ALLOW ME TO GLOAT: MY DAUGHTER – WHO ONCE LIVED IN BROWNSVILLE – RECOGNIZED DURING STATE OF UNION ADDRESS

First Lady and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy met Melissa Isaac-Montoya on October 24, 2021, when they hosted a listening session focused on youth mental health with members of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, educators, and families in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

(Melissa sleeps on her homemade swing during the time her father worked at the Brownsville Herald. That picture appeared in the newspaper at the time. She is now working on her PhD. from the University of Michigan and is the director of the tribe and state tribal education department. Her younger sister Maia earned a Master's in Business Administration (MBA) from UM-Flint and is the tribe's Sr. Fiscal Compliance Auditor and a former tribal council member.) 

First Lady Jill Biden visited the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe in Mt. Pleasant Sunday, Oct. 24, in the first of two planned stops in Michigan, during which she held a discussion on youth mental health.

Biden’s discussion centered on Project AWARE, or Advancing Health and Resilience in Education, a five-year grant program through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that looks to train educators on how to best identify and respond to mental health issues and help connect children and families to the services they need for mental health support.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, joined Biden for the discussion. Tribal Education Director Melissa Isaac-Montoya said she once discovered as a school administrator that 83 percent of her students had at least one form of trauma they could identify. In her first year as a teacher, she had two 2nd graders who had lost a parent, one to cancer and one to suicide. 

She was a “driving force” in bringing the program to the community, Murthy said. 

Below is the White House statement on her and the others' recognition. 

The White House Announces Guest List for the First Lady’s Box for the 2022 State of the Union Address

MARCH 01, 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C. – First Lady Jill Biden will welcome selected guests from across the United States to join her in the viewing box for President Biden’s State of the Union Address this evening, Tuesday, March 1, 2022. Each of these individuals, with their resilience, innovation, service, and courage, were chosen by the White House because they represent policies or themes to be addressed by the President in his speech.

Melissa Isaac (Mt. Pleasant, Michigan)
Gizhwaasod (“Protector of the Young”) at the Michigan Department of Education’s Indigenous Education Initiative and Founder of Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe (SCIT)’s Project AWARE Program.

Isaac is an enrolled member of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe and serves her community through her role at the Michigan Department of Education. (Her father Juan Montoya was a Mexican-American migrant farmworker and her mother Faith Pego lived on the Saginaw-Chippewa reservation. Her grandmother in Brownsville is proud as punch, as we all are.)

Most recently, Isaac worked as the Director of Education for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. As an elementary school teacher at Saginaw Chippewa Academy (SCA), Isaac recognized the need to support the mental health of her students and their families.

She later successfully applied for a Project AWARE grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Using this grant, Isaac expanded mental health services for children at SCA and two public school districts, which included services for Native American children.

Previously, First Lady and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy met Melissa Isaac on October 24, 2021, when they hosted a listening session focused on youth mental health with members of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, educators, and families in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.