Navajos Bridge 2 Worlds in New Mexico

For years, distrustful Navajo parents questioned the value of the “white man’s school” that taught their children only in English.

The school system plucked their children from their homes and put them into another culture, one that was foreign to many parents. Their children spoke English all day and little Navajo at night.

The parents eventually turned to one of their own--educator Rena Henry--for help. Henry was an elementary school principal when she started a bilingual program with one teacher in 1984. Today, 27 teachers instruct 3,754 students.

“We’re finally making changes for the sake of our children so they can walk in both worlds,” said Henry, director of bilingual education in a northwestern New Mexico school district. “That’s what I want for them.”

In San Juan County, where jagged rock formations tower a thousand feet into the blue sky, the Navajo language dominates. Billboards on the main highway from Shiprock to Farmington use Navajo to advertise shops and a restaurant. A pair of AM radio stations broadcast in Navajo.

More than 80% of the student body in the Central Consolidated School District is Navajo, but it took concerned parents to get Navajo into the classroom.

Henry, 50, was principal at Naschitti Elementary School, about 60 miles south of Shiprock, when parents sought help. But first, they had to alter their view of the public schools and their role in them.

“For the longest time, Navajo people were saying, ‘That’s a white man’s school,’ ” she said. “That had to be changed.”

Henry’s program was one of the early Navajo-English programs in the state and succeeded by developing its own “home-grown teachers,” she said. The program, which received $1.3 million in state funding this year, is still being fine-tuned.

The program teaches students language, culture and history with regular classes. “Parents said, ‘These are the things that we want taught,’ ” Henry said.

In June, a team of six teachers modified the program to meet state standards. It was the latest step in a program that has always sought excellence, said Ann Palmer, executive director of elementary education at Central Consolidated Schools.

“They want to keep looking at it, refining it to make it better,” Palmer said.

Barbara Howard, a teacher at Newcomb High School near Shiprock, uses the largely unwritten language’s 32 consonants and four vowels to engage students in conversation, reading and writing. Children, many of whom grow up not speaking the language, can go home and talk with their parents in Navajo. “They have something in common,” she said.

At school, students become eager to learn to say words in languages other than Navajo and English. Some students begin to explore other languages such as Ute and Apache, Howard said. “It just expands. They have an exchange of languages,” Howard said.

“I’m proud that I speak two languages, especially Navajo,” Glenda, 15, said. “I think it’s going to help others.”