She remembers what it's like to be a child in a world of powerful adults.
Teresa Iyall, the principal of Tulalip Elementary School, was only a few years old when her mother took the U.S. government up on its offer to relocate the family from their home on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in Idaho to San Jose, California, where her morn would receive job training and a chance at a better life.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs brochures distributed on reservations in the late 1950s showed Indian families living happy, middle-class lives, assimilated in their adopted cities, thousands of miles from home.
The reality was something different. The secretarial job for which Iyall's mother, Celina Goolsby, was trained didn't pay enough to cover expenses for her and her six children. Their San Jose landlord, with his dyed-blonde hair, fat cigars and pink Cadillac, was so flamboyant he was almost comic, unless you happened to be a child in a house where the rent was overdue.
Iyall remembers his silhouette rising up the glass in the front door of their rental house--and then the pounding as he threatened to throw the family into the street.
As she retold this story, in her office where 78 percent of the children are Native Americans and 78 percent are poor, she wove together several strands in the history of Indian education in America: the government's attempts to separate Indians from their families and cultures, and the distrust many Native Americans feel toward public schools that often have failed their children, thereby perpetuating a cycle of poverty.
They are her own experiences and those of her elders, passed down like the stories of Coyote the Trickster, from one generation to the next.
"I know what it's like to come to school hungry, to not have clean clothes," Iyall said.
"I feel so much for these children."
One who made it
To be in a school on the Tulalip Reservation, in an office with the word "Principal" on the door, represents beating long odds.
Iyall had expected to attend college and become a teacher. Two uncles, an aunt and several cousins were all teachers. But as a student, first in San Jose and then Spokane, where her family moved when she was 9, Iyall saw no role models of Indian educators.
"I didn't see it in my classes. I didn't see it in my schools. But I knew it was out there," Iyall said.
When she graduated from Spokane's North Central High School in 1973, about two-thirds of Native American students had dropped out before graduation. Many had dropped out before ninth grade.
"We call them push-outs," said Danny Hurtado, the director of Indian education for the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). "The system basically gets rid of Indian kids."
Figures released by the OSPI last fall showed that in Snohomish County, 50 percent of Indians drop out before graduation, twice the rate of whites and Asians. Hurtado said the Indians who leave school before ninth grade aren't included in the statistics.
Between Iyall and college stood two years of high-school math that almost undermined her goals. She got high grades in most classes, but she struggled in algebra, unable to unlock the abstract equations with their foreign languages of x's and y's. She ultimately passed the course, but only after her mother hired a tutor.
Years later, when Iyall taught fourth and fifth grade in Kitsap County, she learned about children's different learning styles. As she searched for ways to translate math for her students, the said, she began to understand the underlying concepts herself for the first time. About the same time, her own daughters were attending high school and bringing home the same algebra problems that once had so frustrated her.
A published poet
Iyall's eyes fell on a photo of her grandmother in an elaborately beaded buckskin dress. She said she realized that her people were gifted problem solvers, capable of complex compositions and abstract thought.
The insight resulted favorably in Iyall's first published poem, "Grandmother, Salish Mathematician," which appeared in a 2002 anthology, "Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community." In an author's note, Iyall explained the genesis of the poem and the challenge she felt as an educator.
"I have seen Indian student test scores decline, often scoring the lowest of ethnic groups in the areas of math and science. We have got to teach in ways so our students are able to make these concepts relative to their world."
Becoming a leader
Iyall, who earned a master's degree in education in 2000, might have remained a teacher on the Kitsap Peninsula. She loved teaching successive family members--a brother one year, his sister two years later--and how they came back to visit her in subsequent years, still excited about learning.
But in 2002, she was recruited for a federally funded program to train Native American teachers to be school administrators.
William Demmert, a Western Washington University education professor and a former director of Indian education for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who directed the program, said there are, at most, "a handful" of Native Americans in education administration in Washington state. He said the program was a one-time opportunity and probably the first of its kind.
In addition to learning about budgets, staff development, community relationships and administrative law; Iyall participated in colloquiums on Native education with the others students. They also met with visiting education officials from Greenland, where classes are taught in Inuit, Danish and English.
Together, these educators talked about ways to improve academic performance among Native American children: infusing lessons with culturally relevant materials, addressing the critical role of Native language in school and recognizing that community involvement is essential to student success. As she listened to these discussions, Iyall said, "I found myself beginning to define what was important to me. I began to form a vision of what I wanted to be as an Indian administrator."
Making strides
In 1997, the first year the state administered the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, Tulalip Elementary students were among the lowest scoring in the state. Six percent of fourth-graders met the state standard in math, 18 percent in reading and 13 percent in writing, and that writing score dropped to 6 percent two years later.
Iyall took over as principal in September, replacing a charismatic and popular principal, Fabian Castilleja, who had left to take a principal's job near his home in Eastern Washington. Under Castilleja's leadership, the school's WASL scores rose significantly. In the tests taken a year ago, 43 percent of Tulalip fourth-graders met reading standards and 30 percent met standards in math. The scores, however, are still nearly half the Marysville District averages.
Under pressure from state tribal leaders, the OSPI has instituted some reforms in Indian education. In 2002, the state Board of Education agreed to work with tribes to develop a certification program for tribal members fluent in Native languages.
At Tulalip Elementary School, two teachers come into classrooms four times a week to teach Luhootseed, an indigenous language of the Puget Sound region. The tribal teachers develop instructional materials, illustrating the words with drawings and reinforcing them with chants accompanied by Native drums. Tulalip Elementary teachers will be trained to use a Northwest Native American reading curriculum written by Indian educators and specialists in Native American culture. Fourth graders at Tulalip also will pilot the Canoe Curriculum, a culturally based set of lessons with an emphasis on math and science.
In the recently completed legislative session, state Rep. John McCoy, D-Tulalip Reservation, won passage of his bill that recommends, but does not require, that schools teach the history and culture of local tribes. He said he hopes the instruction will dispel stereotypes about Indians.
"We don't all live in teepees," he said. "We don't all ride horses. We don't all receive a check from the government."
Role model
Iyall is aware of her unique position in Marysville-district schools. She is not just a new principal, trying to balance the sometimes-overwhelming demands of the job: leading 16 teachers, supervising secretaries and custodians, managing a budget and developing the school's academic-improvement plan. She may be the only Indian principal her students ever see.
