Within the android build section there were a couple of changes I needed to make.
The local.properties needed the ndk and cmake dir to be set and at specific versions
Although I placed ninja in my PATH, I still needed to specifically give the CMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM path in build.gradle
The most important change was creating a .aar that users can simply import into their own android build. To do so I sought some help on how to build .aar but what worked best, since .aar is simply a zip file, was ant jar the java jar, unzipping the .aar that includes the .so, and zipping it back up. Then users just need to implement the two code blocks in the readme and it will import all the JNI bindings.
Within the android build section there were a couple of changes I needed to make.