Kara Bobroff on How to Make School Serve the Broader Community

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In this inspiring episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia and Jason Cummins are thrilled to have Kara Bobroff join them to share her incredible journey in transforming education for Indigenous communities. As the founder of One Generation and the driving force behind the Native American Community Academy (NACA), Kara passionately discusses how schools can truly reflect and serve their communities. With warmth and wisdom, she takes us through the creation of NACA, a groundbreaking school built on the values of cultural identity, wellness, and academic achievement. Discover how this model has inspired a network of schools across the country, empowering Indigenous education and fostering a sense of belonging and purpose. Join us for an uplifting conversation about the power of community-driven education and the bright future it holds for learners everywhere.

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction to the Getting Smart Podcast
• (02:00) Challenges and Inspirations in Native American Education
• (05:11) The Role of Community in Shaping NACA
• (08:37) Innovative Approaches to Indigenous Education
• (11:49) Expanding the Vision: The Native American Community Academy Network
• (24:56) The Broader Impact: NISN and Community Transformation
• (33:29) Looking Forward: One Generation and Future Goals

Introduction to the Getting Smart Podcast

Mason Pashia: You are listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. As the education landscape rapidly shifts around us, I’ve been thinking a lot about what is school, and specifically, who is school for. Fundamentally, a school serves the enrolled learners, but the best schools are both representative of and serve the broader community.

While looking for shining examples of schools that serve more than just the enrolled students, I continue to run into this idea of a community school over and over again, finding solace and inspiration in the idea of schools that strive to serve the whole community. Today, my co-host and friend, Dr. Jason Cummins, and I are joined by a great guest who leads a network of community schools. Jason, would you mind introducing yourself?

Jason Cummins: Hello everybody. I’m Jason Cummins and I am a education leadership professor at Montana State University and been in the field of, um, education for, for a, for a bit. So I’m really interested to learn more about community schools as well. I know that the landscape of education is changing and I think that this is, um.

This movement is really beneficial to a lot of our communities.

Mason Pashia: Our guest today is Kara Bobroff. Kara, welcome. So good to see you. Would you mind introducing yourself as well for our listeners?

Kara Bobroff: Name’s Kara. I’m Navajo on my mother’s side. Born for Lakota on my biological father’s side. I am currently the founder and the executive director for One Generation, but was the founding principal of the Native American Community Academy in the NACA Inspired Schools Network. So, super excited to be in a conversation about education and what we aspire to do and have done, and also what we feel Indigenous education can bring to the conversation.

Mason Pashia: I wanted to start off by giving our listeners a little bit of context about what NACA is. So, NACA, I believe, was the original school, and it was designed in collaboration with a bunch of community members to establish a school that reflects their values and priorities, including wellness, cultural identity, and academic preparation.

I love that. I think that really ties into a lot of the community vision work that we talk about at Getting Smart. But just tell me more about this process. Tell me how you brought folks to the table, how you knew who to bring to the table. I would love to hear just that origin story of NACA.

Kara Bobroff: Yeah. Wow.

Challenges and Inspirations in Native American Education

Kara Bobroff: So, going to the origin and genesis of NACA really came out of a lot of different people’s call for something different for Native American students in inner-city Albuquerque, New Mexico. My journey to this was both personal and guided by my professional path as well.

I grew up in Albuquerque. I was a student in the Albuquerque Public Schools. I went on to become a special education teacher at the middle school my older siblings attended. I was an assistant principal and just seeing what was happening during that time.

As a student, I remember not having any Native American role models within my own education and not seeing anything represented in the curriculum that I was learning from elementary all the way through high school tied back to my culture and my identity as a young Native person. I started to work with Native youth as I was going into teaching and really got more interested in what was that connection between our community and education. I reached out to a professor to ask about the history of Native American education, specifically with the Navajo Nation.

As I got into this, it was mind-boggling to me that throughout my entire experience as a student, that wasn’t mentioned once in what I was learning about the history of New Mexico or the United States or anything else.

As a young teacher, I was just, it was almost like being a teacher. I was in my student teaching at that time. It became really clear to me that that’s an experience that we should all know about, as far as the impact of boarding schools and the strength that Indigenous communities bring through the self-determination and sovereignty of education.

I started to get interested in that. I moved to the Bay Area and worked in a school in Marin County up in San Rafael. This was a public school with amazing opportunities for students. Everything from inquiry-based science to awesome core literature. The teachers had high levels of collaboration. Kids were open to take trips to Washington, D.C., and Costa Rica. I was just thinking, what would it be like if we had a school like this where I grew up, or where I was an assistant principal or a teacher, or even in San Francisco, Oakland, or on the Navajo Nation?

Meanwhile, back home, there was a conversation around what was happening with Native youth in the Albuquerque School District. It was one of the largest districts in the country. I think it’s one of the top 50 largest districts. There was a group of co-superintendents at the time who put together an equity council.

This is around the time of No Child Left Behind, when people started to disaggregate data and started to uncover different results for different student groups. They saw that although there was this vibrant Native population within the school district, their outcomes were disproportionately lower than their peers. Everything from attendance to high school graduation rates, academic assessments, and just started to question what would it take to address that?

The Role of Community in Shaping NACA

Kara Bobroff: Through this equity council, there were two amazing advocates, both in health and education, who brought several ideas back to this conversation. One was the idea of a Native American magnet or charter school. I remember thinking at that time, oh, that’d be a cool place to work. That’d be awesome if that were to happen. That just kind of inspired me to ask about it.

As I came home over this four-year period, I ended up moving to the Shiprock area. On my way back into New Mexico, I served as a principal in my first principalship on the Navajo Nation in a very small community called Newcomb in a geographically and diverse, large school district. Eighty percent of the students were Navajo on the Navajo Nation. I kind of saw the opposite of what I experienced in Marin, where it was very community-responsive to parents, with a lot of opportunities, and it was very much not that there weren’t a lot of opportunities for the student’s culture, families, innovation within the school. I started to question at that time what’s going on here?

As I started to read a lot about this generation of women who came into education and pursued their doctorates and different folks who started to write about Native American education, Indigenous education. The thing that I took away from those readings was that Native students will do better when their communities are part of the school and when there is a focus on culture and a reconnection with language. Also, when we’re looking at their holistic development.

I was thinking if this is true, and all of these higher education entities and researchers are writing about this, why are we not doing it? That was my big question. So I was like, how do I make this come alive for students? Meanwhile, the story I was telling earlier about folks back home, the conversation continued.

There was an occasional article that would come out, so eventually, my path led back to Albuquerque. As I attended when I left for California and just kind of reengaged the superintendent about what’s going on with this idea for a Native American magnet or charter school. Her response was that we have people who are interested, but nothing has really happened yet.

I think that journey away and coming back for me was one where had I left, I would’ve been happy going back into the school I taught at and went to as a principal. Or working anywhere in our school district, but really could not let go of the idea and started to talk to different people about it instead of just going right back into the regular traditional model of education.

When I talked to a couple of women, I said, hey, here’s this idea. What do you guys think about it? They’re like, we need to do it. Let’s do it. I talked with my family, and this should not be one person’s idea. I think the charter school movement at that time was very much about finding the single leader who has the best idea on how to change education. Take that idea and have it go across a hundred different places with a playbook that you can implement and students will receive it. And that idea is not too far off from what an institution of education has been, literally.

I decided not to go back into a traditional principal role or any of the different things. And spent that time for the first time since kindergarten being outside of a traditional model of education and being in the community in a role of having these dialogues and conversations as a principal really helped me see things in a very different light.

Innovative Approaches to Indigenous Education

Kara Bobroff: What we did is talk to individuals and bring people together collectively around a few central questions. It didn’t make sense to do a magnet school for operational reasons and structural reasons. It was really about how can we do this as a collaborative charter where we have support from our local district, but we have a blank slate to create a vision of what was possible. So, really it was about what is the interest of people coming together?

What were some positive things we could point to that were good for Native American students and families that we had experienced, whether we were educators or families? Different people in mental health and other economic sectors as well.

What are some things that we know haven’t worked, and how do we keep ourselves from making the same mistakes that we have replicated in the past? And the last question, to me, was not the most important, but the one that really helped center around the mission you just shared, Mason, was what’s the single most important thing we need to keep in mind as we create this goal and move forward?

Started working with an Indigenous women’s group. Started to go to the law school, the med school, the higher education entities in our city. Started to work with the Indian American Chamber of Commerce, Indian Public Cultural Center. Students who had stopped out of school, who were going back in and trying to understand that journey. And three things that came out of that were universal across all of these conversations, grounded in this experience. ‘Cause we all shared our personal experiences, which were at times really tough to hear and also at times very true.

Like my school did A, B, and C, and this is the reason why I felt this way. Like my counselor never said I could do this but said I could do that, right? So anyway, all these different things that kind of came together.

When I was in Marin, it was not a question of whether you were going to college. It was about what college you were going to. So, thinking about that and just what that might look like for students. The second was looking at students’ overall identity. And that came out of a conversation around a lot of Native students in an urban setting may have grown up in Albuquerque, like myself, and not have actually grown up in their home community.

There was a strong experience that was lived by the folks that we engaged, over 200 some folks in this conversation, where they felt like we want our child’s identity, culture, and language to be something that’s seen as a strength, not as a deficit.

And we also want people to be able to explore that in whatever way a young person wants to. So it’s their interest, where they’re from. And then having that holistic reconnection be part of the school’s priorities, structure, and design. And then the last is looking at holistic wellness.

And that’s really the foundation of the school, thinking of our work around students’ intellectual development and wellness, physical health and wellness, social and emotional, and then intentional connection to their community. And spirituality, not religiosity. So when you take those three things together, that became the Venn diagram for how we do our work.

So if you’re a teacher, a program director, those three things need to be constant in everything that you’re doing. And learning, building learning experiences for students and with students.

Expanding the Vision: The Native American Community Academy Network

Kara Bobroff: The mission of the school was that we were engaging our community to create a school that supported students from adolescence at that time. Now it’s early learning all the way to adulthood and all aspects of who they are. So they’re actively prepared for college, securing their identity and health. And that came from all of those different conversations, all of the things that people said. And then it’s if we do that today, it is still in place and it’s still the thing that drives the school. So that is what is now the Native American Community Academy. And I would say, I mean, probably the best thing ever to be part of.

Mason Pashia: Such a good overview. I love this idea of even just like showing up as the place to start. Both you and the community members just showed up and then that starts it. People forget to show up sometimes, and that’s as simple as it is, so hard to do.

Jason Cummins: That really resonates with me, your experience that you had no role models or you didn’t see yourself or people of your community reflected in the school. It’s a strange situation, and I think you hit the nail on the head that it is assimilation, right? The undercurrents of assimilation in America’s school systems towards Native Americans.

So I really like how you shared that and can identify. I went to a school in the middle of our reservation with, say, 98% Native enrolled, but we had no reflection of ourselves in the school system. So it always felt like school wasn’t for us. And then you mentioned that the NACA is a school outside of the traditional model. What does that mean?

Kara Bobroff: So it was outside of the existing school district but in collaboration. At that time, there were kind of two things that passed in our state. One was that our state had passed the charter school law. The charter school law is really intended for innovation.

Some of the first charters in our state were started as part of traditional high schools, comprehensive high schools within what you would see as a district. The other aspect of it, when we started the conversations with the superintendents at the time around the Native American Community Academy, there was a clause about starting a collaborative charter school where a superintendent and community could collaborate together to create something that maybe the district couldn’t provide or wasn’t addressing the equity conversation, kind of spurred that as we’re not doing well with our Native American students.

What do we need? How do we be of support, but kind of get out of the way for you all to create whatever it is you need to see and envision in a school? The other thing is that we have an Indian Education Act in New Mexico that laid out a vision and blueprint for native students around the components that I shared.

Not all of them, we didn’t look at that to create the school mission and vision that came from the community, but that supported the idea of having something specific and distinct to Native students. And I think the other thing I would say is the collaboration also gave so much autonomy so that we really could think about how, what does the day look like from the time to what we teach.

I remember in the first year, hiring our first group of teachers, we had 112 people apply for, I think, nine positions. There were 12 total positions on staff, and we started with about 90 students, sixth and seventh graders in that first group of families. Some of those families are still working at the school today.

I remember hiring the teachers and saying, well, I just want you to know, there’s not a textbook that you can pick up that you can have an Indigenous education. Okay, this is what I’m going to teach from, and here’s the materials that go with it and the resources, and that doesn’t exist. So you are going to have to create that. I think that was a combination of our greatest teachers and assets are also folks in our community, and having those folks come into the school and teach alongside our teachers or take on a language course or take on an Indigenous studies or science course.

One measure and assess the way we assessed ourselves against those three things that I mentioned in the beginning was really around 90% or more of the students stay grounded in Indigenous education, meaning perspectives. The core values of the school, the actual classes, and courses and experiences that they have from the time that they’re there to the time that they would graduate.

But really thinking about what does that mean to teach at the center of holistic wellness, language, and culture. And biology or environmental science or, you know, so I just like really feel so grateful for our teachers who show up and showed up in a way that was really brilliant, ingenious in so many different ways.

Then the co-creation around what we were doing well and what we were not doing well, students were like, the math curriculum we have does not make any sense to us. Like, okay, how are we going to change that? Or, we have Navajo language to get started.

Now the school has five different languages, and there was a young person, she showed up and asked one of the teachers, she had an old Bible in Lakota, and she said my family’s carried this. It’s all Lakota. Can you tell me what these words are?

Mr. Flying Earth, one of our founding teachers and leaders, was like, yeah, and he is fluent in Lakota. She’s like, can we have Lakota language class? I’m like, absolutely. We’ll get that done. I’m like, so the next year, we introduced Lakota and then other students were like, hey, we want our language. We’re from the Pueblo of Isleta. It was like, okay, we’ll create, I think in that situation, we created an agreement with the Pueblo. They sent the teacher, we provided the space and time, and to this day, all three of those languages are still part of the school. We added in Keres and Zuni language as well.

But I just feel like that’s kind of the thing that I would say that was really different. Then, you’re taking a personal wellness class and learning about holistic wellness, and all of these things that I think now more of the general population of education has moved towards. I think 95% or more of our students said, I have an understanding of my own unique identity.

Again, when I was in school, I don’t think I would have ever been able to answer that question. I was like, oh my gosh, okay, so we’re delivering on that holistic wellness, but we need to improve in this area. It’s a lot. I also felt like we set up in our, I think, fifth year, a way to really have a professional learning model where teachers had time throughout the week in a guided process to really think about Indigenous education and developing different frameworks themselves for themselves to be able to understand a cycle of how they would plan to create Indigenous learning opportunities for their students with the support of other teachers and support of somebody who’s guiding that process too.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that embedded component is so important in so many of the things that we’re seeing as well. It’s like you can’t have agency and social-emotional learning as a class. Those have to be embedded in everything that you’re doing. Jason, I feel like you oftentimes don’t speak up about your own experience, but you and I met because you wrote a book a while ago, and I think you’ve done another version of it or been working on it about the wellness wheel for schools.

I’m curious if any of this wellness conversation is kind of vibrating with anything you’ve been thinking about lately.

Jason Cummins: Definitely, yeah. We wrote the School Wellness Wheel, and the follow-up is Humanized Education, and it’s a framework to promote student growth and strength and utilizing identity and community as a strength, not a deficit. As well as focusing on growth and knowing that trauma or generational trauma can be healed through practice and, but yet not staying there, but recognizing that students who might not have, per se, experienced some very heavy events benefit from wellness practices as well, and so do staff. Staff learn to implement that. I was going to mention that, but thanks for mentioning that, Mason. I really appreciate the holistic wellness, as you called it, in your school because a lot of times, maybe there might be some sort of human element to schools, but it’s fragmented. Like you said, it’s we’re going to do this once a month, or we’re going to work on identity in September when it’s Native American Appreciation Month or whatever, but it should be throughout the whole school year. What does that look like? What are some of the holistic wellness practices in your curriculum? Can you speak to that?

Kara Bobroff: Yeah, I think it started with the NACA wellness wheel. It’s literally a reflective tool where our advisors put together the first iteration of it. It’s like zero to 10 where you can say how you’re feeling about your intellectual, what you’re learning, how your school experiences, your own nutrition. Thinking about empowerment and understanding your locus of control, what’s within your locus, and life fulfillment is a question on there, your relationships and kinship, and understanding kinship is a different concept for Native communities and Indigenous people around your family and how you think of your family. It’s really for students to reflect and staff on those things.

Then literally a physical, I worked with our advisory, I had the advisory for the first six years, six years of the school until they graduated. They were seventh graders who started with us, and every week we would focus on this wellness wheel and talk from that and talk about what our aspirations were and things like that. So it was embedded into a process and the relationship with one another, and then also through our student-led conferences and demos.

Then there were more teachers that utilized the wellness wheel also within their own courses. It would show up in a Navajo language class in alignment with the idea of the four different sacred mountains and lifecycle of what that meant in a cultural context, specifically in that class. In our personal wellness class, using that as the curriculum framework for everything that could take course through that, identifying how both holistic wellness and the core values of the school would show up in the Native American studies or Indigenous literature course, in science. It’s really fully integrated into what it is the teachers are developing, and they can go deep into something as they’re covering another concept or contents or building knowledge. They can also veer out as well. But it was something that I think our students are very much aware of and grounded in as are our parents.

It started to impact policy as well around we don’t have, we don’t want fast food in the school. We don’t want sugary drinks. I think it was our second year where it was like, teachers are like, well, if the students can’t have these things, that means us too. I was like, yeah, this is one of those moments where you’re in a staff meeting, you’re looking at the person’s face, and you know my answer’s going to be yes. So it was like, yeah, we can drink water, it’s good for you, and have healthy food. We have an integrated model of growing food and then bringing that into the concepts of using literature and science together, just around students learning and having a truly integrated approach to learning.

So all of those things, I think it’s if we’re asking our students to do this, we need to be role models for that. And it’s also good, right? So I think there’s those things. So it shows up in a lot of different ways, but it is definitely one aspect of our school that I was always really excited about.

Jason Cummins: Definitely, I can see the integration because how many times in schools, and I’m guilty of it as well, where we’ll teach nutrition class, but our school lunch is not nutritious.

Mason Pashia: Kara, I love what you’re saying. You’ve built this incredible school. You’ve helped build this incredible school. So much of its success is rooted in its ability to be responsive to the people it serves in the community. That’s really hard work. It’s also work that is wonderful because it can scale to other communities, right? If you build a responsive model with these things that are incredible for embedding identity throughout the day, this wellness, and this idea that identity is kind of almost like polyphonic. You are so many people, so many people influence you at a given time. I would love to get into some of the broader ecosystem work of what you’re doing, ’cause that’s some incredible work as well.

Shorts Content

The Broader Impact: NISN and Community Transformation

Mason Pashia: NISN is the network that’s been inspired by the NACA model. I would love to hear a little bit about that. And then just take us kind of up to speed on where you’re thinking now.

Kara Bobroff: So NISN came out of a couple of things. One, the first year we opened and the first year or two, we had a lot of folks come and visit. A lot of folks started to ask the question, how do we open up a NACA in our community? I was like, don’t do that. I’m like, no, that’s not it. That’s not the thing.

You know, there’s things that you’ll come. So it started to open up that question, and I think I kind of knew there’s a sense of knowing and intuition, I guess, that comes with this work. And it just kind of knew at some point this is going to grow in whatever way it’s going to grow.

We were able to do a deep dive and reflect back into our own work around what was working, what needs to be improved, how are we preparing our own teachers, and all of these different things, right? Knowing that it wasn’t something that people were coming out of education preparation programs ready to do. It wasn’t even a concept at that time that was largely accepted in many communities for sure.

So, there were three things that we kind of looked at. One was like, is it through teachers sharing? You know, teachers could come, they would see a class or a course, they would connect with a teacher at the school. They would grab curriculum. We would share the curriculum. We documented 10 practices and programs within the school to share out as well. So we did that, which was quite interesting, having to explain everything in major details. I was like, okay, that’s a little bit limited ’cause somebody can pick that up, but you can’t really pick it up and fully transfer it over.

Maybe those kids in a class, in a school that’s in another community, might get something NACA like, and that would be positive and good. The other was that we could have folks come and visit and share. The last kind of thing we landed on, I was like, you know, it’s really about the community and its community’s relationship to the school. I think the biggest impact we can have as we think about sharing this work is to not replicate NACA but to have it be a source of inspiration. All the things we’ve done well, and all the things that we still need to improve upon and provide the same opportunity that I had to have the gift of time.

It was about two years, you know, from oh wait, something’s telling me this needs to happen. What do we need to do? People like, how are we going to all do this together? To the time the school opened. So created a fellowship model, and so we funded a fellowship usually for one or two people from a community who stayed in their home community, came to the school, and visited throughout times where we convened together.

Visit other schools that were doing really great work around Indigenous language revitalization, innovation in education related to Native communities, and provided them with support from a fellowship director who helped really go through the process of engaging your community and what it is you’d like to see for your children.

Based on that, create the design of that school and then move it into the plan around how it’ll be governed, how it’ll be the finances of it, as well as the educational model and program. So, there’s approximately, I think right now, I want to say 13 schools in five different states that have gone through this process.

We have a couple of fellows in. There’s some staff in Albuquerque. Most of the staff are connected to have come out of NACA as teachers and are working at the network now. Ideally having folks in these different schools share their learning with one another and also share what they have done really, really well. My hope was always like, I want them to be really amazing models of Indigenous education. What if all of these schools had that same sustainability and love and care for kids through what they see as the values around Indigenous education for them and they’re connected.

At some point, these kids can be connected, and for me, that’s kind of a resurgence around similar things that we heard from our Maori brothers and sisters around what Indigenous education could be and the redefinition of what that could be in our country is pretty, I think for me, needs to happen and it’s happening.

But that’s how the network was started. Now, the network, I think, also provides professional development opportunities around Native American literature, Indigenous science. There’s an interim experience for those folks who are in some of the schools to connect. They are all different forms, like everything from a charter school to a community-based Indigenous language immersion school to.

Someone who transitioned a BIE-run school to be tribally controlled. So just different models when it comes to the frame of education. But all of it is based on the conversations they had with their communities. There’s some loose ideas around holistic wellness.

Thinking about identity, culture, and language, and some of these commitments that we have to seeing community transformation is a center aspect and piece of the work that folks are oriented towards. Then it’s kind of like you start to just learn from one another and create the mission and vision from there.

Mason Pashia: You’ve done a distinction, I think two times now, between an innovative school and then an innovative Indigenous school as this almost like both within the charter framework at the beginning and then just sort of just now as you were talking about what you all sought to be and Getting Smart.

We talk about innovative schools all the time. That’s sort of our de facto tagline just curious if you have language for that distinction. I’m always seeking a better articulation of what is innovation because it’s sort of a nothing word. It doesn’t hold very much, and it looks so different community to community.

Like it’s oftentimes you’re innovating based on the resources that you have at the time to achieve an end that seems impossible or unlikely. That looks very different for a very well-resourced community versus one that is under-resourced. But I, yeah, I don’t know. There may be nothing there, but if you have language or spent time thinking about that, I’d love to notice what comes to mind with that distinction line.

Kara Bobroff: Thank you for asking that question. I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me that question before. But I was thinking about it. To me, it’s the reconnection to what we already know based on seamless learning within our natural way of being and environment. So before there was an institution of education, Indigenous communities were aligned and are aligned still to things that appear seamlessly like from fall to winter, to spring to summer.

How we’re brought into the world, how we grow through our childhood into adolescence, into early adulthood, into adulthood, into becoming an elder. All of those things were how we lived, and to me, that’s seamless, that’s learning, that is Indigenous ways of being. When the institution of education interrupted that, there’s always been a draw back as individuals and as a collective to what we know once was. We can’t really create what was once in place, but we can get to the place as close as we possibly can.

I think a lot of the educators and students have done that through doing things that are connected to land, like putting together different types of schools, if you want to call them self-determined or sovereign models of education. I think in my sense, there’s like a reconnection piece.

The innovation is the creation of that, and then the embodiment of it. To me, it’s a creation of what is the embodiment of a collective vision and a collective sense of knowing.

Jason Cummins: That sounds more congruent with reality and the ecosystem. Just how reality is everything’s connected, whereas the identify with that. Whereas the Western educational system sometimes creates disconnect even between disciplines, you know, music, science, math, but within an Indigenous worldview, those disciplines are not separate.

Healing and art and music are, you know, there’s very deep interconnection there. So thanks for sharing that.

Looking Forward: One Generation and Future Goals

Mason Pashia: I think we’re coming to an end. I would love to hear, what are you working on now? I saw some stuff about One Generation. Tell me what that is.

Kara Bobroff: Yeah. So I think it’s the place where, so One Generation is really. The continuation of all of the things that have come from NACA in the sense that it was really clear when it was leading NACA and then starting like in ISN, that have always had to recreate and build the thing to center Indigenous ways of being in Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous values, and learning.

It’s to further that ecosystems when I look out at the broader kind of education, you know, when you think about H three, when you think about innovation and education, there’s all of these different organizations and entities and things that exist and people are creating them.

And my sense was like, I was always like, okay, we can use an AmeriCorps Vista program, but we need to NACA-ize it. And folks were like, and my everybody on our staff were like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, we’ll NACA-ize that thing, right? And make it relevant to what it is we’re trying to do.

We co-created Growing Educators for Native American Communities called GOC with a community college here. So we could get all of these amazing teachers who showed up who weren’t coming out of education preparation programs certified because they needed a certification to teach and a publicly funded charter school.

So we created a cohort of 35 educators. Some are like, some of these folks know more about life in the world, I’m like, I want our kids to have you as their teacher. And so whatever we need to do to make that happen, I’ll build a thing that makes that okay for that to happen.

Same with the fellowship and leaders and thinking of leaders of schools and being community members, not because they have a principal certification. Maybe they’re teamed up with somebody who does, but because they are folks who can see what it is that needs to happen in that sense.

So One Generation is like a place for folks to bring that understanding and passion of and also to know I can create something like this. I didn’t know there was an opportunity to do that. And then we also support in similar ways with schools, but like entities like the Indigenous Farm Hub and came out of that and the idea of like how do we get healthy food to students and families.

Jason Cummins: So if somebody wanted to reach out to ask how they could support your network or maybe even want a training or just to connect and learn more, how could they do that?

Kara Bobroff: Yeah, I think you can reach out to the school itself. So it’s naca school.org, N-A-C-A-S-C-H-O-O-L.org. Is the website, and you’ll find some information there you can reach out to. Let’s see, the NA Inspired Schools Network. Dot org as well. And then you can reach out to our folks at One Generation as well.

I didn’t mention this about the name, I was in this role at the state for a bit our tribes and Zuni Nation say we want language to be revitalized and we are looking at education to do that.

I’m thinking, oh my God, that is such a big thing. The more I learned about, you know, it’s by 2050 there might be 23 Indigenous languages in a healthy state within our communities. Thinking about this idea, if you can get one generation to revitalize and start speaking the language, it’ll continue on. So that also kind of speaks to the reason for that acronym and also OG thinking about.

But what do we need to do? And the urgency around that too. So really heavily focused on that moving forward.

Mason Pashia: Amazing. Well, thank you both so much for your time today.

Kara Bobroff: Thanks so much. It was great to meet you, and I hope we can connect again soon.

Guest Bio

Kara Bobroff

Kara Bobroff is Navajo/Lakota and began her career as a Special Education teacher in Albuquerque, teaching students with behavioral disorders. She served as Assistant Principal of a low-income school in Albuquerque and a middle school in Marin County, CA. As Principal of Newcomb Middle School in New Mexico, Kara worked with 250 Navajo students and seven reservation communities. She facilitated more than 50 community conversations that led to the founding of the Native American Community Academy (NACA) in 2006, and NACA-Inspired School Network (NISN) in 2014. Under her leadership, NACA has been recognized as a model for effective indigenous education by the New Mexico Indian Education Sub-Committee and has been invited by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to participate in national strategic reform for Indian education. In 2012, the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) in conjunction with the MetLife Foundation recognized NACA as one of 10 schools in the country for its ability to promote high achievement in spite of serving a large number of students living in poverty. NACA was recently highlighted by the state Legislative Finance Committee as one of the few middle schools in the state to show great promise. From 2019 to 2020, Kara served as the Deputy Secretary of Education for Identity, Equity, and Transformation with the New Mexico Public Education Department. Kara has been recognized as one of the “Best Emerging Social Entrepreneurs” in the country by President Obama, awarded a national Echoing Green Fellowship, and is a current Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow. She earned a Master’s in Special Education and an Education Specialist degree in Educational Administration as a Danforth Scholar from the University of New Mexico, where she received the Zia Award for University of New Mexico alumni for distinguished service in the field of education

Dr. Jason Cummins

Awaachiiiákaaté, or Jason Cummins Ed.D is an enrolled member of the Apsaalooke Nation, and serves as a professor of school leadership at Montana State University and previously served as the Deputy Director for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Native Americans and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities, Office of the Secretary. As an Indigenous scholar and school leader he has innovatively worked to lead schools towards authentically serving Native American students PreK-12 and their communities by implementing culturally sustaining, trauma-informed, and restorative approaches.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• LinkedIn | Kara Bobroff
• Our Past, Present, and Future | Getting Smart blog
• NACA Inspired Schools
• NACA Wellness Wheel
• Humanizing Education (A book by Jason Cummins)