Thread: NE schools: More minority students, more meeting poverty

Nebraska schools: More minority students, more meeting poverty standard
By MARGARET REIST and MARK ANDERSEN / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, March 6, 2011 1:00 am

Linda Baumert, who has taught first-graders in Schuyler Community Schools for 27 years, was there when the first hints of change squeezed into a desk in her classroom.

The first Hispanic student in the district walked into Baumert's room in the mid 1980s during her first few years of teaching, a harbinger of things to come.

Drawn by a meatpacking plant 4½ miles west of town, the district's Hispanic population grew slowly until about 10 years ago, when a trickle became a torrent.

From 2005 to 2010, the district's Hispanic population grew 533 percent, from 201 students to 1,272. Today, 89 percent of the K-3 elementary school is Hispanic, 68 percent of the high school.

For reasons that go beyond race, 73 percent of Schuyler's students are enrolled in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program.

Free and reduced-price meal counts are the commonly accepted method for determining poverty in public schools across the country, Nebraska Department of Education spokesman Betty Vandeventer said.

Schuyler is an extreme example of two long-term trends in Nebraska's public schools: increasing diversity and a growing number of students who meet the districts' poverty standard.

Over the past 15 years, non-Hispanic white student enrollment dropped 13 percent statewide, while racial and ethnic minority numbers jumped 123 percent, most notably the Hispanic population. Statewide, the percentage of students meeting the schools' poverty standard has increased to 41 percent, compared to 30 percent a decade ago.

Those shifts have had a profound effect on school budgets, student achievement and space needs. And they are forcing teachers and districts to change the way they educate children.

"What we did for the population we had before, which was perfectly acceptable and successful, will not work for the population of students we have now and in the future," said Nebraska State Education Commissioner Roger Breed.

The demographic shift has changed some of Nebraska's 253 districts more than others. The majority of Hispanic students attend school in just a handful of districts.

Last year, nearly 66 percent of Nebraska's Latino students were enrolled in just eight districts -- Omaha, Grand Island, Lincoln, South Sioux City, Lexington, Schuyler, Columbus and Scottsbluff, according to research by Ted Hamann, University of Nebraska-Lincoln associate professor of teaching learning and teacher education. Eighty-seven percent of Latinos were enrolled in 25 districts.

The Hispanic student population has increased in 228 of Nebraska's 253 school districts over the past five years; 39 districts have seen a growth in black students.

The challenges facing districts with significant enrollment changes, Hamann said, are different from those that have seen little change.

"What Crete needs to do or what Schuyler needs to do is different than what Seward or Wilber need to do," he said.

Statewide, without the influx of minority students, overall school enrollment would have declined along with the white student population, which dropped from 88 percent to 74 percent over the past 15 years.

Total K-12 enrollment in public school districts statewide increased less than 1 percent, from 282,375 students in 1995 to 282,994 in 2010. Desks where 34,000 white students across the state once sat are now occupied by Hispanic, black, Native, Asian or multi-racial students.

Those numbers aren't offset by home school or private school enrollment. In fact, the same dynamic has happened in non-public schools, where white student enrollment decreased more than overall enrollment over the past decade.

Between 1995 and 2010 in the state's public schools, all racial and ethnic minorities increased:

* Hispanic students: 284 percent, from 10,972 to 42,123.

* Black students: 43 percent, from 16,480 to 23,585.

* Asian and Pacific Islander students: 81 percent, from 3,553, to 6,426.

* Native students: 39 percent, from 3,672 to 5,116.

Nowhere has the change been more dramatic than in Schuyler, a town of about 5,300 people 70 miles northwest of Lincoln, where the two biggest employers are the meatpacking plant and a food processing plant in nearby Fremont.

Schuyler school officials have struggled to find space for the burgeoning student population, which has climbed from 1,300 when Superintendent Robin Stevens arrived 11 years ago to nearly 1,800.

In the classrooms, the focus on reading is everywhere. In elementary school, teachers divide students into small groups based by reading levels, not grade. Students don't move forward until they've mastered the material.

At lunch, students waiting in line study the pictures of food on the wall along with the names. Orange. Egg. Waffles. Watermelon.

The library carries dual-language books alongside books in English.

The high school offers English Language Learner classes in social studies, science, math and language arts. The district has a newcomers class for students who speak little English.

Nearly all students come to school speaking some English now, said Schuyler Elementary School Principal Darli Jo Vrba, though teachers still struggle to communicate with parents.

For Baumert, the change is one of the things that's kept her at Schuyler Community Schools for 27 years.

"It's probably why I've stayed here," she said. "When you do years and years of teaching, you look for challenges. For me, it's in my room every year."

The challenges go beyond towns like Schuyler. Nebraska's urban areas, for instance, have also seen significant change.

Lincoln Public Schools' Hispanic population increased 50 percent over the past five years, Omaha Public Schools' 43 percent, and Grand Island Public Schools' 47 percent.

Even predominantly white, more affluent districts near larger urban areas have seen dramatic increases: Elkhorn's Hispanic population more than doubled; Millard's increased 87 percent.

More Nebraska students also are meeting the schools' poverty standard.

From 2000 to 2010, the number of students who qualified for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program jumped by 36,000, from 85,859 to 121,567.

The data doesn't show a direct connection between increasing diversity and increasing poverty. For one thing, more students across the board qualify for free and reduced-price lunch because of the recession. Also, the state has improved methods of identifying students who are eligible.

In Keya Paha County Schools, a tiny district on the northern edge of central Nebraska, for instance, all 97 students are white, but 49 percent of them qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

And, while the number of students on free and reduced-price lunch has increased in nearly every district, it hasn't happened uniformly.

On one end of the spectrum are districts like Seward Public Schools, which saw an increase in lunch program qualifiers from 19 to 24 percent between 2005 and 2010. On the other end: districts such as Schuyler, where the number of students qualifying jumped from 19 percent to 69 percent last year.

The number of Nebraska school districts that have at least half their students meeting the schools' poverty standard more than doubled in the last decade, from 24 to 56. Eighty-one percent of Nebraska's school districts have at least 30 percent of their students on free or reduced-price lunch.

As a group, students who come from lower-income families are more likely to move frequently and have less access to good, consistent medical care, said Marilyn Moore, Lincoln Public Schools associate superintendent of instruction. They tend to live in areas with higher crime and their families have less money for food.

"These are just part of the lives of children growing up, and they correlate to how well students do in school," she said.

Studies show students who spend the first five years of their lives in poverty are less likely to be read to or talked to as frequently as students who grow up in more affluent homes. And they're less likely to be in licensed child-care settings or preschool, Moore said. That's not a reflection of how much parents care, Moore said, but all those factors mean a gap in the language development of students by the time they start kindergarten.

"Schools don't create the achievement gap, they start with the gap," she said. "The big challenge is how to close that."

And that costs money. Federal Title I money coming to Nebraska to help educate students who meet the school poverty standard has more than doubled over the past decade, from $28.4 million to nearly $60 million.

That's just a portion of what districts spend to educate students qualifying for meal subsidies. Last year, districts got more than $76 million in state aid for that purpose. And districts spent nearly $90 million, not counting federal money. State aid is based on free lunch only, not students in the reduced-price lunch program.

Districts also get money to educate ELL students. Last year, they got more than $37 million in state aid and spent more than $44 million.

The challenges posed by poverty, language and diversity make teaching more complicated today, particularly with increased pressure by the federal government on accountability and making sure all students achieve.

Stevens, the Schuyler superintendent, is convinced that Schuyler landed on the state's list of "persistently low-achieving" schools because so many more students live in poverty and are having to learn English. That's despite teachers' focus on analyzing student data to hone in on which students need more work.

"When you ask what effect poverty has on us, I can't help but believe it gives us these negative labels," Stevens said. And those negative labels affect both the community and teachers, he said.

Meanwhile, the growing number of students filled up Schuyler's school buildings. More students were learning in portables than in the actual school buildings until the community -- which had defeated four other bond issues -- passed one for $6.9 million in 2007 to build a new elementary and an addition to the high school.

Now, the district is spending $4.5 million in federal bonds to add on to the elementary school to house more fourth- and fifth-graders and build a new entrance to the high school. The district is also opening a community services center to help families.

Schuyler Elementary Principal Vrba said teachers are doing whatever they can to help students.

"We have them through the day and we have to do the very best for them," she said. "They need us."

Still, there's a significant achievement gap statewide between minority and white students. And teaching students enrolling in schools today requires many changes, educators say.

"There are a lot of small steps," UNL's Hamann said.

The heavily phonics-based reading program used at Schuyler, for instance, may be part of the solution but not all of it because it doesn't focus on comprehension, he said.

Sometimes, Hamann said, it means understanding what students from different cultures know, then capitalizing on it.

"In some cases it's not that they know less, it's that they know different," Hamann said. "We don't tap into what they do know."

Leadership with an attitude of acceptance is vital, he said.

"It's not a case of tolerating newcomers, it's a matter of welcoming newcomers," Hamann said.

Education Commissioner Breed said change is happening, though slowly.

"I think the ship is turning a little bit at this time, and I think we'll have a very different ship in 2020 than we do now," he said. "But it will be done issue by issue, community by community, school by school."

http://journalstar.com/news/local/educa ... 57535.html

From 2005 to 2010, the district's Hispanic population grew 533 percent, from 201 students to 1,272. Today, 89 percent of the K-3 elementary school is Hispanic, 68 percent of the high school.

For reasons that go beyond race, 73 percent of Schuyler's students are enrolled in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program.

I hear the "sucking of tax dollars by illegals" sound. A few things that I would bet on in thei area of Nebraska; Lots of unwed mothers with new US citizen babies on welfare and lots of money sent to out of the country.

Anchor baby citizenship is one of the biggest threats our country faces; their numbers are ever increasing and they are handed U.S. citizenship but their loyalty lies mostly with the country of their illegal alien parents. Stopping the abuse of the 14th amendment must be a top priority.

From 2005 to 2010, the district's Hispanic population grew 533 percent, from 201 students to 1,272. Today, 89 percent of the K-3 elementary school is Hispanic, 68 percent of the high school.

For reasons that go beyond race, 73 percent of Schuyler's students are enrolled in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program.

Illegal invaders are like an invasive species, such as locusts or the Asian carp. They come in and simply destroy the native habitat by breeding and devouring local resources. Looks as if NE is going to end up just like California if this invasion is not stopped.