By Thadeus Greenson, October 28, 2020, Community Voices Coalition.
Working on the North Coast, where the American Civil Liberties Union has had an ongoing presence since 2007, when it filed a landmark class-action lawsuit against Del Norte Unified School District on behalf of Native American students, Tedde Simon says she came to see there was what she described as a “widely understood issue.”
In Humboldt County — home to seven federally recognized tribes and proportionately one of the largest Native populations in the state — Native students were experiencing dismal educational outcomes and it was no secret, says Simon, an investigator and acting Indigenous justice program manager at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California. Rather, she says, it was “widely understood” that local Native students were far less likely to meet basic educational benchmarks and far more likely to be suspended, expelled or suffer chronic absenteeism.
“It really highlights the incredibly egregious disparities that exist especially for Native kids,” Simon says. “We knew, of course, that this is an issue. Some of this data is not surprising but still entirely shocking.”
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