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Hispanic dropout dilemma
By ALICIA CALDWELL, CONSTANCE HUMBURG and MATTHEW WAITE
"They come over here to work and they really don't see a future in school," said Pioquinto, 18, who withdrew from Clearwater High School this year to work at her mother's restaurant and grocery store. Pioquinto, who came here from Mexico as a preschooler, said she plans to get a high school degree through a home schooling program. She hopes to go to community college. It's not an aspiration widely shared by her peers, she said. "They think college is a dream,' she said. Florida census numbers released today reaffirm a troubling trend: Disproportionately high numbers of Hispanic teenagers are failing to get a high school diploma. The data released today comes from the long form, given to roughly one in six people. It shows that of all Florida's 16-to 19-year-olds who were not in school and did not have a diploma, 31 percent are Hispanic. That despite Hispanics making up not quite 20 percent of Floridians in that age bracket. For African-Americans, the numbers are in line with their proportion in the population. Whites and Asians are underrepresented. The implications of the Hispanic numbers are unsettling, given the explosive growth of Hispanics in the state during the last decade as they became Florida's largest minority group. And they hold meaning for the state's future, given projections of continued Hispanic population increases. "This is not a Hispanic problem," said Tony Morejon, Hispanic affairs liaison for Hillsborough County. "This is America's problem. We're not talking about a couple of people falling through the cracks. We're talking about a gigantic problem." It is a situation that has garnered attention at the highest levels of government. In October, President Bush signed an executive order establishing the President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans. A focus of the commission has been to figure out how to combat the Hispanic dropout problem, said Charles P. Garcia, a Florida Board of Education member who was chosen for the commission. Garcia said Hispanic children need more support from the very beginning of their academic lives. More of them, he said, need to go to quality preschool programs. And school administrators ought to make more of an effort to ensure Hispanics are seen as viable college candidates. "If they're not enrolled in certain courses and they're put on the basket-weaving track, they're not going to go to college," Garcia said. The National PTA has taken notice. Its leadership recently began an effort to increase involvement of Hispanics parents in their children's schools. It's something that Victor Fernandez, principal at W.G. Pierce Middle School in Tampa, has been working on for some time. An immigrant from Spain, Fernandez knows what it's like to feel like an outsider, in terms of culture and language. He invites parents to the school when they can come, and sometimes that means after regular business hours. And he talks to them in Spanish. "I let the parents know how important it is for them to come into the school," said Fernandez, who said his school is nearly 57 percent Hispanic. It's imperative, he said, because of the effect it could have on a generation of Hispanics, whose numbers in Florida grew 70.4 percent in the last decade.
Among Floridians 16 to 19 years old, nearly 12 percent are neither in school nor do they have a diploma. When you look at just Hispanics, nearly 19 percent were not enrolled and didn't have a degree. The disparity holds up county by county, where Hispanic rates were consistently higher. A factor that affects Hispanic dropout rates is the rootedness of the people, said Raul Gonzalez, an education policy analyst for the National Council of La Raza, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group dedicated to improving life for Hispanic-Americans. Cubans, who live in Miami-Dade County in a large, well-established community, tend to have lower dropout rates, he said. Newer populations, such as Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, who make up half of Hillsborough County's Hispanic population, tend to have higher dropout rates. "There are many reasons," said Lydia Medrano, community services manager for the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. "If they don't do well, they tend to drop out. And much of that stems from language limitations." Medrano was one of many people who took part in a report two years ago examining the Hispanic dropout problem. One of the findings had to do with Hispanic children sometimes finding themselves feeling like outsiders in public schools. Frequently, they are told not to speak Spanish in school, something Medrano understands, but says that educators don't always realize that children might take that as disapproval of their culture. Other reasons emerged, such as immigrant families' poverty and lack of assertiveness in dealing with the large bureaucracies that school systems breed. "Sometimes these people aren't very good in their own language because of a lower educational level," she said. "On top of that, it's a more complex system." Many times, their primary goal is putting food on the table. "When you think about Hispanic kids, some of them have parents who are working on hourly wages," Gonzalez said. "They just can't leave their job and go to the school between 11 and 3." Gonzalez said that consistently high dropout rates for Hispanics, particularly in comparison to other minorities, ought to be a wakeup call for policymakers. The growing number of Hispanics makes it too important for the country's future. "Your educational attainment level will dictate what you will earn," Gonzalez said. "There is a direct, irrefutable connection." In Clearwater, Erika Escamilla, 18, considers herself one of the lucky ones. She was eating lunch Monday at a restaurant owned by her extended family, about to head off to classes at St. Petersburg College. She wants to be an architect. She came to Clearwater from Mexico when she was 3 and is comfortably bilingual. Escamilla has watched many of her friends drop out of high school and has thought a lot about why. "The parents who come here from Mexico, they don't have a high education and a career," she said. "They're all about working right away. They think that going through the whole process of school and university, it takes too much time. They want to make the money now. This is a big problem."
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