John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight
One of the newest, most modern tech high schools in South Dakota is in one of the poorest counties in the United States.
Lakota Tech High School, the only public high school in Oglala Lakota County, didn’t exist until a few years ago. It owes its existence to a $50 million flurry of activity that included the school and multiple building expansions, spurred in part by an influx of federal money tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pace of construction has been dizzying, and the still-expanding high school continues to educate more students than the district initially projected.
The pace of teacher hiring is another story.
The district could easily fill empty science, art and computer classrooms with students – if only it could find teachers and homes to put them in.
More than 40% of the district’s teachers travel more than an hour each way for work, from places like Rapid City, New Underwood and Box Elder.
That’s what made infrastructure grant funding from the South Dakota Housing Development Authority so enticing. Between the grants for roads, water pipes and street lights and the district’s other federal funding sources, the district aims to put dozens of teachers in five-plexes and houses just across the highway from Lakota Tech.
The school is an island of educational activity, a little over five miles east of Pine Ridge and 40 miles west of Martin.
“There’s nothing to rent around here,” said Principal Chanda Spotted Eagle, who has a home in Rapid City but lives in a district-built apartment during the school year. “That’s why you have generational homes of people who are actually from here. So it’s an opportunity for me to pull in prospective teachers from other areas of South Dakota and other countries, so that I can offer them something close to campus.”
The state’s Housing Infrastructure Financing Program has so far awarded a total of $77 million to 46 projects, after two successive legislatures passed bills to allocate $200 million in state and federal funding. The first year’s efforts were hamstrung by questions over the housing authority’s legal ability to award money to projects untethered from affordable housing guidelines. The 2023 legislature adjusted the bill to give the authority the power to award the money. The grant for teacher housing was awarded in October.
More jobs than homes
Lakota Tech is the only high school on the Pine Ridge Reservation not affiliated with a church or the Bureau of Indian Education.
On Nov. 14, the day the school board signed off on funding for a cache of pre-built homes set to be shipped and placed by next summer, Spotted Eagle had 19 job openings for teachers and others who work directly with students.
Just before Thanksgiving, there were 51 total openings at the high school and 101 openings district-wide, according to the district’s jobs site.
The openings are the result of the district’s rapid expansion. In less than four years, the Oglala Lakota County School District built and opened the high school, expecting 300 students in its first year of operation in 2020 but enrolling 311. Fall enrollment the following year stood at 453, according to the state Department of Education.
The district also expanded two of its existing preschool-eighth grade schools, completed the first phase of a new football field and cleared ground for what will be an automotive and welding facility on the grounds of the Lakota Tech campus. A water tower on the grounds of the high school and Wolf Creek School supplies both buildings, as does a newly built geothermal energy system.
Each school has an on-site day care for the children of teachers, currently at no cost.
The tech school has opened up career-focused learning tracks that the district hopes will pay off handsomely for students, employers and the Pine Ridge Reservation as a whole in the years to come.
At this point, he said the housing projects are critical to that vision, according to Darrell “Brownie” Eagle Bull, a longtime principal of Wolf Creek School who now serves as the district’s transportation coordinator.
The district starts teachers north of $50,000 – one of the highest starting wages in South Dakota – but it’s not an easy sell when the job includes a daily commute. The five-plexes that opened this year have already made an impact, he said.
“We just hired a math teacher,” said Eagle Bull. “We got the math teacher because we opened the apartments. So I imagine if we get more apartments, they’ll come.”
Options open with housing
Lakota Tech was an easy sell for librarian Josephine Richey. The 40-year educator had worked with Native American students in the past and has a passion for the community. She heard about the school from a fellow teacher during a visit to the Lakota Nation Invitational basketball tournament and cultural festival in 2019.
Between an apartment in Martin and her house in Rapid City, Richey put in a lot of windshield time for work in those first two years.
“I drove from Martin every day, and then I’d always go home on the weekends,” said Richey, who moved into one of the teacher apartments. “Now I’m across the road, and it’s awesome.”
Richey, like Principal Spotted Eagle, counts herself lucky to be able to rent the apartments while maintaining homes in other cities. That’s not the case for other possible teachers.
The housing infrastructure grant funding helped to pave the roads around Richey’s home, and will also help lay out the remaining homes on the district’s construction docket.
Work continued this month on the foundations for 15 single family Governor’s House homes, which are built by inmates at Mike Durfee State Prison in Springfield. The district is also planning to place 12 Governor’s House duplexes which, like the single family homes, will have three bedrooms apiece.
Lakota Tech students will pitch in, finishing out the basements as part of their coursework.
It all adds up to a unique setup for a school district.
“This time next year, we will have 50 to 54 units out there,” Eagle Bull said. “We’re going to be landlords for a lot of buildings.”