Skipping out & missing out
Truancy takes a role
Story by: Zachary Franz
Photos by: Mike Greener

            They say Northern Cheyenne Chief Morning Star was tough, courageous, and uncompromising. When the U.S. government captured a band of Northern Cheyenne in 1877 and forced them from Montana to Oklahoma, it was Morning Star who led the flight to freedom. When the 200 men, women and children were captured by the pursuing army of 13,000 soldiers, it was Morning Star who headed the daring escape.
            How appropriate, then, that Morning Star is the mascot of Lame Deer High School on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeast Montana.
            Lame Deer High is beset by problems. Perhaps the most nagging is that the students just aren’t showing up. The high school had 16 of 146 students drop out last year. But before the students drop out most have high rates of truancy. Halfway through spring semester this year, a third of students already have more than 10 absences, and some have twice that.
            It’s a long-standing problem on the reservation, rooted in deeper issues of poverty and culture.
            The future of education on the reservation can be better than the present. Once again, the odds are stacked against the Northern Cheyenne and to win this battle, they will need the strength, wisdom and uncompromising attitude of Chief Morning Star.
            Brian Bagley, principal of Lame Deer High, talks fast and gets quickly to the point. It may be his East Coast roots — Bagley was an assistant principal in a Boston suburb before moving to Lame Deer last year with his son. Or it might be just necessity.  His office is a parade of kids with complaints, requests, detentions, and ailments. With a politician’s charm, he calls them all by name and lets each overhear him saying they’re his favorite.
            In between interruptions he glances at the live security camera feed into his office. The 16 panel views cover just about every square foot of the high school.
            This is Bagley’s first year at a school that’s used to first-year principals. They’ve had four since the school opened 11 years ago. Bagley ended up here by chance; after a tough divorce, he needed a change, he says. He’d always liked Montana, so he applied for “a million jobs” in the state. When he landed the Lame Deer job, the superintendent told him he had no idea what he was getting into, Bagley says.
            But in this first year he’s both committed and determined and fits in well among a population that’s 99 percent Indian. Students forego titles and call him simply Bagley. He has high hopes for the future and is eager to outline them, but he suffers no illusions about the present state of school affairs.
            “Truancy is a big problem here,” he says. “It’s huge.”
District policy states that students are allowed up to 18 absences each semester without failing a class, but even that generous standard has rarely been enforced. Halfway through the semester, for every student with perfect attendance, there is another who has already accumulated 20 or more absences.
            The reasons are many and complicated, but a walk through town with Marcia Welch, 17, offers a glimpse into some of them.
            Marcia, a junior at Lame Deer High, first heads to a small bridge. She scrambles down a hill into the dry creek bed below. This is where kids come to drink and get high, she says. Among the graffiti covering the underside of the bridge,Welch finds her own initials. They were scratched into the pillar long ago, she says. Welch says she doesn’t drink or use drugs, though plenty of her friends do.
            “People I used to be friends with as kids, now they just hang out on the west side drinking or huffing gas,” she says. “It’s sad.”
            Though the Northern Cheyenne Reservation is by law dry, plenty of alcohol makes its way here. It’s a short enough drive to Hardin or Colstrip. As for teens everywhere, the pressure and temptation to drink are hard to resist.
            Welch climbs back to the road, and wanders up the hills behind the Chicken Coop Café. This is where those desperate for alcohol, but without means to leave the reservation, choke down Lysol, which has a 70 percent alcohol content. A pile of punctured spray cans lie as evidence.

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