From - Mon Sep 9 22:58:01 2002 Lines: 88 X-Admin: news@aol.com From: flowerszzzzz@aol.com (Flowerszzzzz) Newsgroups: alt.politics.immigration Date: 09 Sep 2002 09:32:45 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Dropouts Alarm Hispanic group Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: <20020909053245.00755.00002644@mb-ct.aol.com> Path: vienna7.his.com!news.lightlink.com!quark.scn.rain.com!chilly.oregonvos.net!canoe.uoregon.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!news.stealth.net!news.stealth.net!ngpeer.news.aol.com!audrey-m1.news.aol.com!not-for-mail Xref: vienna7.his.com alt.politics.immigration:26169 x-no-archive: yes www.herald-sun.com Dropouts alarm Hispanic group By Michael Petrocelli : The Herald-Sun mpetrocelli@heraldsun.com Sep 8, 2002 DURHAM -- For several years, Marco Zarate, an activist for Hispanic education in North Carolina, says he has been alarmed at the dropout numbers he sees coming from his community. According to his figures, roughly one-half of Hispanic students who enter North Carolina schools leave before they get their hands on a diploma, a trend he and his organization, the N.C. Society of Hispanic Professionals, hope to change. At ceremony last week in Raleigh, the group kicked off a campaign aimed at educating the public and convincing Hispanic youths of the importance of staying in school. "A lot of them are newcomers, so they may have the language barrier, and their parents may not know the system," he said. The effort will include public service announcements on Spanish-language television and radio, including Que Pasa Radio and La Supermexicana, with the voices of youngsters saying that education is the way to a better future. The group also plans to distribute posters and handbooks to schools around the state with large Hispanic populations. Last school year, 2.54 percent of Hispanic boys and 2.69 percent of Spanish girls in grades 1-12 dropped out, a rate significantly higher than the 1.97 percent for the general population in North Carolina, according to the State Department of Public Instruction. Exact dropout rates for Hispanic students in Durham are not available, according to Durham Public Schools spokeswoman Julie Marshall. Fran Hoch, who runs the Limited English Proficiency programs for the state DPI, says Hispanic students in North Carolina are often new arrivals to the country, and the transition can be difficult. Students without a solid knowledge of English, a large portion of whom are Hispanic, have a hard time feeling a part of their surroundings at school and can fall behind quickly, she said. Familiarity with English is not the only barrier, she said. The most important factor in determining a newly arrived student’s success is a strong educational background -- in any language. "Those students that have strong literacy skills in their native language have a much easier time developing strong literacy skills in another language, in this case English," Hoch said. The most challenging students to keep in school are the ones who arrive in the country already at high-school age speaking little English, Hoch said, because they have little time to catch up before graduation. Zarate worries that with Hispanic students dropping out at such a high rate, they will not be able to increase their representation at the university level. He and his group of Hispanic professionals give motivational speeches in schools and encourage students to look toward college, even if they are not sure they will be able to afford it. "The point is to go as far as you can and finish high school," he said. Illustration of things getting more fractionalized? Aiming for more state and local tax money to go to bi-lingual education(I forget the politically correct term now being used for bi-lingual education) in just one of many state's facing a huge fiscal budget crisis, which is not being made any easier by huge increases in Medicaid costs.