Sovereign Community School finds new home in Oklahoma City

Wednesday, October 30, 2019  

OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma -- Emphasizing wellness and culturally based curriculum in the classrooms is what the newly established Sovereign Community School prioritizes.

With their doors officially opening for the first day of classes on August 26, the long awaited and anticipated charter school has high expectations for their first year in school.

Sovereign Community School was approved by the Oklahoma State Board of Education in August 2018 after being rejected twice by the Oklahoma City Public Schools Board.

After struggling to find a permanent and stable place to house the new school, an offer too good to back down on opened just weeks before the school’s original date to start classes.

With plans set to renovate and begin school at the former St. Johns Episcopal School in Oklahoma City, other challenges fell into place, putting the school in a position to explore other options.

Phil Gover, founder and school board president, said the biggest challenge the school had to work through was a facility change.

“There were two things that were going to hold us up from starting school there, the first was that the timeline to get the work done was going to be a couple of months before we could move in, so we knew about mid-July we needed to find a starter building to start school in for maybe a couple of months and we could move back in to St. Johns, but then in early August, we learned that in addition to the delay, the cost to get all the work done to get our building started for occupancy was going to be half a million dollars and that’s about four times the max budget we had for the renovation at the property,” Gover said.

At that point it became clear to Gover and his leadership team they didn’t need to find a place to start school for a couple of months, they needed a place to have school for the entire school year.

While working through different facility plans and figuring out where to start school, Gover said they had identified two properties.

“It was so close, the first property was a former school on the south side of the city that we could move right into, the problem with that property from our perspective was first, it’s really expensive, about $10,000 a month so we would add an additional $120,000 in rent expense for us in just this first year and that’s for us, a pretty small school, a lot of money, and so that was worse. I wasn’t super confident we could actually make that work all year without sacrificing some pretty significant things we were wanting to do at Sovereign, the other thing about that site is in comparison to St. Johns and comparison to the place we’re at now, it didn’t have any of the outdoor accommodations,” Gover said.

With wellness at the forefront of their Indigenized curriculum to teach at Sovereign, Gover said the properties weren’t a place where kids could do outside experiential education.

When Sovereign became aware that the former SeeWorth Organization property might become available, they were soon approached by the SeeWorth school board president asking if they were interested in sub-leasing the property.

“We couldn’t get a sub-lease, the State Department of Education wouldn’t let us sub-lease with the organization because they are actively under audit in the investigation for the reasons that they were closed in the first place, the only way we could move into this place is if we had a direct lease from the owner of the property, which is a local profit foundation called the McLaughlin Family Foundation,” Gover said.

It was soon after that the former SeeWorth Academy announced they would give up their lease, allowing Sovereign to assume the lease on the property with the McLaughlin Family Foundation.

Like a roller coaster, their plan of action in getting Sovereign up and running for school was put back into motion as they could officially announce the former SeeWorth Academy in Oklahoma City as their new home.

The new property, in full-scale, houses classroom space, a gym, kitchen, library, offices, and plenty of outdoor recreational opportunities for youth to engage in.

“I couldn’t imagine a more perfect property for our school, when we came up with the ideas for this school two years ago and put them on paper, if you’d asked me to design a campus that was perfect for our school, I don’t think I could’ve designed this because I couldn’t have imagined something like this could be possible in the city, it always sort of feels like everything happens for a reason, like all of that stuff that happened in July and all of the bad luck we’ve had the last month and a half was pretty tough, we had a lot of plans, we have a pretty good vision for how we’re going to start school at St. Johns and we had to give that up but then get over it really fast because there wasn’t really time to be sad about not getting our way, we had to get school open,” Gover said.

With opening a charter school, Gover discussed how the school plans to stay afloat financially.

“This is a really great time to try to start a Charter School in Oklahoma, we first received in April a $325,000 start-up grant from the Walton Family Foundation, they do a lot of really great supports for charter schools across Oklahoma and Arkansas and a couple of other states, we applied for one of the grants right after we got approved last year and the grant paid out last spring, that’s actually the money we’ve been using as our operating funds since April,” Gover said.

Gover said without start-up grants, it is almost impossible for a charter school to start-up in the state.

“The state doesn’t give you any money before the school year begins and so the private foundational grants are really huge, that’s $325,000 we’re still operating on, we haven’t even spent half, we’ve been actually super frugal,” Gover said. Another grant Sovereign received was a $600,000 Charter School Program Grant from the Department of Education.

“If we were just relying on state aid, we’d probably have an operating deficit of around $150,000 to $200,000, so you’re start-up grants are absolutely critical to getting the school started because small schools don’t generate quite enough money around revenue to keep themselves afloat without either significant outside support, fundraising, or grant writing and grant making, so we’ve been really lucky, we’ve been able to raise almost a million dollars in start-up money to get started and that’s before we even see a dime in state federal aid,” Gover said.

With a full staff of nine and approximately 60 students currently enrolled, Gover said it couldn’t have been a better summer hiring staff but that it had been quite a challenge in recruiting students for the school year.

“I couldn’t have imagined it going better, the faculty that we hired to start the school has been amazing and a real source of inspiration, all this work and planning, I’ve been pulling 14, 15, 16 hour days for a month a half now, but it’s easy to do that when you work with people that are really talented, dedicated and really on board with your mission and vision that you have for your organization,” Gover said.

Faculty and staff hired for the first year at Sovereignty will include seven teachers, an office manager and the founding principle Matt Wilson. Wilson, Kiowa and Choctaw, has experience in working with school and youth programs on the Shoshone-Bannock reservation in Idaho.

In their first year Sovereignty will begin with sixth and ninth grades, with plans to implement and add additional grades each year after. Gover said that enrollment wasn’t the greatest in late June and early July when they had around 35 children enrolled.

“I was hoping to be closer to 50, well on our way to 80, so we needed to more than double the size of the enrollment and be pretty sustainable for this year, I was really worried about it,” Gover said. And then right around mid-July something great happened.

“I don’t know if our outreach just sort of caught fire or what we were doing just started getting noticed but we started adding kids a little more than a month ago and we got up to about 70 kids, that’s where we were early last week and then we’ve lost eight or nine since then in the transition with the facilities and transportation, so I think right now if I went and checked the roll I think we’d be at about 60 kids, we’re trying to get to 80,” Gover said.

In continuing to recruit students for Sovereignty, Gover said the school would continue to enroll kids through October 1, 2019, allowing families to enroll children even after the school year has begun.

With the school’s curriculum geared towards Indigenous studies and in an Indigenized environment, students will learn more about culture and language with Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal citizen Carrie Lehi as the culture and language teacher.

“For the language and culture, we’ll be having fluent speakers coming in from different tribes and specifically for Cheyenne and Arapaho, since I’ve been working with the language department and my dad’s one of the fluent speakers, we have a lot of connections in the community. I’ve also spoken with staff in the culture department and so they are all anxious to come over and talk to the kids and they’ve already done a few recordings for the kids to get started with,” Lehi said.

Lehi said that the language would be taught in pods along with several languages.

“I’ll be matching the kids up with their fluent speakers, they’ll have the same curriculum and we’ll all be learning introductions at the same time but then they’ll be learning it in their own language,” Lehi said.

Based on the intake survey from enrollment, approximately 19 different tribes will be represented at Sovereignty in their first year of school.

For the culture class, Lehi said she will combining required history standards with feedback from the community in what they want their children to be educated on as far as culture.

“In our first project, kids will be learning migration and how their tribe got to this state and then they’ll be teaching each other all their different migration stories and then go to their elders, they’ll get to skype with elders or elders will come in but the elders are going to be with their teachers, they’re going to be the ones that are going to be teaching their values and so that’s really exciting to me because the best time of my life was the last four years spending with my elders and so I’m really excited to bring that to our kids because it changed my life being able to learn our values and about who we are,” Lehi said.

Lehi said that as children learn about the history and difficult accounts that have happened, children will also be engaging in a wellness class learning how to deal with their feelings.

With the property at the former SeeWorth Academy full of outside opportunities, children will be allowed to partake in nature’s accommodations, including a walking trail, amphitheater and pond located on site.

“In my class, while they’re listening to their elders, they’ll be doing bead work or different projects, like making their own outfits so that by the end of the year they can dance and in the wellness class they’ll be taking dance classes, there’s all kinds of hiking trails out here so they can go hiking, the pond is stocked so they can fish, all of the things that you never get to do in school,” Lehi said.

Lehi said that her brother, Tommy Orange the writer will also be visiting with children at the school as his novel, There, There, will be read by the ninth grade class.

Gover said all of the curriculum would be culturally relevant for the children.

“Even the core curriculum, science, math, literature, it’s all relevant for our kids, we think a lot about culture relevance, we think a lot about how we can deliver content to native students, where they can see themselves reflected in the curriculum and that’s going to be true for all classes, not just social studies, which is typical in Oklahoma schools, that’s a really big difference about us, another thing that we’re going to be doing really well at Sovereignty is having a really great support system built in for kids who are going to start with us that are going to be behind or below grade level,” Gover said.

With classes starting on August 26, Lehi said she’s excited to see the kids come to school.

“I hated school and it was like torture, I got in the field of teaching because I wanted to create a better place for our kids and so I feel like this is it, I’m so excited for them to come and feel at home here, to not feel scared, I felt terrified everyday when I went to school and I hope for them not to feel that, we’re also doing something called restorative justice, it’s a practice that comes out of Oakland Calif., but it’s our way of classroom management, instead of that old boarding school way of dealing with kids, with restorative justice, if a kid misbehaves in the class they need to make it right with the whole class,” Lehi said.

With high hopes in place for open house and the first day of classes, Gover expects to see children experience a school that is unlike any other.

“I don’t think any of the kids that are going to come to school on Monday have ever seen anything like what they’re going to see and experience at this school, I think it’s going to be a really special moment for them,” Gover said.

Sovereignty Community School is located at 12600 N. Kelley Ave, OKC 73131. For more information or to enroll call 405-639-9416.

---

The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal Tribune can be reached at:
Public Information Office
700 North Black Kettle Blvd.
Concho, OK 73022
P.O. Box 38
405-422-7608 | 405-422-7446

Editor in Chief Rosemary Stephens can be reached at rmstephens@c-a-tribes.org

---

Copyright permission Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal Tribune