Navajo seek equal schools
Page residents hope pact will bring a solution

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

PAGE, Ariz. — When the Supreme Court issued its ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it was supposed to bring an end to the fallacy of the separate but equal school system. The landmark ruling finally did away with the legal segregation of blacks and whites in the nation's classrooms.

But more than half a century later, Navajos in Pagesay the local school district has yet to catch up. They're hoping a new settlement, brokered by the U.S. Justice Department and signed Wednesday, will change that.

The Diné Community for Equality in Education accuses the Page Unified School District of intentionally segregating its white and Navajo students into two separate and unequal elementary schools. The deal orders the district to bring the racial mix of the schools within 15 percent of the district average by 2012.

Diné Community member Collier Greyhat has been after such a deal for years. But on the day of the signing, he sounded reserved.

"I'm not disappointed," he said dryly.

With the agreement, he added, "we've opened a new role for our children. We've created a place for them in the education world."

The settlement spells out 23 steps the district must take in seven categories to make the schools more integrated, from developing a "positive customer service plan" to providing staff more Navajo language and culture training.

But the 800-pound gorilla of the deal is the racial make-up of the two elementary schools, Desert View and Lake View. Both, Superintendent Jim Walker said, are majority Navajo. But where Desert View's Navajo population sits at 90 percent, Lake View's less than two miles across town sits at 55. The district average is a little more than 70.

As Greyhat put it, "there was an Indian school and a white school."

They were separate, he said, but hardly equal.

"At the 'Indian school,' the facility was so old you could see holes in the walls," he said. "But you go over to the 'white school' ... it was a real nice set-up."

According to Greyhat, a group of Navajos came together to address the issue in 1993. But lacking a strong organization, he said, the group fell to pieces with a little pressure from the district. Determined to pick up the cause, he and a few others formed Diné Communities and got their 501(c)(3) certification in 2002.

They approached the state and tribe, but got nowhere, said Greyhat: "We just ran into a brick wall."

It wasn't until they hired a pair of attorneys out of Flagstaff and Salt Lake City that things started to move. With Brown v. Board to guide their way, they took their case to the federal government.

Walker doesn't see the comparison. When the Supreme Court ordered the end of segregation in 1954, schools had free reign to separate their students by race. But as Walker pointed out, Page Unified implemented open enrollment in 1994. Since then, parents have been able to send their children to whichever elementary school they wanted.

Why the two schools ended up drifting so far apart is another matter. Greyhat and company say the administration wanted it that way. Walker rejects the charge. He attributes it instead to a former Desert View principal who left to start a charter school and took many of the white students with him.

"So (Desert View) took a hit it never quite recovered from," he said.

The trouble with bringing the schools' ethnic mix in line with the district average, Walker said, is that, like enrollment, it must be voluntary. The district has a few ideas. Walker said it will try encouraging more Navajos to enroll at Lake View by adding a dual language program, and more whites to enroll at Desert View by turning it into a magnet school for science and technology.

Walker cannot say if it will work. All the district can do is try. If it fails, he said, it will just have to try something else. The settlement includes no specific penalties for not meeting the mark.

"I guess there's always the chance the DOJ could take us back to court," Walker said.