‘Doing its Part’

When Deseri Rivas moved from Mendocino County to Humboldt County and began helping seven siblings she was raising navigate Eureka City Schools in 2010, she said she did not encounter an environment she felt was welcoming or supportive of Native families like hers.

“There were no resources for us,” she says, adding that her siblings not only didn’t see themselves or their histories reflected in the school curriculum, but there also weren’t any outside support systems connected to the district or Native role models within its schools. “In a sense, it seemed like we were bottom of the barrel. … Sometimes it seemed like, it sucks to say and maybe I’m biased, but it felt sometimes like white kids came before us.”

And Rivas says when there were issues at school or her siblings faced challenges, the people she turned to her for help were not supportive.

“In a sense, a lot of the teachers and staff I’ve dealt with almost came off a little racist,” she says. “And that was hard. They were just not being culturally sensitive.”

Fourteen years later, Rivas says she’s witnessed marked progress, noting her youngest brother, Adriano, whom she’s been raising since he was 1 or 2 and is now a senior set to graduate in the spring, has faced a different high school environment than his oldest brother. Rivas points to his involvement with the Native American Club, led by Eureka City Schools Indian Education Site Lead Shawna Morales, Yurok language classes taught by James Gensaw that incorporate Native culture and regalia, and the way the district has worked with outside organizations to bring in support resources as “small steps” that have cumulatively made a big difference.

“As of right now, Eureka City Schools is doing its part,” she says.

Rivas isn’t the only one noting the change. Earlier this month, at its 55th annual convention, the National Indian Education Association invited Eureka City Schools (ECS) administrators to present along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLUNC) and the Northern California Indian Development Council (NCIDC), to discuss the unique partnership in Eureka that has brought much of the change Revas says she’s witnessed in practice. Not long ago, the idea of ECS and ACLUNC sharing a stage to tout the district’s progress may have been unthinkable to many, as the watchdog organization had sued the district a decade earlier, alleging “years of intentional discrimination.” ACLUNC also published a landmark report in 2020 detailing what were described as “incredibly egregious disparities” for Native kids in Humboldt County schools, including Eureka’s.

Linnea Nelson, a senior staff attorney in ACLUNC’s Racial and Economic Justice Program who worked on both the 2013 lawsuit and subsequent Failing Grades report, says the joint presentation was “a pretty big deal,” noting it speaks to the district’s “commitment to taking concrete action to address the disparities” detailed in the report.

Under Superintendent Gary Storts’ leadership, Nelson says the district has worked to build relationships and partnerships with Native groups and leaders, to implement the recommendations outlined in that 2020 report and to develop the county’s first-ever professional development program for all the district’s administrators on cultural understanding and Native issues in education.

“I think that leadership is extremely important and Superintendent Storts, I’m just really impressed with his leadership on this,” Nelson says.

For his part, Storts says he’s both proud of the hard work of many that has led to the progress ECS has made and keenly aware that more needs to be done.

“People have said what ECS has done is pretty spectacular,” he says. “I don’t see the spectacular nature of it. It’s what we should be doing and what we always should have been doing.”

While some, like Nelson, are quick to point to Storts’ leadership as a catalyst for some of the change Rivas has seen on Eureka’s campuses, there was undeniably positive momentum before his arrival in 2021. Some of it ties back to that lawsuit the ACLUNC filed in 2013.

Nelson, who first came to Humboldt County to investigate the complaints that would form the basis of that suit, says there were many aspects of the suit that were troubling — including allegations that administrators had ignored complaints of racial taunting and bullying, and that staff had made racially and sexually insensitive comments to students — but one stuck with her.

“One that stood out in particular is that the district had been teaching an inaccurate curriculum about Native American history that perpetuated derogatory stereotypes despite the fact that rich educational resources on Native American history are easily accessible from local tribes and nearby Cal Poly Humboldt,” Nelson recounts in a video ACLUNC prepared documenting its partnership with NCIDC. “And yet Native students, many of whom are living on their ancestral lands, the same land where these schools currently stand, were not learning their history in school. And when it was mentioned, it was often done in offensive and inaccurate ways.”

ECS and ACLUNC settled the lawsuit in January of 2015 with what they described as a “wide-ranging” agreement that established goals for enhancing multi-cultural curriculums, providing appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities and reducing discipline disparities.

The settlement agreement paved the way for the some of the curriculum improvements that Rivas says her brother has benefitted from. But perhaps just as importantly, it the case also deepened the ACLUNC’s involvement locally, setting the ball rolling toward the research that would become the Failing Grades report released in 2020.

In a previous interview with the Journal, Tedde Simon, then an investigator and acting Indigenous justice program manager at ACLUNC, said it had been “widely understood” that local Native students were far less likely to meet basic educational benchmarks than their white peers, while also seeing far higher rates of suspensions and discipline. The Failing Grade reports sought to quantify the extent of the problem.

The findings were shocking.

In the 2018-2019 school year, the report found that 20.7 percent of Native students in Humboldt County met or exceeded state English language arts standards for their grade levels compared to 44.6 percent of students overall. The math numbers were even worse, with just 14.5 percent of Native students meet or exceeding standards compared to 32.5 percent of Humboldt County students overall.

At Eureka City Schools, the report found that graduating Native students met the University of California/California State University course requirements at just one-third the rate of the district’s students overall.

The data was undeniable and led to a unique collaboration between the ACLUNC and NCIDC to create an Indigenous education advocate staff position that is now filled by Sonny Tripp. Efforts to reach Tripp — as well as NCIDC CEO Madison Flynn — for this story were unsuccessful, but Tripp explains in the ACLUNC video on the partnership that he sees the disparities documented in the failing grades report as a continuation of generational trauma.

“When settlers arrived on our land, they brought with them a damaging mindset that Indigenous people, our rituals, our ceremonies, our ways of life are less than or inferior, that they were something that needed to be changed,” Tripp said. “Public education became a tool for colonization, a tool to erase everything it meant to be Indigenous. For over 100 years, Native children were taken by force from our families and tribes and sent to Indian boarding schools, but these places weren’t schools. They were institutions designed to destroy Native people’s identity, our connection to the land and our culture. Everything Indigenous, our language, clothing, our ceremonies, was prohibited, and children faced severe punishment, even physical violence, if they spoke their Native language. Today, many of our students are only two generations away from the boarding school era and families are still carrying this profound trauma with them.”

Because of this reality, the Failing Grades report took pains to lay out a series of recommendations aimed at halting the educational disparities by building trust between local schools and Native communities. Some of this was about teaching a curriculum that represents and accurately reflects Native students’ histories and experiences, but much of it was also about building relationships.

Tripp and NCIDC identified ECS as a key player in this effort as the county’s largest school district. And in Storts, they soon found an eager partner.

Storts is a relatively new face at the district, having left a position as little South Bay Union Elementary School District’s superintendent in 2021 to take the assistant superintendent position at ECS that opened up when Michael Davies Hughes was appointed the county’s superintendent of education. Storts was then appointed superintendent late last year, after the retirement of Fred Van Vleck.

Storts says he stepped into the new role keenly aware of the Failing Grades report and the “alarming statistics” it contained. One of the report’s first recommendations, Storts says, seemed pretty straightforward: “Consult with Indigenous families, tribes and children.” So he set about doing that, which soon led him to Tripp.

“We both wanted to do what we felt like was the right thing for our Native youth, and a relationship blossomed,” Storts says.

Storts and Tripp then started planning a professional development training for the district’s entire administrative team. But they didn’t want it to be the kind of two-hour seminar that’s quickly forgotten, they wanted it to be a deep, immersive and impactful experience.

NCIDC ended up putting on a two-day training before the 2023-2024 school year entitled “History, Health and Healing in Indian Education in Humboldt County,” hosting ECS’ administrators at United Indian Health Services’ Arcata campus for the first day and then out in Hoopa the second.

“Essentially, what we did was have our largely white administrative team just sit down and listen,” Storts says, adding the day was painful and challenging at points but celebratory in the end, concluding with a traditional salmon bake. “Everybody sat down and broke bread, ate salmon and shared stories. The following day, we went up to Hoopa. We went through a kind of mock ceremony, went to a sweat house, rafted down the river and learned about the connection the Trinity as to the Hupa people. It was such an immersive experience. It resonated deeply with everybody.”

Storts says the relationships formed over those two days have endured and paid dividends for ECS students, noting there was a high-profile law enforcement incident involving a Native family with children in ECS schools last year in which he and others at ECS were able to “talk to our Indigenous friend and get some really important support” for students.

“I think the whole thing is really about building relationships,” Storts says, crediting Tripp with helping bring those to fruition.

Nelson says the situation spoke to trust in both directions. First of all, she says Tripp and others in the Native community trusted that Storts and ECS were committed to the process, were going to be respectful and try to absorb the lessons their Native teachers were trying to impart. Then, she says, when an incident arose, ECS administrators trusted Tripp and others enough to bring them in and ask them for help.

“It’s just how important it was for Gary to be calling Sonny on the phone and saying, ‘We need help,’ and also listening when Sonny was there as an advocate between families and school staff,” Nelson says.

The two-day training was only a starting point, Storts says, noting that this school year began with another professional development day with ECS administrators — this time including all its school principals and assistant principals — learning from NCIDC staff.

“We spent the afternoon at Cal Poly Humboldt and really dug a little bit deeper into some of these needed conversations,” Storts says. “They worked with us. There was laughter, there was tears and a whole heck of a lot of learning.”

Next year, Storts says, the plan is to begin the year with a third training, this one for ECS entire teaching staff.

Storts says none of these efforts have faced any resistance from ECS staff.

“I didn’t feel any sort of hesitation from our Eureka City Schools principals or anyone,” he says, noting that the district has a diverse population, with 31 different primary languages spoken by its students. “We’re ready to do the work. I think if you work in Eureka City Schools, you know we have a diverse student population. You know many of our leaders don’t look like some of our students, so we need to learn about them.”

In addition to the professional development, ECS had implemented a host of other changes aimed at building relationships and fostering trust. There’s the Native American Club for students, as well as a Parent Advisory Committee aimed to give high-level administrators and staff feedback. The district has changed policy to offer excused absences to Native students to attend cultural ceremonies and is incrementally working to incorporate more Native people and perspectives into its curriculums. Last year, it celebrated Native American Day in late September with a week of activities — one of which saw a group from the high school learn about regalia, culture and ceremony from Karen Skogland, of the Blue Lake Rancheria, Tripp and Bubba Riggins, from NCIDC, and Morales before presenting to a fourth grade class at Alice Birney Elementary School. This year, one of the students who attended last year, Native Club Regalia Specialist and President Leilianna Brown, and Morales prepared Eureka High students for California Native Day presentations.

Throughout Native Day week, the district flew the Wiyot flag outside its buildings.

“These are bits and pieces of change that are happening, and there’s momentum,” Storts says. “And these are the partnerships you want in school.”

It’s too soon to see whether these efforts will begin closing the disparities laid bare by the Failing Grades reports or whether they will improve educational outcomes for ECS’ Native students. Nelson says the most recent data available shows continued disparate discipline rates in the 2022-2023 school year, but she’s quick to emphasize that these efforts — and the relationships they’ve fostered — are new.

“There were important steps that were taken pursuant to that settlement agreement, but I think real cultural change requires working closely with partners to ensure that message prioritizing creating an inclusive environment for Indigenous students goes all the way down to the classroom level,” she says.

Rivas says she feels the change and the momentum.

“It’s small steps but they’re setting the path,” she says, noting that her oldest brother who she raised entered ECS in 2010. “From then to now, I look around and think, ‘Dang, you guys!’ They’ve come a long way.”

But Rivas says she’d like to see more — more Native representation in existing curriculum, as well as the creation of a Native American studies course. She’d like to see more tutors and support services, with more Native people filling those roles. But Rivas says when she looks to the future, she’s hopeful.

“My youngest is 1 right now,” she says. “Maybe when he gets there.”

Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal’s news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 321, or thad@northcoastjournal.com.

This article appears in ‘Doing its Part’.