Spokane Community College will receive federal money to guide Native American students through its natural resources degree programs.
Washington’s U.S. senators say $9 million from the Inflation Reduction Act will be routed to six of the state’s two-year colleges, including SCC, to increase Native participation in their climate-related programs. SCC’s share is $600,000 over the next four years to continue working with the Colville and Spokane tribes.
“So many of the natural resources and environmental sciences jobs in our state are with tribes and tribes want to hire their own people and so they desperately need people to complete these degrees,” said Jaclyn Jacot, SCC’s interim vice president of instruction.
“They’re coming to us saying, ‘We’ve got jobs. We want to have tribal people staying on the reservation or working in their communities. They just need the education and training to help them be able to do that,” said David Stasney, a faculty member in the college’s Environmental Sciences department.
SCC will hire a person to work with students from the Colville and Spokane tribes. Jacot says many Native students struggle when they move to Spokane to go to college and eventually drop out.
“The tribal navigator position is really meant to ensure retention and success,” she said.
Besides a tribal navigator, Jacot says SCC will also hire information technology support for the college’s rural campuses in Inchelium and Wellpinit.
She says this is part of the college’s multi-year project to improve the instruction in the programs that include Native students.
“Over the last year, David [Stasney] and his colleagues have been participating with tribal ‘knowledge holders’ to learn ecological ways of knowing that, quote-unquote, ‘modern science’ maybe has ignored or hasn’t fully explored. Those are changes that will be happening within our environmental sciences programs over the next four years throughout this grant,” she said.
