The New York Times Student Journalism Institute

Elvina Lopez, a high school senior who has lived on the Tohono O’odham reservation in the Sonoran Desert all her life, is leaving Arizona this year and heading to New York.

“I’ll probably get homesick really quick because it’s going to be my first time going away,” she said.

Lopez, 20, will attend St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., on a basketball scholarship. She owes the opportunity not to the school system in the Tohono O’odham Nation, the second largest reservation in Arizona, but to a charter school in Tucson, more than 120 miles east of her home in Kaka.

Most mornings she wakes at 4 a.m. to catch a ride to a bus stop in the reservation’s capital city, Sells, nearly two hours away from her house. By 6:30 she is getting on a school bus, on which she dozes off for another hour and a half until it reaches her destination, the Ha:sañ Preparatory & Leadership School.

The charter school, founded in 1998, offers a path to higher education to students like Lopez who might otherwise fall short of expectations on the reservation. The majority of students at the school are members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, but there are also students from other Arizona tribes, including the Pascua Yaqui.

Lopez attended the Tohono O’odham High School in Sells for three years before leaving, worried that she wasn’t learning enough. The school had a 22 percent graduation rate in 2010, according to the Bureau of Indian Education’s annual report card.

“It was basically reading and math,” Lopez said. “That’s all it seems they were teaching there.”

Ha:sañ had a graduation rate of 72 percent in 2010, according to the Arizona Department of Education. Last year, 23 of the 27 seniors at the school graduated, and 19 of them were enrolled in college, according to Bill Rosenberg, the school’s director.

Rosenberg said Ha:sañ prepared students by emphasizing their cultural heritage while meeting all state college entrance requirements. The curriculum reflects a bicultural approach. Mandatory courses include world and Arizona/O’odham history, math, and English composition, according to the school’s website. Among the elective courses are ethnobotany and nutrition, which teaches about O’odham plants and the vocabulary for food preparation, and gardening, designed to nurture Him:dag, or “way of life,” by introducing native plants as food and medicine.

The Tohono O’odham, or “desert people,” inhabit areas of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona as well as parts of northern Mexico. The nation is made up of 11 districts and has approximately 28,000 members occupying a vast stretch of desert about the size of Connecticut.

Unemployment remains stubbornly high, at 35.5 percent, the Arizona Commerce Department reported in 2010, in an area where more than half the population is under 25 years old. Many young people in the reservation are lured by the drug trade and gangs, which makes the Ha:sañ Preparatory & Leadership School a haven for those enrolled.

“They come out here and take what they like about life on the reservation, like their language and culture,” Rosenberg said. “They leave behind all the bad stuff that happens at the reservation: the poverty, the alcohol and drug abuse.”

Many, like Lopez, are attracted to Ha:sañ because of its athletic department, which includes 120 out of the school’s 170 students.

“It’s a motivating thing for them,” said Alex Richards, the school’s athletic director, known to the students simply as “coach.” She trains the students in the school’s nine sports, including basketball, volleyball, golf and rock climbing.

Despite its academic record, the school faces economic challenges. Two years ago, sports were under a serious threat from the school board.

“They said there was no money in the budget so they were going to cut the sports program,” Richards said. “I told them no.”

Richards decided to seek financing independently, applying for grants and enlisting local businesses to sponsor teams in order to collect the $75,000 needed to run the program every year. The school also holds fundraising events on weekends, selling traditional foods like bean and cheese popovers made with fry bread, a staple for many American Indian tribes.

Richards also acts as a guidance counselor. Her best advice for athletes who want to go on to play college sports is to stay focused and to remember that some people will expect them to honor their American Indian heritage.

“You represent a people whether you want to or not,” she tells them.