PIERRE, S.D. (KELO) — Members of the South Dakota Indian Education Council are making three recommendations in the panel’s annual report.

The decisions came during a meeting Wednesday evening. State law requires that the annual report be delivered to the office of the governor and to the Legislature’s State-Tribal Relations Committee.

Statewide assessments year after year have found that American Indian students don’t perform as well academically as students overall.

The council members agreed they want data from the South Dakota Department of Education’s new Science of Reading program that is broken down to reflect Native American students. They further recommended that the department share reports with the council during the five-year duration of the $54 million Science of Reading federal grant.

The council’s second recommendation was that absentee and attendance data continue to be gathered by the state Department of Education. That was also one of the recommendations made in the council’s 2023 report.

The department has distributed federally provided grant money to a handful of school districts the past two years so they could work on improving attendance and reducing the chronic absenteeism that substantially worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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State Education Secretary Joe Graves, who is a member of the council, said the federal funding being used for the attendance grants will expire after the 2025-26 school year. He and Lower Brule Sioux Tribe education director Brian Wagner spoke beforehand about what might come after that.

“If we have good enough data,” Wagner said about their conversation, “we can get the state Legislature to talk about supporting schools financially and if not, then he had some ways he can do it with existing resources. If we can collect good data, then maybe we can get additional support.”

The council’s third recommendation was that the South Dakota Office of Indian Education and the Region 8 Comprehensive Center repeat the wellness survey that was initially conducted last spring.

The survey was sent to all of the tribal, federal Bureau of Indian Education and public schools in South Dakota, according to Fred Osborn, who heads the state’s Office of Indian Education. He said that 30 schools returned the questionnaires.

The council also recommended that the comprehensive center share updates on the wellness program with the council.

“I feel like thirty is too low a number to make decisions about anything,” Rosebud Sioux Tribal education director Rosemary Clairmont said. “We have to get another try at this.”