The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bipartisan amendment this week introduced by U.S. Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick, and Jason Chaffetz, that requires the federal government to fulfill its obligation to maintain tribal roads. The amendment was adopted into the House Interior Appropriations bill (H.R. 5538).
The amendment provides dedicated funding for dirt school bus routes on American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) trust lands within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This funding would be available to repair dangerously rutted and flood-prone roads in the Navajo Nation.
“The condition of critical bus routes within the Navajo Nation is unacceptable,” Chaffetz said. “There is no excuse for kids to qualify as chronically absent simply because bad weather made their road to school impassable. These students already face enough barriers to success without having to worry about whether they can even get to school,” said Chaffetz in a press release. “They deserve better.”
Kirkpatrick represents 12 Native American tribes in District One, including the Navajo Nation. About 85,000 Navajo K-12 students use tribal roads to get to one of the 260 schools on tribal land. Many of these children can spend up to two hours on a bus – each way, every day – because these unmaintained routes are so difficult to traverse.
“As I’ve said many times, this is more than a transportation issue — it’s a civil rights issue,” said Kirkpatrick, who is Arizona’s only member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee,” stated Kirkpatrick. “Students on tribal land deserve the same access to education as any other student.”
According to Kirkpatrick, the federal government is contractually obligated to pay for tribal road maintenance, but every year only 20 percent of those maintenance costs are actually covered. Kirkpatrick’s amendment to the FY17 Interior Appropriations bill requires that funding to go specifically toward repairing and maintaining these dirt roads.