A welcome end to classes in a Leech Lake Reservation pole barn

At long last, federal dollars are on their way to rebuild the dilapidated Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig High School. That's a reason not only for the Leech Lake Indian Reservation community to celebrate, but all of Minnesota.

Generations of students have attended high school classes in a cold, leaky and structurally unsound metal pole barn near Bena, Minn.

Tuesday's announcement by the U.S. Department of the Interior of close to a $12 million grant for the federally run school means that students will soon have a safe, modern learning environment. In addition to the moral imperative for rebuilding, helping these students succeed is an important investment in the region's economic future.

The Bug school, as it's known, is part of the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) school system — one of two federally run K-12 systems. The Department of Defense runs the other for dependents of military members and civilian contractors. The growing gap between the state-of-the-art Defense schools and the underfunded BIE schools has been the subject of congressional hearings.

Leech Lake Chairwoman Carri Jones, who has testified repeatedly, has been a powerful advocate for the school and its students. The gap was also spotlighted in the 2014 Star Tribune editorial series "Separate and Unequal."

Bug school officials have said that construction could begin in the next six weeks, with a new school ready next year. It is unclear at this point if the new facility will be the one envisioned in previous architectural drawings the community had drawn up or if plans have evolved.

Hopefully, Leech Lake Band members will share their vision with the state, which has admirably rallied to the school's cause. There has been broad, bipartisan support to rebuild the Bug school from legislators, Gov. Mark Dayton and the state's congressional delegation. Sen. Al Franken and Reps. Betty McCollum, John Kline and Rick Nolan in particular have championed the school's plight.

The sizable sum for the Bug school illustrates what political teamwork like this can yield. While the Bug school — unbelievably — didn't appear in a new replacement school priority construction list recently issued by Interior, agency officials nevertheless found an alternative funding stream to get it built. The high-profile pressure undoubtedly helped push bureaucrats to innovate.

Ongoing teamwork remains crucial. Bug students need a new building, but they also need it well-equipped. Textbooks in the new high school should be up-to-date and plentiful. Computers preparing students for the digital era should be fast, powerful and running current software. The new science classroom should have working microscopes for all students, not the smattering of battered equipment that biology students now share.

The Bug school's political advocates must be ready to go to bat for it again if additional sums are needed to equip the new facility. They also need to turn their sights on the BIE's other schools. About a third of the BIE's 183 schools on 64 reservations in 23 states are in such poor condition that they need replacing. A massive overhaul of the entire system is needed. The Defense Department is in the midst of a $5 billion school replacement and renovation project. A similar heavy lift is vital for the BIE and its more than 40,000 students.

Momentum for BIE school funding cannot lapse as new political leadership takes office after this fall's elections. BIE students live in some of the nation's most remote and impoverished communities. It's hard to think of a better investment for taxpayer dollars than schools to help them succeed.

"Whoever our next president is, we have to keep moving forward," McCollum said, "not take pause for a while or slide backward.''