 - Local Tribal leaders expressed frustration last month that more progress hasn’t been made in the ongoing effort to provide tuition waivers to University of Wyoming students enrolled in the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes.){kind=link}
(Riverton, WY) – Local Tribal leaders expressed frustration last month that more progress hasn’t been made in the ongoing effort to provide tuition waivers to University of Wyoming students enrolled in the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes.
‘Some headway’
Representatives from both Tribes met with the UW Board of Trustees in September to discuss the tuition waiver request, and after that meeting UW formed a working group to explore options for providing more financial support to enrolled Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone students.
Since then, UW Foundation President John Stark said he and UW Vice President for Budget and Finance Alex Kean have been working with Tribal leaders to develop a “solution as to how we would respond to that request for tuition waivers.”
“We’ve met up here in Riverton in February and then we also met recently in Laramie to figure out (the) possible ways we could handle this,” Stark told the Wyoming Legislature’s Select Committee on Tribal Relations during a meeting last month. “I think we’re making some headway.”
The working group has designed a proposed “four-year renewable scholarship” program that would cover resident tuition and mandatory fees for enrolled Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal members until they earn their first bachelor’s degree, Kean said.
The scholarship “package” would incorporate other funding awards students might be eligible for as well, he noted, like the Hathaway Scholarship or UW’s Cowboy Commitment, and to be eligible for the proposed new scholarship, students would have to:
- be enrolled in the Eastern Shoshone or Northern Arapaho Tribe
- graduate from a Wyoming high school
- complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid annually
- be enrolled as a full-time student at UW, or complete a minimum of 12 credit hours per semester
‘Achievable’
When the proposal was presented to the UW Board of Trustees earlier this year, Kean said “there was an indication that we’re working towards something that is achievable,” but the trustees did ask for some “refinement” before approving the new scholarship package.
Specifically, he said they requested “a complete endowment agreement (be) written out so that they know what it is exactly that they’re approving.”
“Once that is in place, then we would begin the discussion of how to fund this,” he said. “There would need to be some expendable cash up front. But it would create the opportunity for funding to come from many sources to go into this endowment to then cover that cost over the long term.”
‘Pushed in circles’
Kean said he took it as a “positive sign” that the trustees “asked us to come back with a few modifications to this proposal,” but Eastern Shoshone Education Director Harmony Spoonhunter characterized the board’s response differently.
As a member of the working group that developed the scholarship proposal – and as someone who has been trying to achieve tuition waivers for local Tribal members since 2011 – Spoonhunter said she “had high hopes” about the meeting with the UW Board of Trustees earlier this year.
But after the trustees told the working group to “come back in with a more definite plan,” Spoonhunter said she felt “kind of like we’re getting pushed in circles.”
“We’ve been working on this for a really long time,” she said. “Other states have put bills and policies in place for Native American tuition waivers. … I would like to see that here.”
Eastern Shoshone Business Council Chairman Wayland Large agreed with Spoonhunter’s assessment of the meeting with the UW Board.
“The impression I got was, ‘Let’s start the wheel all over again,’” he said.
The trustees asked about “Tribal funds” too, Spoonhunter added – a question Northern Arapaho Business Council Chairman Keenan Groesbeck considered “disrespectful,” given that UW is “a land-grant based university” that is located on historically Tribal lands.
“In a roundabout way, you know, they kind of disrespected Ms. Spoonhunter because they told her, ‘Well, why don’t you go get a dollar and start your own endowment,’” he recalled. “I think the UW Board of Trustees owes her an apology. …
“The good old boys club at UW needs to deal with us. They need to give us the time to hear us out on these matters. (Because) the Tribes and UW are in a position now that we should be able to figure this out.”
Large said the UW Board of Trustees has asked the working group to present their updated scholarship proposal in September.
For more information, call UW at (307) 766-1121.