Mount Pleasant High School will be offering a course on Anishinaabe culture.
"Native Ways of Knowing" will be offered to students ninth grade through 12th grade for the 2025-26 school year.
Superintendent Jennifer Verleger says the course will offer students with hands-on activities, experiential learning, and guest speakers.
She also said students will spend some time at the Ziibiwing Center in Mount Pleasant.
"We are so fortunate in the Mount Pleasant community to have this rich culture right in our backyard," Verleger said. "We are able to easily take our students to cultural events, like educational pow-wows, and certainly the Ziibiwing center to further their learning."
The school says they were able to offer students this course through the EXPLORE grant, from the Michigan Department of Education. The grant is designed to encourage students to become educators, and school's goal is to reach Indigenous students and have them consider careers in education.
They say the course was developed by a leadership team that included representatives from the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, Central Michigan University, and Mount Pleasant Public Schools.
The Michigan EXPLORE grant allowed the team to spend time developing the course, bringing in resources, and making sure they had all the hands-on experimental pieces ready.
