Teaching from the Heart| Professional Development

On the Warm Springs Reservation, teachers offer students stability, new pathways to learning, and a connection to their tribal heritage.

Warm Springs teacher Cary Varela has found a community on the "rez."

Story and photos by JUDY BLANKENSHIP

WARM SPRINGS, Oregon — The Warm Springs Elementary School, with its long, low, central building and satellite single-wides and modulars, sits like a homely cousin amid the stately, two-story brick structures left over from Bureau of Indian Affairs days, when a boarding school occupied the site. Logging trucks rumble by on the highway just above the playground, carrying timber from Central Oregon to Portland, 100 miles away. The sprinkling of houses and tribal government buildings that constitute the town of Warm Springs radiate out from the school and up the surrounding hills. With 380 students in kindergarten to fourth grade, the school sits at the heart of the "rez," as everyone here calls the reservation. Ninety-eight percent of the children are Native American, descended from one of three tribes — the Wasco, Paiute, and Warm Springs people — settled on the 644,000-acre reservation by a 19th-century government treaty.

a student The Way It Was

That Warm Springs Elementary would be a semifinalist in last year's U.S. Department of Education's National Awards Program for Model Professional Development seemed an impossible dream when Dawn Smith came on board as principal six years ago. A chronically high exodus of staff that had persisted for 25 years had left the school in a shambles. "Teachers and principals would come here for the experience," says Smith, "but what they got instead was a big culture shock." Some didn't even stay the year. Student attendance was spotty, achievement scores were at rock bottom, and professional development was unknown.

The remarkable turnaround of Warm Springs Elementary can be attributed to many factors, but everyone interviewed at the school earlier this year agrees that the transformation is largely due to the leadership of Dawn Smith. A Klamath Indian, Smith was recruited by the Warm Springs tribe 26 years ago while an education senior at the University of Northern Colorado. She was invited to do a year's internship with the Jefferson County School District, with the promise of a job if there were openings.

The following year Smith was hired as a first-grade teacher at Warm Springs, where she was one of two native teachers. She stayed 13 years in the first-grade classroom, during which time she married a Warm Springs man and had two children. In 1992, after a stint as a counselor, Smith served as vice principal for a year while traveling "over to the valley" to get her principal's credentials. True to the established pattern, the presiding principal left the school at the end of that year, and Smith found herself at the helm of Warm Springs.

"Things were very chaotic here," remembers Smith, a 46-year-old woman with short, dark hair and a serious demeanor. "Many kids were disrespectful and did pretty much whatever they wanted. Instruction time was practically nil because behavior management was such a problem. I think that's why I got hired," Smith adds. "I had a mission, I wasn't going anywhere, I knew the kids and the community, and I knew what the school could be."

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