Welcome to GEAR UP!

As project director for South Dakota GEAR UP, it is a real pleasure to say hi and welcome you to this exciting endeavor.  With your hard work and ours, we expect to make a real difference for our students who enter the South Dakota GEAR UP Program.

Currently, we do not have a high school graduation rate that we as American Indian people should find acceptable.  Therefore, we should all embrace a program that will encourage more of our youth to graduate from high school and pursue higher education.  Education is our new buffalo!  If we grasp the opportunity that education provides us, we will give ourselves the tools needed for this world; just as the buffalo did for our ancestors.

GEAR UP will model itself after the successful Native American Honors Program.  We find this to be important from the standpoint that it has proven itself to be triumphant with American Indian students.  It is not a program we hope will work for our kids; rather, we know it will work for our kids.

This program will provide intense academic preparation as well as cultural and social support.  We want our kids to understand and learn that attaining education is hard work, but more than worth it when we realize the value of it.  This is where we need the work of parents and guardians who will encourage and help engage their children in this process.

Governor M. Michael Rounds and the Secretary of Education, Dr. Rick Melmer find our American Indian students so valuable that they have made it a key goal within their 2010 Education Initiative.  Goal five of this six goal initiative states:  By 2010 South Dakota will increase educational opportunities for Native American students.  One of the ways they felt we could accomplish this goal was to go after the GEAR UP Grant.  Out of this process came the $6.9 million dollar matching grant.

We, as American Indian people within South Dakota, are entering a new era.  We have state leaders who recognize the importance of our heritage and culture, and they want to assist us in preparing our children to preserve this legacy.  Please join the South Dakota GEAR UP Program with a fresh perspective and a willingness to assist our American Indian students on their path to educational success.