Thread: Hispanic leaders plead for solutions to high dropout rate

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Hispanic leaders plead for solutions to high dropout rate in Collier
By Janine Zeitlin

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Making $12 an hour looks pretty good at 16 years old.

But that money may start to look lackluster after ditching high school, a few decades of working and maybe a marriage and children.

Hispanic students — who show the highest dropout rates in Collier County — aren’t thinking about the future when they quit school, educators and advocates say. They’re more concerned with making good money to support themselves and their families.

“When you’re a kid and see money in your hands, you forget about everything else,” said Josh Rincon, a project director at Redlands Christian Migrant Association in Immokalee, who almost dropped out his senior year. “They’re not thinking down the road. They’re not thinking about the day after or tomorrow.”

The latest state numbers available from 2004-05 show about 54 percent of Collier high schools’ dropouts were Hispanic, while Hispanics made up 34 percent of Collier high school students enrolled in fall 2005.

The Hispanic Affairs Advisory Board, the group that makes recommendations to Collier commissioners, recently gave a report to elected leaders with a plea to improve education for Collier Hispanic students and to consider solutions to keep Hispanic students from dropping out.

“When a person drops out, not only have they lowered their life-earning capacity, they have literally created a kind of dam or wall that is impenetrable in terms of any kind of progression in the community,” said James Van Fleet, the report’s author and a former professor.

“You may well have lost those children,” he said.

Van Fleet works as a consultant to the State Department on education issues and sits on both the Hispanic Affairs Board and the Collier School District’s diversity committee, where he also presented the report.

He and others now hope for some action.

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Finances and cultures often factor into why Hispanic students drop out, advocates say. Many parents of Hispanic students come from countries where priority is placed on making money rather than on education.

“The issue is not people don’t value education, but more that if they are coming from a large family and parents need to bring food to the table, the emphasis is going to be on working rather than education because they need to survive first,” said María Torres, director of diversity and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) programs for the Collier district.

While dropout rates for Hispanics in Collier schools vastly have improved since 2000-01, the dropout rate for 2004-05 for Hispanics was still twice the rate of black and white dropouts, both of which showed a less than 2 percent dropout rate. The population of Hispanic students enrolled in 12th grade in Collier schools was fewer than half the number of students enrolled in ninth grade in fall 2005.

Annie Alvarez, who has three sons entering the eighth grade in Collier schools, said many Hispanic parents, especially immigrants who recently have arrived in the United States, need more education about the value of school in American society.

“A lot of Hispanic parents, they’ll say, ‘They’re old enough now to work.’ Because in their country, they go to work at 16,” said Alvarez, a county recreation supervisor. “They don’t realize the kids need to stay in school.”

The School District has programs on its cable channel that air Spanish and Creole four times a week and target parents. Torres does a weekly radio show in Immokalee and organizes meetings four times a year in Spanish.

But Alvarez said the district isn’t reaching enough parents.

“If the parents could get education, it would be a much better situation for the kids,” she said.

Hispanic students with parents who migrate and yank them in and out of school also have a tougher time staying in school, said Torres, who has noticed more migrant parents leaving their children with other families when they migrate north so children can finish off the school year. Dropouts are students who don’t enroll in another school or program after leaving one.

Social issues of isolation and not fitting in because they don’t speak English well or have recently arrived in the United States also may chew at a child’s desire to stay in school, Torres said.

Torres didn’t know how many Hispanic dropouts in Collier were foreign-born or born in the United States, but a 2005 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington research organization, showed almost a quarter of all teen school dropouts were foreign-born.

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Josh Rincon, now 37, was an Immokalee High senior when he started earning almost $400 a week at his job at a bakery. He told his father, a former migrant worker from Mexico, he was ditching school. Rincon wasn’t discouraged from leaving.

“It took a special person to say, ‘There’s more to life than to work at a bakery,’ ” Rincon said.

The man imparting that advice worked at Redlands Christian Migrant Association, an organization focused on education issues for low-income and migrant families. Rincon was hired at RCMA to work as a tutor, stayed in school and has worked there since.

He is discouraged the cycle continues.

“It’s their grandparents working the fields, their dads, and they’re growing up around that. When you ask kids, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ they say, ‘I want to work in the fields like my dad.’ ”

Hispanic students need to see options beyond what their parents do — especially when they see their parents earning good money through some farm work, Rincon said.

“We need more mentors. We need more agencies to mentor our kids,” Rincon said. “We are doing something, but we can only do so much. We have a few successes but it can be greater.”

Van Fleet agrees. He thinks school decision-makers must create mentoring programs using community members to expose them to careers in arenas such as business, teaching or law enforcement.

“The fact is that the School Board can’t do it all themselves. They have to know how to reach out for help and I have never, ever seen that happen,” Van Fleet said.

“The community has a phenomenal capacity to be involved.”

Community-based mentoring programs also would create a larger stock of educated Hispanics who may want to return to Collier County after graduation and increase diversity among professionals, he said.

Torres said the district has programs but does plan to expand them to include a cadre of mentors in the community. She feels schools have enough resources to prevent dropouts, but the problem compounds as more students arrive each year.

“The reality is we continue getting kids from other cultural backgrounds and other countries and we continue increasing our services,” she said.

Dropout numbers

Hispanic students made up 54 percent of dropouts in Collier County high schools, according to the latest available state data. The high school population of Hispanics in 12th grade was half the number enrolled at ninth grade in fall 2005.

Numbers of dropouts from Collier high schools in 2004-2005:

-- White: 113

-- Black: 33

-- Hispanic: 181

-- Other: 7

Total: 334

Number of Hispanic students enrolled in Collier high schools in fall 2005

-- Ninth grade: 1,535

-- 10th grade: 1,267

-- 11th grade: 869

-- 12th grade: 710

Florida Department of Education

And is there anyone wondering about English, Civics, or mathematics? With this group of Spanglish bumpkins who care nothing but how much they make an hour?

I am truly HAPPY that they drop out---now the parents can be held liable for the failure of their spawn to perform----make them (parents) pay all student costs incurred by the state for their children's failures.

If they(parents) don't pay, send their kids to boot camp---we need more know-it-all high school dropouts to serve as front line fodder for educated troops in Iraq!

WHY SHOULD THEY CARE HOW MUCH MONEY THEY MAKE?? HELL, THEY ALL KNOW HOW TO GET ALL THE FREEBIES THAT OUR GOVERNMENT IS SOOOO READY,WILLING AND ABLE TO GIVE THEM....
THE MORE KIDS, THEN MORE MONEY.....LET'S SEE ANYONE TRY TO STOP US IS THEIR ATTITUDE....
DOT

Hmmm, after much thought, I believe I've figured out a solution to this problem. How about we repeal the law that allows illegal immigrant children an education and deport each and every one of them.

Anyone that thinks American citizen children aren't being affected by the illegal immigrants children in the class rooms are living in la-la land.
Every illegal child in school takes away from the education citizen children are getting.

Yes MW I would say deporting them and taking away the education benefit would solve the problem. They obviously do not take advantage of the benefit anyway so why offer it? Opponents would argue that these kids are more in need of intervention so we should contribute more to trying to keep them in school. I say no send them to Mexico and let them work those low-paying jobs there. We should not be paying to educate them in the first place as they do not belong here and are not entitled to any rights as they are illegal aliens.