Budget cuts already hurting Indian reservations

Budget cuts from the federal sequester are already having a damaging impact on one small community in Montana. The Fort Peck Indian Reservation is struggling to find funds for even the most basic of services, reports Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post. (Post photo by Erik Petersen: teaching at Fort Peck)

The school "superintendent can’t hire a reading teacher in an elementary school where more than half the students do not read or write at grade level," Layton writes. "Summer school, which feeds children and offers them an alternative to hanging around the reservation’s trash-strewn yards, may be trimmed or canceled. And in a school system where five children recently committed suicide in a single year — and 20 more made the attempt — plans to hire a second guidance counselor at the high school have been scrapped, leaving one person to advise some 200 students."

"Few schools in America depend more heavily on the federal government than those on Indian reservations, which have no private landowners to tax," writes Layton. "Washington pays about 10 percent of the budget for a typical U.S. public school district; on federal lands, it contributes as much as 60 percent." (Read more)