I've driven past Oscar Howe Elementary on Valley View Road a dozen times — maybe more — and every time I think about how they got the naming right. Oscar Howe, the Yanktonai Dakota artist who painted those geometric visions of ceremony and dance, who taught at USD for years, who redefined what Native American art could be. His work hangs in museums. His name belongs on a school.
The building sits south of 41st, that stretch where Sioux Falls starts to thin out toward the newer developments — not quite the older core neighborhoods like McKennan or Cathedral, but not quite the sprawl of 85th Street either. It's in that middle zone where young families land, where the yards are bigger and the streets still curve instead of grid.
I don't have kids here, so I can't speak to what happens inside the classrooms or how pickup line works on a Wednesday afternoon. But I know the building carries the name of someone who mattered — someone who broke through boundaries, who created beauty that was both traditional and radical. That feels like something worth teaching around.
There's a simplicity to elementary schools in general that I appreciate. They're not trying to be anything other than what they are: places where kids learn to read, where they finger-paint, where someone helps them tie their shoes. Oscar Howe Elementary does that work under a name that suggests art matters, that heritage matters, that the people who came before us and made something lasting — they matter too.
I think about that sometimes when I'm stopped at the light near Valley View. How a name can be a quiet lesson all on its own.
— Grace
I don't have kids here, so I can't speak to what happens inside the classrooms or how pickup line works on a Wednesday afternoon.