ARAPAHOE—By the time she took the dais, Arapaho Charter High School Principal Katie Law was beyond tired. Law had spent the last two days of the school year with student athletes at the state track meet in Casper. After the final student competed, they all piled into a Suburban for the two-hour drive back to Fremont County, arriving just in time for graduation.
Maybe it was the fatigue. Maybe it was the years she spent herding this class to this finish line. The hours driving them around, hounding them to stay on course, answering their all-hours phone calls, worrying about them at every setback.
As she began addressing the parents, siblings and fellow students gathered in the gymnasium — festooned with turquoise, black and white streamers and balloons, artificial flowers and portraits of graduating students — Law was nearly overcome with emotion. She paused.
“I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” she said.
Then she regained control. There was much to celebrate, after all.
“We kind of made history together,” she said.
WyoFile followed Arapaho Charter High School’s class of 2024 through its final semester, tracking the highs and the lows as it made that history.
By conventional measures, the performance of this tiny school on the Wind River Indian Reservation falls behind. That includes its four-year high school graduation rate, which fell to 0% in 2018.
Beyond the statistics, however, lie unconventional success stories that defy categorization. Data points don’t capture the hurdles that have littered the path between these students and their diplomas — lost loved ones, housing instability, absent parents and an education system that’s historically failed Indigenous students.
Gathered in this gym, preparing to cross one of life’s most substantial thresholds, the Arapaho Charter High School class of 2024 offered lessons of its own. Stories of hardship, yes, but also of overcoming, of achieving and of what it took to reach this milestone.
The principal
Arapaho Charter’s student body is capped at 50, and it employs a dozen staffers as well as four shared employees. Because the school is so small, a one- or two-student deviation can skew stats in big ways.
“Graduation data has always been a thorn in my side,” Principal Law said in January, a few days into the final semester. But also, it puts a lot of pressure on graduating in four years, and that’s not reasonable for all Arapaho Charter students.
Her goal, she said, is “to get kids a diploma,” even if it takes longer.
The school was created to address high dropout rates, poor academic performance and spotty attendance. After receiving its charter in 2002, it began accepting students in 2005. It is one of many high schools that serve tribal students, including Wyoming Indian, Fort Washakie and Riverton.
Charter, as staff and students call it, has a smaller credit requirement than neighboring district schools, in part because its tiny size prevents it from offering a large curriculum. It emphasizes the Arapaho language,Hinono’eitiit,and culture. Staff develops individualized learning plans for each student, and the school partners with Central Wyoming College, Job Corps and the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, to supplement its offerings.
Nearly 100% of its students are Native American, and all qualify for free or reduced lunches. The school reports higher-than-average rates of foster care, homelessness and involvement in the criminal justice system among its students.
Leading a school of this size, the principal must wear many hats and put out many fires. Law, a small but athletic white woman who grew up in Colstrip, Montana — 20 miles from the Cheyenne Reservation — has worked in the district for 18 years, including more than five as Charter’s principal.
In that role, Law leads a staff of teachers, handles administration, navigates unhappy parents and works out logistics for field trips. She cares for babies when the school’s daycare worker is out and finds beds for students who don’t have a place to crash. She drives kids to events, and helps them get their own driver’s licenses. When needed, she helps them navigate the criminal justice system.
After 18 years, she understands that her school district faces challenges that don’t conform with traditional performance markers like on-time graduation. Over the next five months, Law and other district educators will pour their energy into helping kids earn those diplomas, on-time or not.
Parents as students
The plain blue schoolhouse was a splotch of color against empty snow-covered fields just a few weeks later in February. The Wind River Mountains loomed in the southwest, rounded and white. The sky overhead was quiet.
Charter feels utterly remote in a way many people would struggle to comprehend. Like a lot of structures on the reservation, the simple peak-roofed building doesn’t share a street with other homes or businesses, or occupy any kind of delineated neighborhood. It contains a handful of classrooms, a couple offices and a daycare.
Law was in her office answering emails. A bag of candy sat on a shelf, good bait for drawing in students, and gym shoes were stowed in a corner. The semester was off to an OK start, she said, though she had lost one senior who’d dropped out.
Strains of a cartoon drifted from a room near the main entrance. Inside that room, a 2-year-old boy with a shock of black hair threw a ball into a toddler-sized hoop while the daycare manager, Ella French, cheered him on.
Drew Sky Oldman had spent much of his young life in Charter. His mother, Daylene Robertson, was a sophom*ore when she first toted the weeks-old baby to school with her.
Today, Robertson exemplifies both the trials Charter students encounter and how to manage them. Approximately 15% of its students are parents, according to 2023 school data. Lots of students here are saddled with responsibilities not usually foisted on teenagers, Law said. They take care of their relatives. They arrange funerals.
Robertson, an Eastern Shoshone woman with nose piercings and dyed hair, grew up on the reservation with her grandmother, an eye doctor named Penny. Robertson’s mother moved to Montana when she was 9, and her father, who struggled with alcohol, drifted in and out.
Robertson started watching her four younger siblings at an early age, she said. She loved to drive them around and hang out with them. She was a good student. Though she has asthma, she played sports.
Then she met a boy. The two partied together. But one weekend, after she couldn’t even keep a beer down, she said, she discovered she was pregnant. She was 16.
Robertson stayed in school through her pregnancy, and gave birth to Drew over spring break that year. After a couple weeks, she brought him to school with her.
In those early days, she was still working at McDonald’s. Her extended family helped out, and she sat in the front of class and tried to stay on top of her work. She was tired all the time. “I don’t know how I did it,” she said.
Robertson and Drew’s father started to fight a lot, and she moved out of his parents’ house and in with her aunt.
She lost friends when she became a mom, she said. One of the few who stuck around was classmate Sassite Underwood, or “Sassy.” But in June 2023, Underwood was riding in a stolen vehicle when it rolled off the road near Riverton, ejecting her. She died at the scene.
Losing Sassy was devastating for Robertson. “I loved her,” she said. She had also lost her grandmother, who passed away in late 2022.
She and Drew moved to Montana to live with her mom in 2023. She was going to attend her senior year of school there, but her mom kicked her out after they had a dispute over money, she said.
So she packed their lives into her car and returned to the reservation, where she moved in with her ex’s parents. She re-enrolled at Charter in fall 2023. She determined what credits she needed, did her work and in December graduated a semester early at age 18.
She stuck around during the spring semester to play sports and work as a bus monitor while Drew was in daycare. “Best student in the school,” she said of her son’s attendance.
Having her son was a sort of wake-up call, Robertson said. He motivates her to excel, to do things like graduate early.
“After I had Drew,” Robertson said, “I started thinking about our future because I didn’t want to be like any other mom that don’t work, is always home, dependent on people.”
Others in Robertson’s situation “would have given up a long time ago,” Law said. “It kind of did the opposite for her and gave her that motivation to not only show people like ‘I can overcome this,’ but ‘I can do more.’”
Warriors suit up
The school hit a roadblock last fall. Charter had a shared basketball agreement with nearby St. Stephens Indian School for several years, pooling resources to field a squad. But when Charter kids showed up the first night, there was a misunderstanding. St. Stephens evidently hadn’t agreed to combine for basketball, Law said, because Charter hadn’t signed the right papers.
A flurry of back and forth followed, Law said. Ultimately, it led to a big choice for her school: Should Charter start its own basketball program? If it did, it would have to be junior varsity only, meaning the seniors would forgo playing varsity to ensure that future players would have a program. In a community where basketball is king, it was a big deal.
“And our boys, specifically our senior boys, were like, ‘You know what, we want to create something better for other people, we want our brothers to be able to play, we want our cousins to be able to play,’” she said, “like, ‘This isn’t just about us.’”
That was an indication to Law, she said, that this class had evolved, understanding that being a student is “also about what they can do for the school.”
Charter only had weeks to scrabble together a program, she said, rushing to get uniforms made and games scheduled. But they did it.
“It was just a lot of support from this community,” she said. “Our first home game was huge. Everybody in the community wanted to come out and see the Warriors have a team again.”
Wins like this helped buoy the students through tougher times.
A spreadsheet of funerals
By late April, the snow had melted and the trees were on the verge of leafing out. Only a few weeks of classes remained.
It had been a hard couple days inside the school. A teenager had just died by gunshot in Riverton. That boy was like “a brother to about six of these kids,” Law said.
His death came amid a rash of funerals for community members or relatives. “I have about 13 different students who are going to be attending funerals over the next three days,” she said. That created challenges. Not only to give the kids the emotional support they needed, but also to accommodate the related absences without violating attendance requirements. She made a spreadsheet of funerals so she could keep track of which students were where.
“Graduation is in three weeks,” she said, noting that the tension between giving students space and making them hit their marks is tricky. “It’s been pretty difficult to navigate, especially with staffing affected and just kind of like ‘How do we keep kids moving forward?’”
Death is too common in her school community, Law said. By her count, she has attended 44 funerals in her 18 years in the district, the bulk of which were for students or former students.
A death can understandably derail a student. Some 70% of Charter’s students live in single-parent households or have a deceased parent, according to 2023 school data. That doesn’t count deceased siblings or other relatives.
Death and life
Wearing a black hoodie and flat-brimmed hat, 20-year-old Lakota Felter walked through the school, pointing to classrooms where he was finishing his education in what was his third senior year. There was the science room, where he had to take three classes the previous semester to catch up on credits. The English and social studies rooms, where he also had to meet requirements, and the room for math, a subject he had mastered long ago.
He stepped outside, where storm clouds had bunched together in the spring sky.
Felter’s parents divorced when he was young, and he mostly grew up in a home with his mother and three older brothers. They were tight-knit.
Felter, a stout Northern Arapaho man with a gentle voice, mostly stayed out of trouble and always liked math. He attended the bulk of his schooling at nearby St. Stephens Indian School.
His mother had back problems, he said, bad enough to keep her bedbound. In June 2021, he went to bed late one night after playing video games, and woke to his grandmother screaming. She had found his mother dead of a medication overdose. Felter was 17.
The boys took care of themselves after that. “It was all of us in the house,” he said.
He was supposed to graduate from St. Stephens the following spring. At first, his auntie made sure he was going to school and doing his work. “But like, after a while, I just like … couldn’t feel up to it.”
Before his mother died, Felter would get home from school and go straight to tell her about his day. He missed that. And while he was still going to class, “I didn’t have it in me to do work. I’d catch myself just staring at work.”
He fell behind at school, he said. “By like, a lot.”
St. Stephens was a bit chaotic at the time. Controversy rocked the school after investigators in 2021 identified widespread wrongdoing by school leadership, including sexual misconduct and bullying, and administrators and school board members were terminated.
He didn’t graduate in 2022. With the upheaval in staffing, he said, it was hard to track his credits. He didn’t graduate the following year either.
His brother, Winter, had begun working security at Charter, and encouraged Felter to enroll. He did in the fall and was able to fulfill his outstanding credits. He liked his Charter teachers, and said it was nice to be around his brother.
Felter planned to get a job after graduation. If money wasn’t an issue, he said, he would go to college and study something with computers. “That’s what Winter is always trying to push me to go do.”
He glanced out from the awning he sat under. The clouds were beginning to burst. Thunder rumbled across the open prairie. Rain pelted down a little while later.
Adult help
Fremont County District 38 —which oversees Charter — held Heritage Week in mid-May. Teepees were erected on the green lawn at Arapahoe Schools’ main campus about a half-mile down the road from the high school. The landscape had greened up considerably under a bright sun. Inside a gymnasium on the campus, fly-fishermen taught seniors how to cast.
A baby’s voice could be heard in the din. He was sitting on the lap of his mother, Byrdie Spoonhunter, a pretty Northern Arapaho woman with glasses and glossy black hair. Spoonhunter is 20, with tattoos laced across her hands.
Like Felter, Spoonhunter didn’t graduate in four years.
She grew up in Arapahoe and attended schools in this district since pre-K. Spoonhunter is the second-youngest of eight children. Her father was not around, she said, and her mother died in a car wreck when Spoonhunter was 4. She was in the foster care system for years and ping-ponged around a lot, she said, including to group homes around the state. A surrogate mother took her in for a time, but she also passed away, in 2020 of cirrhosis. Both moms are memorialized in her tattoos.
Once she got to Charter, she dropped out a couple times, which delayed her progress. She then was on track to graduate in 2023, but dropped out again after becoming pregnant.
This fall, “I got to come back with [my son] because they have a daycare at the school. That’s how I was able to finish.”
Auzaylio was just a month old when school started. That first day, she forgot his bottle. “I cried,” she said. “It was really stressful.”
She was also bouncing around homes, including moving into a shelter for a little bit, she said. Auzaylio’s father is incarcerated.
Life factors made it hard to concentrate, but if she wanted a diploma, she had to get it before she turned 21. She credits Law with helping her stay on course.
“Anytime anything went wrong, I went to Katie,” Spoonhunter said. “She would make sure I got my work done, even when I was having a bad day.”
Little by little, she got there, graduating at the end of the fall semester. She is the second of her siblings to graduate high school, she said.
She and Auzaylio live with extended family now. She wants to be a certified nursing assistant, like her older sisters. She’s proud of her diploma. There were people who didn’t believe in her, she said. “But now I’m able to tell them that I did it.”
The achievers
Though the school’s on-time graduation rate is low, some students defy the odds.
Malakai Dresser is small in stature, with warm brown eyes. The long-distance runner wears hoodies and ripped jeans and is polite nearly to a fault.
Dresser, who is Northern Arapaho, was raised by his auntie; he doesn’t know his biological parents. He went to Riverton High School for a couple years, and was expelled for, as he puts it, “being dumb.” (He was caught vaping more than once.) He switched to Frontier Academy, an alternative school, where he took courses online. He found it suited him, zoomed through and amassed credits. At the end of that year, he was close to graduating, so he enrolled at Charter to finish up.
His final semester, he ran track, worked at KFC in Riverton and attended school. He turned 17. Although a year younger than most grads, he was ready to be done and working, he said.
Jai’ron Rhodes, who became Charter’s first student to qualify for the state championship track meet with a 41-foot shot put throw this spring, was also named Charter’s Senior of the Year. (Rhodes’ sister, a junior named Kenya, also qualified.)
At 17 years old, Rhodes is tall and self-possessed, with deadpan humor. The oldest of eight kids, he spent his K-12 career at a variety of schools before coming to Charter.
Rhodes, who is Northern Arapaho, enjoyed the outdoors and the ceremonial aspects of growing up on the reservation. He didn’t like the darker facets, “all the drugs and all the violence,” he said.
He is very close with his biological and non-blood siblings. One of the latter, a teen nicknamed Shrimp, was the Riverton boy who died in April. Rhodes had taken Shrimp under his wing, he said. “He was just like my little brother.”
After Shrimp died, Rhodes disappeared from school for a few days. “I think I just needed time to be sad,” he said.
He didn’t fall totally off the radar, however; he returned to class with time to meet all his graduation requirements. He attributes his performance both to a personal belief and to his family.
“I think most of it’s just self-motivation,” Rhodes said, “just wanting better for myself and trying to prove that I can do these things for myself. And I think just having a strong support. Just even having one person that supports you can go a long way.”
His family, “they are pretty supportive of everything I do,” he said.
Rhodes’ leadership skills were a big factor in his Senior of the Year award, Law said. “He volunteers for everything that we do … he works and goes to school and does sports and is able to balance all of that,” Law said.
Always available
With just one day left of the semester, about a dozen school employees gathered in a gym for a working lunch, standing in bunches talking end-of-year matters. Superintendent Curt Mayer stood to thank them for their work and to introduce a surprise guest. Wyoming Association of Secondary Schools Principals Executive Director Ken Griffith was there to present Law with the Principal of the Year award.
When he called her name, Law pulled her sweater hood over her head in embarrassment. As she walked up to accept her plaque, she noted regretfully that she was in jeans.
Law is the first reservation principal to win the award, Mayer said. When asked how she felt, she deflected, saying she doesn’t like attention.
Still, she is clearly committed. At the end of the school year, she said, it’s not uncommon to work 12- to 15-hour days.
“I want to see things succeed, and I’m going to do what it takes,” she said. Being on all the time does sometimes cause problems in her personal life, she said, but she feels the job demands untraditional hours. Law, who is married, also coaches track.
“Track is my own deal,” she said. “I don’t have to coach, but I love it.” It’s what helps her get through the harder things, she said.
The way she makes herself available to students is extraordinary, Mayer said.
“You’re not going to find another principal or educator that puts as much time in as she does in the evenings, on the weekends,” he said. “Kids call her at 2 or 3 in the morning, things like that. She’s always available for them.”
‘Greatness in your blood’
Back in the crowded gym, the graduation ceremony unspooled with aHinono’eitiitwelcome and prayer, a procession of dancers and a bit of pomp. Graduates sat in the front row, occasionally fiddling with their tassels and shifting in their seats as they watched speakers. By the time the keynote speaker stepped to the dais, toddlers and infants in the gym were growing fussy.
Actor Christian Wassana, who has appeared on television shows like “Yellowstone” and spent time with this class before, urged the seniors to believe in themselves and leave their comfort zones. Statistics on Native Americans, he said, can paint a grim picture. “That’s not who we are. And you guys know that. You are changing that today.”
According to Wyoming Department of Education numbers, “American Indian” students had the lowest four-year graduation rates of all categories in 2022-2023 — below even students categorized as “homeless” or in “foster care.”
But on this day, 14 Charter students donned caps and gowns — the biggest class in the school’s history. Among them were a record four students who graduated at least a semester early, three students who were dual-enrolled in Central Wyoming College, Rhodes the state track qualifier and a handful who worked after-school jobs. Eight students were headed either to college or Job Corps.
Robertson was there, beaded tall moccasins on her feet and Drew by her side in his own miniature cap and gown. Felter was too, wearing graduation necklaces that looked like leis, only they were made with folded dollar bills. Rhodes went to the lectern to collect several honors and strike funny poses. Dresser accepted a Pacesetter award. When the kids went out into the audience to hand roses out to individuals who influenced them, Spoonhunter gave one to Law. A couple hundred people filled the gym, recording on their phones and hollering applause along with the drummers who accompanied the ceremony.
“You have greatness in your blood, resiliency in your DNA from your ancestors,” District 38 School Board Chair Lionel Bell told them. “I want you to remember that.”
After each of the 14 kids collected their framed diplomas, they returned to their seats. The ceremony was ending, the crowd spilling out into the aisles and the buzz of voices growing loud.
Nobody was giving instructions to the graduates any longer; they had been freed of duty. A group gathered in a loose bunch in front of the stage as confetti poppers went off, and undertook that final act before adulthood: tossing caps in the air.
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
