Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Dec. 6
Stricter day care enforcement is positive first step
In the wake of several disturbing day care incidents in Sioux Falls, city government is taking a small but significant first step toward keeping children safer when parents entrust them with others.
Beginning in 2020, officials will begin implementing routine random inspections of roughly 125 of the 250 day care operations registered with the city. According to LuAnn Ford, public health manager with the Sioux Falls Health Department, about one-third of the impacted facilities will be inspected each year. The other half are state-certified and already subject to the routine annual inspections required by tighter federal regulations enacted in 2017.
Why is the increased oversight called for? It’s the stuff of parent nightmares.
Video surveillance over a span of 10 days in 2018 revealed multiple instances of two childcare center employees slamming 3- and 4-year-olds to the ground, yanking them by their arms and stomping on them during nap time.
This spring, an employee at a church-run day care admitted in a police interview that she deliberately hit a 2-year-old in the face with her knee, causing a “deep laceration” from the top of his forehead through his eye to his cheekbone.
In March of this year, three families came forward in the case of a 76-year-old accused of touching young girls at his wife’s in-home daycare between 2012 and 2017. A plea deal sent him to prison for 15 years on one count. Prosecutors suggested there were likely more victims.
Last month, a 9-month-old baby died at an in-home day care. The child’s death is under investigation and no charges have yet been filed. Among the 16 children under the care of two adults in the home, seven were under the age of 2. South Dakota law limits the number of children at that age in that type of facility to four.
Whether intentional or accidental, incidents like these aren’t unique to Sioux Falls or South Dakota. Childcare regulations across the country vary widely, as does the degree to which those rules are enforced.
But while our city and state aren’t alone in struggling to ensure safe care for our children, we lag toward the back of the pack in the intensity of our efforts. The maximum child-to-adult ratios South Dakota law permits are higher than those of most other states, which are themselves often higher than what childcare experts recommend.
We are one of the few remaining states to not have a Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) for childcare in place, though one is in the planning stages. And South Dakota allows more children to be in a home without being licensed or registered than any other state in the nation.
The tougher federal transparency rules enacted in 2017 were part of a broader package aimed at increasing childcare standards and safety. Despite then-Attorney General Marty Jackley giving local governments legal cover to release basic information, including locations of reported crimes, Sioux Falls does not make that information publicly available. That makes researching facilities that aren’t state-certified difficult for parents as they look for safe childcare.
The childcare issue is a complicated one. Dichotomies abound. Safe, quality day care in the United States is hard to find and harder to afford for parents, but the theoretical law of supply and demand doesn’t function here. Keeping a day care operation up and running is an uphill financial battle.
An Argus Leader investigation found that the number of family-run, in-home day care providers in the city dropped 42% between 2009 and 2018. The pay rate for childcare workers, who aren’t required to attain a high level of education, hovers around $10 an hour. That’s less than half the median hourly rate across all occupations in the U.S.
In the face of so many challenges, we’re heartened to see city leaders move toward strengthening a fragile status quo. The lives and well-being of our children depend on this first step not being the last.
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Aberdeen American News, Dec. 7
We need to better serve our Native American neighbors
When education fails our children, our foundation crumbles.
So it goes for our Native American friends and neighbors.
For decades, Native Americans have been left behind by an education system that fails to meet their needs and has resulted in generations of suffering the consequences of inadequate educational achievement. Never has that been that more evident than in South Dakota, according to a special report led by reporter Nick Lowrey of South Dakota News Watch.
Native Americans make up about 10% of the state’s population. Lowrey writes after his two-month investigation:
The systematic failure to properly educate Native American students is seen as a major source of devastating later-in-life consequences that have plagued Native people and communities for decades: generational poverty, high unemployment, substance abuse, high incarceration rates and reduced life expectancy.
The latest results from both state and national standardized testing provides a window into just how dire the situation has become, as Native students continue to perform far worse than white students in South Dakota across almost all measures of academic achievement.
During the 2018-19 school year, less than one in four Native American students in grades three to eight and grade 11 was rated as proficient in reading and writing on state standardized tests. Roughly one in seven Native American students was proficient in math, and just one in eight was proficient in science. A separate test, the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, found that South Dakota’s Native American fourth- and eighth-graders were between 25 and 30 points behind their white peers in math and reading.
On-time graduation rates for Native American students also are lower than for every other racial group in the state at just 54%, compared with the rate of 85% for students of all backgrounds, according to the state report card.
Shame on us.
The reasons for the poor performance are varied and complex, but many educators and experts agree that the problems are rooted in circumstances far outside a student’s control.
“I believe wholeheartedly that we are extremely intelligent, innovative people, but this system is not designed in a way that nurtures that,” said Sara Pierce, director of education equity at the West River nonprofit advocacy group NDN Collective.
Pierce, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who has worked in school systems in Omaha, Nebraska, and Rapid City, said the state’s schools have struggled to teach Native students in a way that is relevant and responsive to the culture in which they grew up. There also are relatively few Native American teachers in public school districts, which reduces emotional and educational connections and relationships, she said.
A deep cycle of poverty that persists in tribal communities hurts as well. In South Dakota, roughly 60% of Native American children were considered to live in poverty in 2018. Numerous studies show that people of any race who come from a low-income background are more likely to struggle in school.
South Dakota needs to find ways to improve education outcomes for Native American students. For too long, we have talked about the problems with little sustaining action.
First, we need to embrace Native American perspectives and input on education. There are plenty of Native American leaders who can guide us to solutions.
We also have to commit not only our time, but be willing to spend some money to see improvement.
We can start small and test to see what works and what doesn’t. That way we can start to find out what solutions we need to be pursuing.
We need to help Native American children find their voices. We believe that will lead to empowering them, and nothing has more power than a group of people who believe they can accomplish their goals.
Too often, we simply wait for problems Native Americans endure to go away. But they never do.
If one of the problems is too few Native American teachers, maybe the state needs to hire a pool of them to teach online courses. You can reach even the remotest of students via technology.
Maybe more of our schools need to embrace and/or offer more Native American curricula. Fields of study such as history seem to be a natural fit. And what about offering courses to teach languages such as Lakota?
We need to put Native American children in positions to win educationally. Take their talents and triumph them in front of their fellow students. And we need to provide schools with significant Native American enrollments with staff members to emotionally support and encourage all students, including Native Americans.
We can also build upon the successes that already exist. Like the Cheyenne River Youth Project. That nonprofit service organization provides after-school educational programs, job training and internships, wellness education and healthy meals to children on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation.
Or the successes of a private, Catholic residential school just outside Chamberlain.
St. Joseph’s Indian School is home to about 220 students from reservations across South Dakota. From 2015 to 2018, about 96% of St. Joseph’s graduates were either in college, working or had joined the military.
Many native students have been left behind by the traditional public school system. Reforms are badly needed due to the state’s long-term failure to provide its Native American children with an education that leads to academic achievement.
All children, regardless of background, want to feel safe, loved and supported. Looking at how to better serve Native Americans educationally will not only help with that, but also will make our entire educational system and state stronger.
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Madison Daily Leader, Dec. 5
Tech school retention is great achievement
South Dakota’s technical institutes have raised their retention rate to 78%, a terrific achievement .
Retention rate is defined as the percentage of students finishing their first year who return to the same institution for their second year.
It’s a widely watched measure in higher education. Some universities and technical schools even have part of their funding formula determined by retention rate.
Most schools work hard to achieve a high rate, trying to provide the course offerings, learning environment and counseling that leads to first-year success. But the retention rate has to do with many other factors, such as quality of high school preparation, family circumstances, money, availability of jobs and more.
While the schools don’t have control of all these factors, they look for stress points, such as struggling in a class or absenteeism, as opportunities to help students get back on track.
South Dakota’s tech schools’ retention rate is well above the national average of 62%. The schools certainly deserve credit for this achievement.
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