The following letter was written by Rebecca Riall, a former board member of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center, which dissolved after the resignation of all members. Riall resigned to protest IU’s lack of attention to the interests of American Natives.

I am writing to tell you why the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center (FNECC) Board is dissolving and to share with you my challenge to IU to include American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians in diversity policies.

In the remainder of this letter, I speak only for myself, not my former fellow board members.

The FNECC board fought for the establishment of an American Indian/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian student center and has, on a volunteer basis, organized the FNECC's programming, represented IU to American Indian communities and provided student support services since 2006.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Board of IUB American Indian Center Quits After Lockout; American Indian Students Seek Equitable Treatment Within IU's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs and Plan Independent Community Center

It may be that my generation was the last allowed outside. Born in 1964, the final year of the baby boom, mine was the ultimate generation whose parents either didn’t care about, or were blissfully ignorant of, the real-world’s dangers.

As a 6 year old, I broke my first bone on a jungle-gym that today would violate every tenet of the Geneva conventions. Sharp, metal and covered in rust, it was a geodesic monolith, buried in the school playground, lacerating every kid who dared climb upon it.

Which was all of us.

For my seventh Christmas, my parents bought me a backyard trampoline. As far as I could tell, its purpose was no higher than that of a personal abattoir. Replete with exposed bolts and a brace of jagged springs, the trampoline daily extracted pounds of bloody flesh from both myself and every other kid in the neighborhood.

Latino students and others who are learning English may get left out of a proposed law that aims to close achievement gaps and other disparities between Indiana students of different backgrounds.

HB 1107, authored by Rep. Greg Porter (D-Indianapolis), would require the Indiana Department of Education to establish standards for teacher training programs in "cultural competency," or the ability to understanding how a student's background can affect learning style.

Sallyann Murphey did not plan on being a teacher. With a degree in politics and modern history, she started her career as a journalist and producer for the BBC. In 1991, she and her family moved to a farm in Brown County. Murphey enrolled her daughter in Harmony School, and her career changed direction.

She questioned her daughter's social studies curriculum and brought her concerns to the school. But instead of being brushed off, she was invited to teach her own class. Seven years later, she finds herself both teaching at Harmony School and working as an advocate on behalf of the school and its mission.

Murphey is passionate about Harmony School's practices. She believes in the school's mission and works to create other schools around the country that accept and support its ideas.

First in a series.

It isn't exactly clear what the Monroe County Community School Corp. (MCCSC) Board will do when it votes on Tuesday to redraw the school system's elementary school boundaries for at least the next seven years. But three things are pretty sure bets.

Clear Creek Elementary, a middle-class school on the rural southern edges of Bloomington and the system's most overcrowded, will be gutted. Roughly a third of its student body will be bused next year to the new Summit Elementary.

Childs Elementary, the most affluent of all 13 MCCSC elementaries and the system's second most overcrowded, will be even more affluent and economically homogenous when the fall semester begins. So will Rogers/Binford, second on the list of affluence and homogeneity.

And the concerns of a passionate, diverse, and committed group of Clear Creek parents and teachers will be largely ignored, as they have been throughout the nine-month redistricting process, a/k/a "realignment."

The Bloomington Alternative offered opponents of school board plans to transfer a third of the Clear Creek Elementary School student body to Summit Elementary an opportunity to express their views.

Victoria Rogers, retired Clear Creek Principal
Excerpted from a Feb. 1 Guest Column