Kansas State School Board extends its partnership with indigenous education council

The Kansas State Board of Education extended the Kansas Advisory Council for Indigenous Education’s role as a consultant on Native American education in perpetuity at its Wednesday meeting.

The KSBOE established the KACIE as a temporary advisory board in May 2022 after education commissioner Randy Watson made a derogatory remark about Native Americans earlier that year. The board is tasked with finding ways the education system can better serve Native American students and better teach non-native students about historical and contemporary tribal subjects.

“This really started with an emphasis on collaboration, creating more collaborative co-governance structures,” said Alex Red Corn, a Kansas State University professor and executive director of the Kansas Association for Native American Education. “We have four federally recognized tribes in the state of Kansas, and finding ways to incorporate them into conversations about education and our educational systems that are run by the state are a natural way to acknowledge their inherent right to sovereignty and education.”

Indigenous Education council focused on 5 priorities

When creating the board, advocates said there were five priorities it hoped to tackle, including the following:

• Curriculum reform to include more recent Native American history, especially the four federally recognized tribes in Kansas.

• Lessons on contemporary Native American government and culture.

• Overhaul demographic data systems to include tribal affiliations.

• Create a state-level director to oversee the KSBOE’s Native American Education Efforts.

• Help remove Native American figures or imagery as school mascots.

What KACIE is focusing on going forward

Red Corn said the board’s highest priority over the past four years is creating a more robust data collection system to inform the state of the tribal affiliations of students. Over 60% of Native American students are multiracial and are lost in the current student information systems.

“We don’t have any mechanism for actually reporting out that 62% in a normal mechanized way,” Red Corn said.

There are also matters of teaching Native American languages in schools in addition to more common foreign languages taught in schools. But curriculum can get tricky, and the KSBOE doesn’t typically make strict prescriptions about what schools should teach.

Red Corn said any recommendations would be about tribal history and sovereignty, rather than specific narratives. He said there’s an assumption curriculum changes can be viewed as political messaging that he would want to avoid, much like discussions on retiring Native American mascots.

“Mascots tend to become a lightening rod politically and it really shifts the conversation into all these different kinds of places, so mascots isn’t all we do,” Red Corn said. “Mascots tend to get more attention but they’re actually not much of the bandwidth that we’re working on right now.”

The KSBOE approved KACIE’s extension with a vote of 9-1, with Danny Zeck, District 1 representative, the lone dissenting vote. Zeck didn't explain his opposition but did ask if KACIE wants to remove American Indian mascots during the meeting. Several board members who voted in favor of retaining KACIE hailed it as an important step in building understanding between Native Americans and the educational system.

“I just see this as an opportunity that we didn’t have before to engage in relationships and understanding,” said Jim Porter, who represents District 9 on the KSBOE. “I think we have the opportunity to have meaningful education opportunities, just to have conversations, just to understand each other better.”

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Council keeps consultant role on Native American education in Kansas