First Lady talks education to Hispanic audience

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By Percy Luján

NEW YORK CITY — First Lady Michelle Obama, featured speaker at the League of United Latin American Citizens convention, which concluded here this past week, didn’t venture into the national debate about the 50,000-plus Central American children clogging the U.S.-Mexico border. She left that contentious politicized subject up to husband Barack. Instead, addressing 1,200 LULAC members at a unity luncheon here, she chose to talk about education and Latino youth. After commending LULAC for its consistent civil rights advocacy on Latino and black education issues, she shifted, “While all of you are proud of what you did, you are by no means satisfied.”

A U.S. Department of Education study released in April showed the high school graduation rate for Hispanic students nationwide was 73 percent, 13 points lower than for white students in the school year ending in 2012. For African-American students it was 69 percent.

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Hispanic students now the largest minority group on four-year college campuses

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By Richard Fry and Mark Hugo Lopez

WASHINGTON – Hispanics are now, for the first time, the largest minority group among the nation’s four-year college and university students, with the number of 18- to 24-year-old Hispanics enrolled in college exceeding 2 million, reaching a record 16.5% share of all college enrollments. As their growth among all college-age students continues to outpace other groups, Hispanics also made up one-quarter (25.2%) of 18- to 24-year-old students enrolled in two-year colleges, according to an analysis of newly available U.S. Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. In the nation’s public schools, Hispanics also reached new milestones. For the first time, one-in-four (24.7%) public elementary school students were Hispanic, following similar milestones reached recently by Hispanics among public kindergarten students (in 2007) and public nursery school students (in 2006). Among all pre-K through 12th grade public school students, a record 23.9% were Hispanic in 2011.

(Raymundo Aguirre/Borderzine.com)

El Paso school districts have no idea how many new students fled Juárez

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EL PASO — As the drug war rages on in México, the number of students that have enrolled in El Paso schools due to the violence remains unknown and unrecorded by schools. Ysleta and the Socorro Independent School Districts said there is no clear indication that people fleeing México to escape the violence have dramatically affected either district. “I know students are coming in from México, but I cannot say with any certainty and there is not any data that I can look at right now that tells me that we have grown by any significant number and that we can directly attribute that to students coming in from México to flee the violence,” said Hector Giron, director for Bilingual/ESL/LOTE Department for YISD. For students that have already made the transition to U.S. schools, the main challenge for them has been overcoming the language barrier. A junior from Montwood High School in the SISD, who wishes to remain anonymous, said he has been going to school in the U.S. for six years and due to his level of English he felt intimidated when he began school here.

ESL classes offer support and community

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JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. — The bell rings. Science Hill High School students crowd the hallways. Among them, five international students head to English as a Second Language class, where they learn American culture, improve their reading and writing skills and get support for other courses. Wilber, a ninth-grader with a big smile and an even bigger personality, is one of five students in the second-period class.