Demographics
My teaching career has been planted on the soil of the Navajo Reservation in a small town called Kayenta. It is located in the northeastern region of Arizona. 92% of our community is made up of people with Navajo in their bloodline. Thirty one percent of all families have income below the poverty line and our school is classified as a Title One school. I have been teaching Kindergarten at Kayenta Elementary School for the past eleven years and four of those years I taught English Language Learners. Typically, I have encountered at least 20 – 25 eager little bodies at the beginning of August every year and spend the next 180 days filling their minds, bodies and souls with not only academic but life skills that they will continue to use as they venture from one grade to the next. From year to year the enrollment for our K-12 students has been steady at around 2000. Our district is different from many others because our buses must travel as far as 50 miles each way to transport our students from home to school. These students wake before the sun rises and return home when the sun is getting ready to set. Some students live in areas with no running water, no electricity, and roads to their home are unpaved. The unpaved roads become hazardous in weather conditions such as heavy rain storms or heavy snow storms. On some of these days, our district calls off school because the roads are unpassable. On the Navajo reservation, students are faced with many barriers, yet they persevere.
Within the past few years, our district has been working on creating and consistently serve healthy foods on a daily basis to our students. The hard work and dedication became evident when in 2011, Kayenta Unified School District won second place out of 380 nationwide submissions in First Lady Michelle Obama's Recipes for Healthy Kids competition. The competition required teams of school nutrition professionals, chefs, students, and community members to work together to develop a creative, nutritious, and kid-approved recipe that could easily be incorporated into the lunch program. Our school created a Stir Fry Chicken Fajita, Squash and Corn dish. The Food Service Director traveled to Washington D.C. to receive the award and to this day, many of the food choices offered at our school are nutritious.
The Navajo Nation Special Diabetes Project is a group of community workers who are visible in the community and work with all ages, from infants to elders. Within the Kayenta service area, there are seven individual chapters and each chapter is made up of a small community in which this project serves each chapter. The purposes of the project are to a) provide prevention education to reduce new diabetes cases among the Navajo people, b) to identify individuals who are in pre-diabetes stage to reduce new developments and c) provide diabetes management to reduce complications and disabilities. These objectives are being met by promoting a healthy lifestyle and educating the community in making improvements to nutrition, diet, and exercise. On a daily basis, the project staff members venture out into the community and hold free events, forums and exercise workshops. They are great at getting community members involved and have a very effective outreach program in place. During the school year, they will visit classrooms and teach lessons to our students.
My Kindergarten students are at the point where they are interested in everything and have just begun to peel back the layers of the academic world. Many of my students have had little to no Pre-Kindergarten experience and are therefore entering the classroom with what they have been exposed to at home; students who have had some type of Pre-Kindergarten experience are usually ready for the academic setting. Pre-Kindergarten readiness is not only an issue on the Navajo Reservation but nationwide. According to PBS, “Today, nearly half of America’s children are not prepared to succeed when they enter kindergarten. Research shows that children living in poverty enter kindergarten at an especially high disadvantage, particularly in literacy skills.”2 Given this staggering statistic, it is extremely important for a child to get the most out of Kindergarten in order to be successful in future grade levels.
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