WASHINGTON – Bureau of Indian Education Director Thomas M.
Dowd announced on April 5 that the Enemy Swim Day School, a BIE-funded K-8 school in
Waubay, S.D., is one of four nonprofit organizations named by the Verizon
Foundation last month as the first winners of its Verizon Tech Savvy Award.
Enemy Swim, operated by the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe of the Lake Traverse
Reservation in South Dakota, was among a national field of 85
nominees.
“I want to
congratulate Enemy Swim Day School and its FACE Program for being among the
winners of the first Verizon Tech Savvy Award,” Dowd said. “The Enemy Swim FACE
Program’s RealeBook Project is bringing new hope to parents that their children
will have the reading skills necessary to sustain them for the
future.”
The school received
the award for its RealeBook Project, an initiative of the Enemy Swim Family and
Child Education Program, which was recognized by the foundation as an
exemplary program for increasing technology skills among tribal parents by
teaching them to write and publish children’s books, using computers, software,
digital cameras and printers while learning organizing, writing, editing and
publishing skills. Parents then read the books they produce, which are written
both in English and Dakotah, the tribe’s native language, to their children.
The project, which produces four original books per month, supports the
school’s focus on teaching the Dakotah language while promoting literacy,
employment training, and cultural pride through the FACE
program.
In addition to being
named a 2006 award winner, the Enemy Swim Day School FACE Program received
$25,000 to continue and expand their RealeBook Project.
FACE and its companion program Baby FACE are
projects of the National Council for Family Literacy, a national
nonprofit organization established in 1989 to meet the educational needs of
parents and their children through family literacy programs. Both are
administered by BIE to provide early childhood education and pre-literacy
experiences for infants and families in the home, as well as early childhood and
adult education programs in school. An important facet of these programs is
support of parental involvement in a child’s reading experience. Since its
start in 1991, the FACE program has served more than 15,000 infants, children and
adults. In addition, it has enabled more than 500 adults to earn high school or
general equivalency diplomas and approximately 2,000 adults to find
employment.
RealeBooks
(pronounced REALLY-books) is a Web-based application that can be used by
children and adults to create their own “books” with text and photos, which then
can be posted to the RealeBooks website. Books created by other BIE-funded
schools can be found on Web site’s Bureau of Indian Education RealeLibrary
page at http://bie.realelibrary.com/ . In school year 2006-2007, the BIE awarded
RealeBook Projects to nine FACE programs. They have since produced 1,840 books
reaching 460 families.
The
Verizon Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Verizon Communications.
According to its Web site, the foundation funds programs that address social
issues such as literacy, technology education and domestic violence, and builds
partnerships to replicate its most successful programs in communities across the
country. The Verizon Tech Savvy Award is part of the foundation’s Verizon
Literacy Network, a free, online resource that leverages technology to deliver
training and information to improve literacy.
The BIE school system serves almost 50,000
American Indian children in 184 elementary and secondary day and boarding
schools located on or near 63 reservations in 23 states. In school year
2006-2007, the BIE directly operated one-third of these schools and the
remaining two-thirds were tribally operated under BIE contracts or
grants.
For more information
about NCFL, its projects and partners, visit www.famlit.org . To learn more about the Verizon Literacy
Network and the 2006 Verizon Tech Savvy Awards, visit http://literacynetwork.verizon.org/ .
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