The tides of change have washed over California. Today, white,
non-Hispanic students are a minority in the state, making it hard
to keep school populations ethnically integrated.
The tides of change have washed over California. Today, white, non-Hispanic students are a minority in the state, making it hard to keep school populations ethnically integrated.
In the 2001-02 school year, 44.2 percent of the state’s population was Hispanic or Latino with 34.8 percent being white or not Hispanic, according to figures from the California Department on Education.
That figure continues into San Benito County where 55.5 percent of students were Hispanic and 40.4 percent white during the 2001-02 school year.
“Our schools traditionally have been well-represented by all of the elements of a community,” said Tim Foley, county superintendent of schools. “… San Benito County is looking more and more like the rest of California.”
While districts such as the Hollister School District and Aromas-San Juan Unified School District participate in the practice of sending students to neighborhood schools, residential segregation can lead to racial segregation at schools.
Foley noted that the high cost of living in some areas of the county does lead to discrepancies in school enrollment, but he said there are efforts to deliver a quality education to every student in the county.
Calaveras Elementary School has the highest percentage of Hispanic students in the district and the county at 76.6 percent, according to the 2001-02 figures. Whites or non-Hispanics make up 19.2 percent of the school’s population.
HSD Superintendent Judith Barranti said Calaveras’s numbers don’t reflect the area surrounding it.
“The population around Calaveras is not large enough to support an elementary school,” she said. “We (the district) have schools that are much larger.”
A bigger problem at the HSD than racial segregation is keeping enrollment numbers even across all its schools. Because of this, students from the Ridgemark and Sunnyslope areas are transported to Calaveras, Barranti said.
Barranti and ASJUSD Superintendent Jackie Munoz emphasized the importance of diversity – learning from it and preparing students for it in the real world, especially in California.
Racial segregation can lead to less diversification of cultures and viewpoints and segregation by poverty and other forms of inequality. Despite the implications of racial segregation, Barranti said the top two signs of a child’s success don’t deal with a school’s racial makeup.
“The No. 1 indicator of a student’s success is the quality of classroom teaching,” she said. “The No. 2 indicator is the child’s home environment – the attitude of the family at home. It doesn’t matter, their ethnicity. These account for 70 to 80 percent of why a student succeeds.”
ASJUSD has a whole other set of difficulties. Because the district is so rural and spread out and has only two elementary schools, there isn’t much opportunity to racially integrate the schools through busing or other means. Because of this, Aromas School’s population in 2001-02 was 34.9 percent Hispanic and 60.5 percent white while San Juan Elementary was 63 percent Hispanic and 33.7 percent white.
“They just go where they live,” Munoz said.
The bottom line for many administrators is making sure the quality of programs and teachers is equal across the board. This helps keep schools from looking like the inner-city schools in cities such as New York, furthering the cycle of racial segregation.
“I look at the quality of the programs, the quality of the instruction and the teachers … are students making adequate or better progress?” Barranti said. “It’s all about equality of resources.”
