JEMEZ PUEBLO, N.M. (AP) – When Jemez Pueblo student Marley Perea entered Walatowa Charter High School in the ninth grade, she was reading at the seventh-grade level. Now, she prepares to enter her senior year with her reading on par with a college student.

“School is not my favorite thing to do,” Perea said. “I’m not a big fan of writing or English. But the teachers there really pushed me and helped me. Everyone at Walatowa is really close. I guess you could say they’re like a second family.”

She plans to graduate next year and go to college. She does not know what she will study but said she wants to bring whatever she learns back to the school as a gift for what it has given her – confidence in herself.

She is not alone.

As Native American students across the country continue to lag behind their non-Native peers in educational achievement, this small charter school, which for years has operated out of three portable buildings among the sandy red hills of Jemez Pueblo, has found remarkable success in making sure its students graduate.

The graduation rate for Native Americans nationally hovers at about 50 percent – compared with just over 80 percent for all U.S. students. But at Walatowa, the graduation rate is 91 percent – a figure that outranks the state average for Native American graduates (64 percent) and most other charter schools in New Mexico. All but five of the school’s 68 students are Native American.

Principal Arrow Wilkinson likes to call Walatowa “the little school that could.”

Students credit Walatowa’s small, welcoming community – which stresses the teaching of Native values, culture and the pueblo’s traditional language, Towa.

The school is not well-known outside of the Jemez Valley, and it doesn’t have its own permanent facility. But school and pueblo leaders, who dedicated themselves to creating their own charter school about 15 years ago, believe they are slowly making a difference in the lives of the teens there.

The key to the school’s success, Wilkinson believes, is “positive relationships between faculty and students. And belief that every student can achieve. They won’t fail because we won’t let them.”

The school started as a dream envisioned by pueblo leaders in 1999. “We wanted to have a little more say in the curriculum we develop and keep in mind our language and where we came from,” said Jemez Pueblo Gov. Raymond Loretto.

The local school board initially denied the pueblo’s application for a district charter back then. So Loretto and others went to the state to approve its charter instead. Walatowa opened in 2003 in a few rooms of the pueblo’s civic center with 18 students.

Maintaining the pueblo’s language – which is oral and not written down – from generation to generation is a concern.

“We don’t have the advantage of teaching our children with books,” said Kaylanah Shendo, valedictorian of the Class of 2015.

She credits the school with encouraging her to go to college, where she wants to study linguistics so she can return to the pueblo and help keep the language alive. Her senior presentation covered the concerns the pueblo has regarding a potential language loss.

A 2014 lawsuit filed by several school districts and individuals against the state that asks the court to force legislators to put more money into education notes that some schools serving Native Americans are not able to teach them their Native language because of the time and effort needed to meet testing mandates.

Wilkinson said that’s not quite the case at Walatowa. “It (testing) hasn’t curbed efforts,” he said. “We just have to be more purposeful. It has curbed the overall general classroom instruction time. But that has not directly affected our efforts to promote Native traditions and language. We adjust our daily school calendar and testing windows to accommodate any cultural activities. We pull from other time slots, and the instructors infuse the community values within the daily lesson plans.”

Still, the school faces its share of challenges. For one thing, the school does not have its own permanent facility. The cost of such a building falls upon the pueblo leadership and administration, as well as the community. The school has set up a nonpermanent capital fund through the New Mexico Community Foundation to start raising money, but it will be a long haul, according to school leaders.

And though the school earned a C in the state’s most recent A-F school grading system report, it received an F for the growth rate of its lowest-performing students, hurting its overall grade. In terms of proficiency in both reading and math, most Walatowa students’ state Standards Based Assessment scores fall below 20 percent – which is in line with national statistics for Native American students.

But school leaders argue that their own internal short-cycle assessments show students are slowly making gains. The sophomore class, for example, displayed an average reading grade improvement of 1.2 percent to 5.5 percent over the course of one year on two different reading assessment programs. And the majority of its students are now nearing proficiency in both math and reading.

The school maintains small class sizes in the 10- to 15-pupil range. The teachers know their students and work with Wilkinson and others to quickly address problems like truancy, bullying and poor academic achievement.

During a recent school visit, students were engaged in presenting their senior thesis papers on PowerPoint. They had freedom in choosing the topics, which tie into issues and challenges Native youth are facing – for example, “How do we solve Jemez’s drinking problem?” One student wrote on “The history and origins of Pueblo baseball.”

Other students were outside on a porch behind one of the portable buildings creating Native drums as part of a class that combined visual arts with ethnobotany under the guidance of pueblo drum-maker Arnold Herrera and science teacher Kristina Kommander. She ran into Herrera down by the river one day and just asked him to come help her teach the class – that sort of thing happens at Walatowa a lot.

A village elder was visiting the school that day to drill the students in Towa.

Wilkinson’s office doubles as a radio station for the school, the testing center and – when an athletic practice or event is happening – the locker room. He keeps a bucket of stucco under his desk in case he has to make some quick repairs to the walls after students horse around in that locker room.

Funding remains a problem. The school wants to hire reading and math tutors to help raise student test scores, as well as a certified Jemez language instructor. And because Jemez is not a gaming pueblo, it does not have the financial resources to offer its students college scholarships, as some other pueblos do.

Yet everyone involved in the school expresses satisfaction at incorporating Pueblo traditions into the classroom.

“Here the kids are able to practice their culture,” Herrera said.

Even non-Native students have found in the school an environment where they can thrive.

Senior Dominique Chavez, who graduated in May, said Walatowa is the reason she earned her high school diploma, as well as 32 extra college credits. School hadn’t been working for her when she attended classes in both the Jemez Valley and Bernalillo school districts. At one point during those years, she was suspended for more than 100 days. “I was never at school. I was at home,” she said.”

Thanks to the efforts of Walatowa’s leaders and educators, she said, she is heading to The University of New Mexico to study nursing this August.

“Walatowa gave me the opportunity to get better, to show that I could do it,” she said.