Education Committee - GACHA

Maria Matos and Yvette Santiago, Co-Chairs

From its inception, one of the Council's objectives was to identify key areas in which Hispanic Delawareans were struggling, and it quickly became apparent that education was one of these areas.

The Education Committee began its work in November 2004 by identifying significant issues affecting Delaware's Hispanic students, including equality, parental involvement, literacy, and staffing for English Language Learner (ELL) programs in the state. Committee members conducted field interviews with educators in Sussex County to determine the overall picture with regard to ELL programs, developed a set of recommendations to address problems revealed by the interviews, and presented their recommendations to the Department of Education. The committee also commissioned a white paper, The Education Report: The State of the Delaware Latino, which represented a comprehensive study of existing data on Hispanics in the state's education system. Highlights of the report covered general enrollment figures, racial disparities, Hispanic performance on the Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP), ELL statistics, national trends, and data on the state's Hispanic student dropout rate.

Of all the data presented in this report, the most troubling statistics were those regarding the significant dropout rate among Hispanics and the steadily rising increase in the percentage of Hispanics dropping out of school:

• The Hispanic dropout rate in the state of Delaware was 9.6 percent during the 2002/2003 academic year, representing 8.9 percent of all dropouts in Delaware. The Hispanic dropout rate in Delaware was the highest recorded for any racial classification and was almost 2.5 times higher than white students, which was 4.0 percent.
• In 2004/2005, according to the most recent Department of Education Report, the number of Hispanic students dropping out of school rose to 10.4 percent, representing 11.7 percent of all dropouts in Delaware.