U.S. Education Secretary John B. King Jr. will travel to Pine Ridge, S.D., on Thursday for a firsthand look at the issues affecting Native American students.
King will visit Red Cloud Indian School where he will meet with teachers and administrators and visit classrooms. The private K-12 school was featured prominently in Education Week‘s 2013 multimedia reporting project on education on the Pine Ridge reservation in 2013
He will also visit Wolf Creek School, a pre-kindergarten through 8th grade campus, where he will meet with teachers and tribal leaders and eat lunch with students.
More than a third of American Indian children live in poverty, and just two-thirds graduate from high school—the lowest of any racial or ethnic demographic group in the nation.
Those troubling statistics have drawn the attention of several federal agencies and the White House. In 2015, President Barack Obama launched his Generation Indigenous (Gen I) initiative, a joint effort by the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of the Interior, which seeks to address barriers to success for Native American youth.
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Photo: A school bus travels an unpaved route on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. -- Swikar Patel/Education Week