At the time of writing the RUSH proposal I mistakenly thought I could waltz into a reservation, conduct a presentation, collect surveys, conduct the interviews... all in one visit. Boy, was I mistaken.
You might think from that quote that our project is not having great success. You would be mistaken. It may turn out that a major accomplishment of RUSH, as much as the information we distribute to communities and the research results we publish, will be what we learn about effective processes.
Okay, I know that sounds like a line from one of those awful management training seminars and you expect it to be followed by one of those sentences that makes no sense but has a lot of important-sounding words. "With what we have learned about effective processes we will be organizing our steering committee to engage in world class service that will delight our customers."
It's not like that. We have actually learned a lot about how people on reservations use media, and I believe our findings will blow up a lot of stereotypes. For one thing, we have found that just as many people on the reservations surveyed surf the Internet daily (38%) as read a newspaper daily (39%). We have also greatly increased the speed with which we are collecting data by distributing surveys at pow-wows. We are comparing the people who attend pow-wows with our sample of people selected from a household survey on the reservation to see what significant differences there are. So far, we have found no differences in age or education, but we have found that more men were willing to complete the surveys at pow-wows than during the home surveys. Not sure why that is. Anyone with a suggestion, feel free to email me.
We have completed our module on Special Education Rights, designed to help parents learn what they can do to insure their children gets the best possible education. We have included our own personal opinions, such as,
"The three-year IEP is a stupid idea.
Your child can be assessed less often than every three years if you give permission. Pay close attention.. DO NOT GIVE PERMISSION!!"
We call them as we see them. These are stupid ideas, plain and simple. Talking around that fact so we don't offend anyone doesn't seem the best way to benefit the students with disabilities and their families we intend to serve.
As far as Dr. Longie's statement on not being able to waltz on to a reservation and have instant cooperation, that's true. People have been sold a bill of goods often enough that they are rightfully skeptical of anyone who claims to be there to help. They wonder how you can claim to know what they need when you don't even know them at all. Parents are busy. They have children to raise, errands to run, jobs to do and any training we offer is just the last thing on a long list of items they need to get done in a day.
If we really think our training is worthwhile (and we do), what are we going to do about that? Well, we are going to use the results of our research so far, advertise on the radio and our website, try to use those media to answer the questions parents have, and keep showing up on all those reservations. There is a story I have heard several times, sometimes about working on a reservation, sometimes about the story is set in Appalachia, but it goes like this.
"A young woman just out of college was assigned to the community by social services. Since many of the families lived far from the nearest town, she would drive down the gravel roads to their homes, knock on the door and explain to the family what her agency offered. One family had several children, no adult was employed, so she knew someone was bound to be home. Yet, each time she went to the house, even though she could hear people moving around inside, no one answered the door. The fourth time she went to visit, the father opened the door and invited her in. She worked with the family for a long time after that, and got to know them fairly well. One day she asked why they had not let her in the first three times she came to see them. The answer was,
We figured you were just like all those other people who said they wanted to help us and then went away without doing anything after they got their government numbers or whatever they wanted. But you, after you came back for the fourth time, we figured you was really serious."
So, that is why Dr. Longie will be going back again to the reservations where we offered training the last quarter. We are really serious.
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