Last month, Oklahoma education officials approved plans to open a charter school to serve American Indian students. A charter school is established by a legal agreement, is operated by parents and teachers, uses public tax money, but is not linked to local schools. The approval came from Oklahoma’s State Board of Education. The group’s decision came a few months after the Oklahoma City Public Schools’ board denied the plan. The goal of the Sovereign Community School is to serve American Indian students from different tribes in the Oklahoma City area. Phil Gover is the founding director of the Sovereign Schools Project. He led the effort to start the Sovereign Community School. Gover has been working to create the school for about 18 months. But he said the process first began about 10 years ago when he visited an American Indian charter school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The school is called the Native American Community Academy, or NACA. Eight years later, Gover received financing to create schools based on the model of the NACA school he had visited. This took place while he was working in Oklahoma City for the organization Teach for America.