings and see that we cared about them and their students. After that we could downplay the gimmicks.”
Staff retention was another key. It was impossible to develop parent and community relationships with a big chunk of the staff leaving every year. Heppner and Nelson placed an emphasis on developing strong staff relationships, sharing leadership, and developing a positive school culture. That strategy began to pay off immediately. Staff turnover slowed to a trickle.
Another strategy was to actively hire Native American staff members. “Almost all of our classified staff here are Native American now,” says Heppner, “and a lot more of our certified staff as well. We’ve made that a priority.”
Funding from another grant, the Families and Schools Together (FAST) program, helped hire one such staff member. Karen Blackbird serves as the elementary counselor and helps run the FAST program, which helps at-risk students and their parents form a strong connection with the school. “We try to do counseling the minute the students come in,” says Blackbird. “We find out about their home situation, their background, what they need. We try to make both the students and the parents feel comfortable with the school from the very first contact.”
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place when the district received a state character education grant. Officially called the Honor, Respect, and Responsibility (HR2) Grant Project, the program is directed by Peggy Azure at the Montana Office of Public Instruction. The grant helped focus Box Elder’s reform effort by tying it to Native cultural values. Each month of the school year highlights a single character trait, incorporating it into the daily curriculum. “When we first started the project we tried using a packaged program,” says Azure, “and we found that it just didn’t work with the Native populations we were trying to serve.”
Box Elder, one of the first five districts to receive the grant, helped the state create its own, Native-focused curriculum. “They really took this and ran with it,” says Azure. “And it’s had an amazing effect on their district.”
Promoting parent and community involvement is a major goal of the project, and Box Elder has done that in multiple ways. The district established or strengthened its relationship to several local agencies, for example, including the community health services organization. But even more important is the way they included parents and tribal elders. The district sought the help of elders when putting the curriculum together. “We’d take a certain trait and ask them how it related to the Native culture,” says Nelson. “Everything from what color represents that quality to the nuances of how it plays out in everyday life. They talked with us about that and then we built it into the lessons and activities.”
Those activities include end-of-the-month assemblies that give the entire community an opportunity to celebrate what has been learned, both about the particular character trait and about the Native culture. Turnout has been extraordinary. “It gives parents a positive, celebratory reason to be at the school,” says Nelson.
At Box Elder, celebrating is becoming part of the routine. By breaking down cultural and historical barriers and bringing parents and the community back into the school, they’ve found themselves on the road to success. It’s a long road, stretching as far as the eye can see. Just a few years ago, you could have seen Box Elder far in the distance, moving in the opposite direction. Now, you might want to wave them down. They’ve got something to tell you.
Original URL: http://www.nwrel.org/nwedu/12-03/road/
This online version is based upon the print version of the magazine. The information contained in it was current at the time of printing/posting.
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