Staff and parents from the Sitka Native Education Program testify to the importance of Native language and cultural education at Tuesday's Sitka School Board meeting inside the Alaska Native Brotherhood hall. (KCAW photo/Ed Ronco)
The Sitka school board meets tonight to discuss possible budget cuts. School officials warn that the cuts could be severe, and that programs are on the line. At a meeting Tuesday night, school board President Lon Garrison urged residents to speak up about the budget.
“The art programs, the music programs, those programs that are the very fabric of this community are at stake,” Garrison told attendees at Tuesday’s meeting. “I know I’m preaching to the choir with the people that are in this room, but the work we’ve been able to do with Native education – that is all at stake. It’s going to be very, very difficult if we don’t have that support.”
The meeting was the board’s annual gathering at the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall. The event is meant to improve dialogue between school officials and the Native community.
The board approved a resolution supporting legislation that would establish a statewide council to preserve and restore Native languages.
Herman Davis discusses the importance of Native language and cultural education during a school board meeting at the Alaska Native Brotherhood hall. To his right are Tristan Guevin, interim director of the Sitka Native Education Program, and outgoing director Kathy Hope Erickson. (KCAW photo/Ed Ronco)
Tlingit elder Herman Davis praised the staff of the Sitka Native Education Program, for teaching a language that was discouraged and nearly extinguished by early non-Native teachers.
“Every time I speak of the language I get emotional. I want to cry. That’s how I feel about it,” Davis said. “And what these people are doing here, they’re trying to save what little we have left that you see over there. They’re trying to save our cultural way of life. They’re trying to save what we used to do before the first non-Natives came among us.”
The school board also lent its support to resolutions urging more per-student funding and money for school meals.
The board meets tonight at 7 p.m. inside the District Office Board Room. The work session is to decide what cuts might be made in the 2013 budget. Tonight’s meeting is not the last airing of the budget – it still requires a vote from the entire board.
