Oregon’s Tribal Early Learning Hub has faced a number of challenges since its creation. But this summer, state lawmakers passed HB 2815, which would invest more in early learning for Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes. As the school year begins, we hear from Jory Spencer, the early childhood service program manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. We also hear from Jennifer Reid, education director for the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. They both join us to share more about their programs and what these new investments mean for them.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Four years ago, Oregon lawmakers passed a bill to create the state’s first Tribal Early Learning Hub. The idea was to increase Indigenous families’ access to early learning and childcare programs. But then, after two years of work and millions of dollars of state and federal funding, the hub fell apart. So this summer, lawmakers tried again. They overwhelmingly passed a bill that asks the state agency to develop and implement a new early education plan for Native children that will be funded with dedicated money outside of the general fund.
We thought this was a great time to check in on early education efforts at two federally recognized tribes. Jory Spencer is the early childhood service program manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Jennifer Reid is the education director for the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Jory Spencer: Thank you.
Miller: Jory, first – can you tell us about your early learning daycare program or what it’s like and what kids are learning?
Spencer: Our early learning programs are made up of three childhood services. Our first program is our Átaw Miyánašma Early Learning Center – that’s our tribal daycare. They serve children birth through 5. Our infant classroom takes infants as young as 6 weeks. We have an infant classroom, a waddler classroom which is ages 1 through 2, a toddler classroom 2 to 3, and then a preschool classroom 3 to 5. So we have about 13 staff, a coordinator and 12 teachers: that’s three teachers in four classrooms. And we serve about 40 to 44 children.
Miller: Are there culturally-specific programs or curricula there? Is it different than a non-tribal daycare?
Spencer: It is different than a non-tribal daycare. There’s the unique aspect of having teachers on staff who are tribal members themselves. They’re from the Confederated Tribes community, as well as other surrounding tribes or Indigenous communities from other regions. They bring their own unique experiences, cultural knowledge, language and skillset to our staff, and incorporate that in the classrooms. And we provide a framework that is developmentally appropriate for each age range, and we infuse it with cultural teachings in partnership with our language program here in the education department. We do have master speakers on staff who work with our programs to incorporate the three languages, which are Umatilla, Walla Walla and [Cayuse].
Miller: Are you able to serve all parents who want spots for their kids?
Spencer: We are not able to serve all of the slots that are needed in our community. We have about 38 total families who are on our waiting list right now. And those 38 families make up the age range from infancy through toddlers mostly, but we do have some students who are preschool age who are not enrolled in our Head Start program but may be enrolled in another preschool program.
Miller: Jennifer, what about the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians? What are kids learning in your preschool?
Jennifer Reid: We have a preschool called Yimìsa’ Preschool, located at the tribal community center in Myrtle Creek. And we offer a robust, high quality curriculum teaching the creative curriculum for preschool. What makes our program special is our integration of language. All children receive instruction in Takelma, the native language of the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. We also integrate as much as possible elder-led activities and cultural workshops and engagement with the youth.
Miller: How many kids are you able to serve right now?
Reid: At this time we have 15. We do also have a waitlist because there is such a high need for childcare and early childhood education in the area of Roseburg and Douglas County.
Miller: Are all the kids members of the Cow Creek Band? Or is it also open to broader members of the region, of the community?
Reid: About 75% of those children are enrolled tribal members with the Cow Creek Umpqua Tribe. We have a tribal preference or ranking to be able to admit Cow Creek youth and other tribal affiliates, children enrolled in other federally recognized tribes. We give preference for enrollment to those children before we enroll community members.
Miller: What have you heard from families about what it’s meant to them to have their kids enrolled in this program?
Reid: It is so special for our tribal families that they have the option of enrolling their child in a community-based program that is culturally relevant and sensitive to not only the needs of their family, but the larger tribe. It truly is part of the community building effort among the tribe that starts with our earliest tribal members.
Miller: Jory, we’re talking about culturally-specific educational efforts here for young people, and I’m curious how you think about these efforts now in the context of our country’s shameful history of abuse and forced assimilation at Indian boarding schools?
Spencer: With consideration to such a tragic history, I think our programs really have an intentional focus and effort towards acknowledging the tragic history and the systems which have abused children and families in the past. By acknowledging that and intentionally moving forward, we recognize that there are systematic failures for our students and families, which I would say is in design and also implementation of those systems, like strategies of enforcing learning in previous history.
Moving forward intentionally within the early childhood programs here within the tribe are really centering child-centered and child-led learning, and infusing family culture and family voice and choice into each program design. So what is the family’s culture, what have they learned, what are their cultural ways? Because each family’s participation in cultural lifeways are different. So really infusing that diversity across all of our programs into our annual activities, into our seasonal themes and lessons that are offered, supplemented with the language. We focus on also taking in data, what languages are families familiar with, how much do they know, and then really moving towards immersion, introductory, expansion of the language in the classroom.
So I would say that acknowledging the tragic history is the first step and then the next most important step is the action taken around designing learning systems that promote sovereignty and infuse each child, and family’s, and the community’s diverse, nuanced, colorful culture and lifeways. So I’m not sure if that answers your questions, but that’s what comes to mind.
Miller: Jory, in 2021, the legislature said to a state agency, “create this Tribal Early Learning Hub,” and eventually $2 million in state and federal funding was spent for that. But then it fell apart in 2023. What happened?
Spencer: As far as I know, in 2023, the hub efforts were still occurring across the state, but they were not necessarily inclusive of tribes. So from there, then they redirected their efforts to create hubs specifically that involved and elevated tribal voices, if I’m not mistaken on that.
Miller: In other words, tribes felt that their sovereignty was being infringed upon, or that they were not actually being adequately consulted for these programs?
Spencer: That’s my knowledge of previous actions, yes.
Miller: So Jennifer Reid, let’s move to the present. Lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a new bill in the most recent session. It directs the Department of Early Learning and Care to develop and implement an early education plan for Native children, to create a new fund that’s separate from the general fund and establish a grant program for each of the nine federally recognized tribes in Oregon. What are you hoping this will mean in practice?
Reid: Well, we are so pleased that the legislature has allocated additional funds to serve our tribal youth in this age range. This Tribal Early Learning Fund will have a direct impact in our ability to provide high quality preschool to students ages 3 to 5. It pays for additional staff people so that we can bring the teacher to student ratio down so that each child has a more personalized experience in the classroom. We are also using the Tribal Early Learning Fund to support a new preschool program. We know that the sooner we get kids exposed to the classroom environment, the easier that transition will be into preschool, and out of preschool into kinder. And so we are using those dollars to program a four-week summer program for our incoming preschool students.
Miller: My understanding is that you got a lot less money in state money for the current biennium than the governor had initially asked for – around $70,000 as opposed to something like half a million dollars. What more would you have done if you’d gotten the full allocation from the governor’s original recommendation?
Reid: With that full funding that we were hoping for, we could have ensured that every tribal member ages 3 to 5 living in Douglas County had access to Yimìsa’ Preschool. And in a mostly rural county like Douglas County, that means that we need to be able to allocate funding and support to families in the areas of transportation, because transportation access is a challenge countywide. We were hoping to be able to help families with gas vouchers to be able to transport their child to Yimìsa’ Preschool, because we do not currently offer a bus route. But funding for transportation could have allowed us potentially to create a bus route to be able to bring families from across the county to Yimìsa’.
Miller: It’s interesting you’re talking about families from around the county, but are you able to use state money for tribal members who don’t live in your area, maybe not in Douglas County, maybe not even in Oregon? We’re talking about members of a sovereign nation who could be anywhere. How does that work?
Reid: At Cow Creek Umpqua Tribe, we serve tribal members cradle to grave, but also countywide, statewide, nationally, and even around the world. And so when we have funding that recognizes and honors the sovereignty of the tribe and allows us to take dollars outside of the state, that makes that opportunity even more meaningful. We’ve been able to do things like mail early literacy book bundles across the country to all of our tribal members 0 to 5, when we have funds that recognize the sovereignty of the tribe.
Miller: Jennifer, we’ve been talking so far about early childhood education, but you have a broader focus for the Cow Creek Band, which is all education. How would you assess K-12 education right now for your tribal members?
Reid: We are lucky to have funds for early childhood in excess of what our needs are. But in terms of K-12, it’s a very tough situation to find funding for school-based services, especially for the adolescent population. We know that adolescence is a critical time in a child’s development. So not having access to funds to be able to provide those supplemental services for our youth who are disproportionally impacted by things like food insecurity, transportation as I mentioned, and the ability to supplement their education with things like tutoring and extracurricular activities … The lack of funding for these age ranges has a direct impact on the quality of life and education for K-12 students, tribal students specifically.
Miller: What about the Student Success Act that was passed by Oregon lawmakers not that long ago? Has that made a difference?
Reid: It has. We are expecting less funding, potentially up to 50% cut of what we’re normally accustomed to. So we will have to scale back and prioritize where we spend that money. We hate to have to pit K-12 services against the important work of our Takelma language revitalization program, which is very fragile at this time. As we’re looking at decreased amounts of funding, we really want to emphasize the importance of allowing tribes the opportunity to dictate how they will spend those funds, based on the areas of need and urgency priority. It’s a different calculation for each tribe and their education department.
Miller: Do you have that authority? Do you have the license to tailor that state money in the way that you think would be appropriate?
Reid: At this time, we are hoping that the Office of Indian Education, who has heard all of the concerns of the nine tribes, will find a way to allow for us to have that customization of funds and how we direct the use of funds.
Miller: Jory, one of the things that we’re getting at here with Jennifer is that each of these nine federally recognized tribes have their own histories, culture and language or languages. What opportunities or maybe challenges does that present when part of your work is to create culturally-specific curricula or programs?
Spencer: I think that, particularly with consideration to creating curriculum for the programs here at the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, we are in our own unique area. We are still in discussion about what is appropriate to write down and capture in a curriculum, versus what is just simply not written down or shared. And because that is in and of itself very nuanced, we are still in, I would say, the discussion phase about creating something that is CTUIR-specific. So with that, right now, we honor and implement activities around our food wheel in alignment with the seasonal round, the animals and the natural resources that we are in alignment with here, as a land-based culture.
Obviously, each tribe is in their own place. So we are not quite to the step maybe other tribes are, of creating and capturing specific curriculum, and moving that forward. That’s where we’re at currently as CTUIR .
Miller: Jory Spencer and Jennifer Reid, thanks very much.
Spencer: Thank you.
Reid: Thank you, tuuwuù’kʰ.
Miller: Jory Spencer is the early childhood service program manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Jennifer Reid is the education director for the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians.
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