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Catherine A. Steele: Apache Educator and Arizona Living Legacy | Christine Marin
Catherine A. Steele, Apache Educator and Arizona Living Legacy
Christine Marin
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(Editor’s note: This essay on Catherine Steele, Apache educator, is based on her nomination by Professor Marin to the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame, to which she was inducted in 2020.)
“I am just sitting here, wondering,” she asked herself. “What are we not doing with our students? They come to school every day wanting and willing to learn with an infectious eagerness.” From 1965, when she began working at the age of eighteen for the Rice School District #20, until 2016, when she retired at the age of sixty-nine as Superintendent of the San Carlos Unified School District # 20, Catherine A. Catherine A. Steele Steele has been asking and answering her own question. Her goal has always been to find ways to change and improve the academic culture of children and high school students on the Apache Indian reservation in San Carlos and make them successful learners and leaders for her tribe.
As an Apache Indian woman born in San Carlos on October 13, 1947, Catherine A. Steele was the face of the San Carlos school district. She was the first Apache woman to hold the position of Superintendent. She always had a distinctive characteristic about her, defining her, shaping her—the characteristic called drive. The drive to do better to help her tribe, to help her community, to help children. And the personal drive to improve her reservation through schooling and education. She became a change-agent by becoming an educated woman and using that education to help her Apache tribe.
Catherine began her career as an instructional aide in 1965 at the Rice Elementary School in San Carlos and became a teacher’s aide in 1967, one among a group of twenty-eight aides hired by the District with federal funds available through President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program.
Marin | Essay Catherine helped develop a strong link between the school district and her San Carlos tribe, the community and the parents, reassuring them that the district was committed to goals and standards to motivate their children to learn and become good students. As an Aide in the classroom and as assigned by the teacher, for example, Catherine helped children learn new reading, spelling, and English-speaking skills and helped them improve hand-andfinger dexterity by learning how to hold pencils when writing numbers and letters, important skills for children in grades kindergarten to third.
These were also important learning years for Catherine herself because they convinced her that teaching the children of San Carlos was what she was meant to do. During that time, Catherine took a personal leave from the classroom to marry and raise a family on the reservation. But she returned to the classroom to continue working for the District.
Catherine also began attending classes in education at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher, earning her Associate degree, and returned to the San Carlos classroom, this time as a teacher. She learned new lessons on how to become a more efficient teacher, and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Education degree from Arizona State University. She later earned her master’s degree in Educational Leadership at Northern Arizona University, receiving Principal and Superintendent Certifications.
By 1978, Catherine was working with the Rice and San Carlos schools to apply for funds under the Education of the Handicap Act. In 1994, she assumed the duties as Director of Federal Programs for the San Carlos District. She rose in the administrative ranks and was selected in 2000 as Intermediate Principal of Rice School. She was later named its Principal, at a time when the San Carlos Reservation was depicted by a writer for the Eastern Arizona Courier as “one of the poorest Native American communities in the United States… [with] 60 percent of the people [living] under the poverty line, and 68 percent of the active labor force … unemployed.”
The education of reservation children was an urgency for Catherine. When tribal leaders took advantage of the 2008 Federal nutrition program, known as Nutrition Assistance in Arizona, Catherine saw to it that reservation children were provided healthy and nutritious food to help off-set poor diets that lead to risks of educational failure and impaired brain development in children. The breakfast and lunch meals did make a difference in school performances of children, and parents supported the District’s efforts.
Catherine became Associate Superintendent of San Carlos Unified School District in 2013 and Superintendent in 2014. She excelled in her new positions and gained new recognition for the District when it participated in
2013 and 2014 with other Arizona school districts in the Arizona Ready-forRigor Project, part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund, with its $43.9 million grant administered by ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. The grant developed and rewarded teachers and administrative excellence. San Carlos’ Rice Elementary School earned the 2014 Educational Excellence Impact Award for its increase in testing scores from a “C” grade in 2012-13 to an “A” grade in 2013-14. More than 2,000 teachers and administrators from fifty-nine schools across ten Arizona school districts participated in the Ready for Rigor Project. Catherine Steele was among ten Superintendents honored and was awarded the “Partner of Distinction Award.”
A “trail blazer”, they called her. “A role model our community can always look back on with pride,” they said. When the District announced the retirement of Superintendent Catherine Steele at the end of the fiscal year, 2016, it noted that she had worked for the San Carlos schools for at least 40 years, and that “she touched the lives of every family within the San Carlos Apache community with her many years of service and the dedication to the education of every child…Her influence and vision will continue for many years to come.”
Catherine A. Steele, a living legacy of Arizona. An Apache Indian woman of substance and distinction and a drive to improve the education of reservation students.
Marin | Essay
I’m focusing on cultivating my land. I have vegetables and fruit trees; I want to get some chickens and solar and really get off the grid and focus on just, really, being a mother.
