Schools Urged to Do More to Aid Latinos

Coalition's Report Lists 3 Key Tasks

Montgomery County public school officials must do more to help Latino students -- particularly teenagers -- who come to the United States with little or no formal education and are at increased risk of falling behind, according to a report released by the Montgomery County Latino Education Coalition.

Latino students, who made up 12 percent of the student population 10 years ago, now make up 20 percent -- and their numbers are expected to continue to rise. But they have the highest dropout and lowest attendance rates of any group in the schools.

The 17-page document focuses on three areas that coalition members -- activists, parents and educators from all over Montgomery County -- believe will help Latino students graduate. Those include providing more support to immigrant students who are lagging when they enter the system at the high school level, improving outreach to Latino parents who may be reluctant to speak up and more aggressively recruiting Latino staff members as well as educators who speak Spanish.

"The parents of these children are not very vocal, they're not asking for services for their children," said Candace Kattar, a coalition member who is executive director of Identity, a community group that works with young Latinos. "We'd like to take some resources and see how they can be shifted, how programs can be changed to better reach this population."

The report has already received an enthusiastic response from the school system.

"They've done their homework," said Frieda K. Lacey, deputy superintendent of schools. "Sometimes you have to figure out what people want. They spelled it out in the report."

Lacey is forming a task force to study ways the school system can address the issues raised in the report. One area of focus will be how to help high-school-age students with little or no formal education who enroll in Montgomery schools. These students face a dual challenge: Many have not even mastered their native language yet are expected to master English and the other skills needed to earn a high school diploma.

Superintendent Jerry D. Weast has touted academic gains made by minority students during his tenure. For example, the percentage of black and Latino students enrolling in Advanced Placement classes has increased steadily.

The number of Latino students taking AP classes more than doubled from 410 in 2002 to 896 in 2005, while the number of black students in such classes rose from 501 in 2002 to 897 in 2005. In the primary grades, more black and Latino students are reading at grade level. Still, their academic achievement as groups continue to lag behind their white and Asian peers.

"The school system for most white and Asian kids does a good job, but for African American and Latino students the school system doesn't do a good job, except for a small number of them," said Ines Cifuentes, a board member with CASA of Maryland, an advocacy group that is part of the coalition.

The report also offers recommendations for improving parent involvement. Pilar Torres, executive director of Centro Familia, also a coalition member, said officials must do more than provide parents with "passive" services, such as translations of documents and interpreters. They must teach them how to be advocates for their kids.

The coalition also noted that more should be done to increase the numbers of Latino staff members in the school system. Currently, only 424 of the 10,040 teachers in Montgomery County public schools are Latino. And at schools where the Latino student population is above 50 percent, less than 10 percent of the professional staff were Latino, the report found. Coalition members said a staff that reflects its community is important because it helps families feel more comfortable and provides role models for students.

Though the report echoes themes laid out in previous pushes for improving minority achievement, Cifuentes thinks this effort could yield significant change because it is more collaborative than previous campaigns.

"There were MCPS folks involved in the coalition," she said. "I think that's probably the biggest difference. This is not an adversarial thing. We all recognize it's a big problem, and unless we work together it's not going to get solved."

The achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white and Asian counterparts is a nationwide phenomenon and one that has troubled educators for decades.

Kattar and others, however, believe that if progress is to be made, it will be made in Montgomery County's public schools.

"Montgomery County has the resources to design something that could be very effective with this population," Kattar said. "MCPS could position itself to be a model of best practices through the country."