Tina King Washington had more than enough good reasons for starting the Kwiyagat Community Academy on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. “I knew my tribe needed a school because our kids were not doing well in the Montezuma-Cortez School District. They didn’t feel like they belonged,” says Washington, the tribal education director at the time.
She recalls getting multiple calls about discipline problems with Native kids from Towaoc, home of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe (UMUT). “I found out that some of our kids were being suspended or expelled unfairly.” This disturbing issue for Washington seemed to align with an exhaustive 2014 report by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights that Native students were disciplined more harshly than white students.
Seeking a resolution to this mounting problem, Washington asked the tribal lawyer who was counseling her, “What can I do?” And he replied quite simply, “Start your own school,” and he agreed to help her.
A seven-member design team got to work and in 2021, the school bell rang for the first time at the Kwiyagat Community Academy (KCA) ─ the first Colorado charter school on an Indian reservation, operated and maintained by the UMUT, and authorized by the Colorado Charter School Institute.
Members of the school’s founding team, left to right: Alicia Whitehead, Tina King Washington, Sherrell Lang, and Richard Fulton.
KCA currently serves 60 Native American students in grades K-4. Most of the students live in Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. “Our goal is to have 100 students enrolled in K-5 by 2025. We are adding one grade every year,” explains KCA’s founder and board president.
Richard Fulton, the school’s education consultant, writes in its First Nations grant application, “The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe envisions KCA as part of a community-wide approach to Ute language acquisition for children 6-12 years old.” Other language-learning programs in the Ute community include Head Start, which teaches the Ute language to children ages 3-5; and the Tiawhe Program, which offers continued language education for students 12 years old and up.
“The tribe finally has a public school in the community for the first time since the boarding school era,” says Fulton, stressing that many of the estimated 500 UMUT schoolchildren endure a 20-mile bus ride each way to attend public and charter schools in nearby Cortez ─ leaving at 7 am and getting home at 4:30 pm. “With KCA, they can choose to attend a close, neighborhood school, instead.”
The most important distinction between the academy and other charter schools in Colorado is the focus on teaching Ute language and culture to students and their families. In addition to learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, tribal children are also learning how to speak Nuchiu (Ute), an endangered language that is very difficult to learn, Washington can attest.
Due to COVID and other high-risk problems on the reservation, such as poverty and diabetes, UMUT has lost many of its fluent elders in the last five years. Current estimates reveal that the tribe has only 30 to 40 fluent Ute speakers left in the community, and many are over 65 years old.
Fulton says there is a critical need to mentor a new generation of Ute language instructors. “The greatest opportunities for success in revitalizing the Ute language rests in teaching the youngest generation to speak the language and understand the cultural significance of language preservation.”
KCA’s long-term goal is to be less reliant on elders for direct language and culture instruction. In an online video, KCA Principal Dan Porter speaks of the urgency to install new language teachers: “I don’t have one child who is predominantly spoken to in Ute. That gives you an idea of the challenges of bringing a language back strong enough to affect a whole culture.”
Growing new Ute language teachers, one intern at a time
With the help of a $150,000 two-year grant from First Nations’ Native Language Immersion Initiative, the Kwiyagat Community Academy established a succession plan called the Ute Language and Culture Internship Program.
Through this two-year program, KCA will hire an intern who will be mentored by several Ute elders, including the beloved elder Betty Howe, who was the lead language teacher for KCA students for years and now works as a consultant. The intern will also take classes at Fort Lewis College, one of KCA’s partners, which offers a Ute Language Teacher Certification Program.
Elder Betty Howe has long been the lead language instructor for KCA, and she will help mentor the new language intern. Photo credit: Collective Colorado
“Betty knows so much about Ute language, culture, and traditions,” says Washington. She tells First Nations that the new teacher will work side-by-side with Howe, who is passing on her successful teaching methods that have resonated with the children. She incorporates acting, dancing, drumming, and singing into her lessons. “Betty is really good at working with the kids. Her greatest gift is singing songs with them. It’s such a great way to learn the language.”
At KCA, a typical school day for K-4 students starts at 8 in the morning and ends at 3 pm. About a quarter of the school day is dedicated to learning Ute language and culture. Washington says that most students come to KCA with very little fluency in the Ute language. “There are a couple of kids who are pretty fluent, but that doesn’t happen very often.”
Washington is proud to report that since the school opened three years ago, the students have come a long way in their language-learning journey. When Colorado Governor Polis visited the school recently, a student walked up to the governor and introduced himself in Ute. “I was so pleased with that! You wouldn’t see that in a normal school. Just that alone speaks to our success.”
KCA’s partners in curriculum development
The First Nations grant will also help with curriculum development. The plan is to develop more workbooks for the children that teach everyday words that they can take home to share with their families.
KCA has also partnered with the Language Conservatory (TLC), which created a Ute dictionary that translates English to Ute words with a voice-activated feature and is available on a computer or a cell phone, as well as a self-paced e-learning platform that tracks students’ Ute language fluency and progress.
KCA Principal Dan Porter takes time to interact with KCA students. Photo credit: Collective Colorado
“What’s cool about the Ute dictionary, is that you can hear a male or female Ute speaker saying the word you are trying to learn, so you know how it is pronounced,” Fulton explains, acknowledging that he uses the Ute dictionary on his cell phone all the time.
What’s more, with five-years of funding from the U.S. Department of Education, TLC will produce at least four Ute children’s books that start out introducing Ute vocabulary, nouns, verbs, and short, simple sentences to students and then ramp up over the years to more advanced conversational language and culturally significant stories.
The big plan to build a bigger school
As enrollment at the academy grows, so must the physical building. Currently, classes are held in two temporary modulars that hold three classrooms each, totaling about 9,400 square feet. One of these modulars is Washington’s former office when she was education director. It was a 1950s Army trailer, according to principal Porter.
Fundraising has begun to replace the existing two modulars with a new, 21,000-square-foot modern, innovative elementary school. Porter says the expansion project has been a team effort between federal, state, and tribal agencies. To date, KCA has raised more than $3 million.
Elder Betty Howe (left), KCA co-founder Tina Washington, and KCA Principal Dan Porter outside one of the existing KCA classrooms.
The new, larger building will include a separate Ute language and culture room, a library, state-of-the-art computer labs, a gym, a lunchroom, and a space for elders. Outside, as an extension of the new indoor facility, the architectural designs call for a few parks and an elder storytelling area that can also serve as a meeting place to conduct traditional ceremonies.
“The elders are very important to this project. They’re the ones who hold the language and the stories.” Washington further explains the vision: “We want both indoor and outdoor spaces for them so that they can look around at the sacred mountains and inspire the children.”
The new school is something that UMUT has wanted for a long time, Porter shares. “These kids deserve what all the other kids have. Whatever we build, we want it to have a permanent feeling. We want to give that signal to the community that you are important enough.”
For Washington, the new school will bring her original vision of the academy full circle. “What I want for my reservation is for our kids to get a good education. To be able to hold their own, be successful, and survive in this world, just like everybody else.”
