Through commendable effort and leadership Havre Public Schools are preserving native language. The school board voted unanimously to offer a Cree language class for High School and Middle School students.
Pax Haslem is the Interim Indian Education for All Director explains what made offering this new class possible.
“A class seven licensure through Montana’s OPI allows us to bring somebody that has fidelity in the Cree language to come into the classrooms and teach the Cree language and Native American culture through that class. So, there hasn’t been a lot of opportunity because where do you go find somebody that can speak Cree? With that program through OPI we’re starting to see the fruits of some of that labor, and so Dustin Whiteford up at Rocky Boy has put together a great grant where he taught nine students this last year and after 18 months, they’ll have their class seven licensure, and they’ll have fidelity in the Cree language. So, this class allows us to go out and hire some of those folks should they qualify and to be able to offer a Native American language in the high school and middle school.”-Pax Haslem
The class would have never been introduced if it wasn’t for the Jessica Kennedy Stiffarm’s insightful student survey.
“So, at the beginning of the year I surveyed the students. I saw the need for asking the students what they wanted to do, so we saw that a huge majority of the students wanted a language program.”-Jessica Kennedy Stiffarm
Now Pax Haslem explains what will be happening next.
“The next step is to build a curriculum and so hopefully working with Stone Child College and MSUN, even taking a look at the Montana Digital Academy’s curriculum, but basically we have to develop our own curriculum. That curriculum has to be approved by our own curriculum committee, and then beyond that then it goes to the board and the board approves that.”- Pax Haslem
