Rough Rock Demonstration School
The Chairman of the Navajo Tribal Education Committee as well as other Navaho leaders sat down in the early 1960s to discuss Indian education. They all felt that the schools currently educating the Indian children were lacking in certain areas. These areas were more specifically “meaningful local school boards, cultural identification, community education and community development, native language learning, home visits, and guidance and counseling.” And thus was built what is now known as Rough Rock Community School, founded on the ideals that “the background for the Rough Rock School is the educational reversal that employed schooling to help reconstruct Indian culture and personality.” Prior to the construction of Rough Rock School, the Indian Bureau opened a boarding school at Fort Defiance. Eight other boarding schools opened on the Navajo reservation following the first. These schools were described as “notorious for their English-only curriculum, militaristic discipline, inadequate food, overcrowded conditions, and a manual labor system that required students to work half-days in the kitchens, boiler rooms, and fields, and allowed the government to operate the schools on a budget of 11 cents per pupil per day.”<br> At the time of World War II, the Navajo school system was entirely crushed. The gas, rubber, and money shortages put the system into a gradual decline. In 1950, Congress approved Public Law 81-474, which was a long-term development plan that would provide $25 million for school reconstruction. Finally, in 1964, The Rough Rock Demonstration School was built. It was the first time that the Navajo people were directly or actively involved in the operation of a school. The Board of Directors, an entirely Navajo school board, establishes the school policies. Parents from the community work in the dormitories. One of the most crucial elements is that “the cultural identification program makes Navajo culture a significant and integral part of the school program.”8 The students are taught in the Navajo language and about the history of their people. Rough Rock also provides adult education opportunities for community members. In 1969, the Board of Directors appointed Dillon Platero, a former chairman of the Navajo Education Committee, as the director. This was an extremely significant step because the Navajo people now entirely control and direct their own education. Rough Rock Community School is still in operation today in Chinle, Arizona, proving that American public education can be controlled by the people it serves.

Citation:
Roessel, Robert A. "An Overview of the Rough Rock Demonstration School." Journal of American Indian Education 7, no. 3 (1968): 2-14. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24397380.
Collier, John. "Survival at Rough Rock: A Historical Overview of Rough Rock Demonstration School." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1988): 253-69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3195833.
McCarty, T. L., and Fred Bia. 2002. A Place to Be Navajo : Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling. Mahwah, N.J.: Routledge, 2002. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed November 6, 2017).
