Minority Dropout Problem : Fresno Educator Fights to Keep Children in School

Larry Luna ordinarily is a mild-mannered elementary school principal in predominantly Latino southeast Fresno, but now he is ready to go to war.

His war doesn’t involve guns and bombs, but he is just as serious as any soldier on the front lines.

Luna’s battle is with the dropout problem in the Fresno Unified School District.

“The dropout situation in our area is a very big, complex problem that belongs to all of us, and to stop it we are going to have to wage an all-out war,” Luna told the district’s trustees earlier this week.

His declaration came as he presented the district trustees with a general plan to reduce the dropout rate. The plan was drawn up by the community task force Luna heads that has been working on the dropout situation since last year.

29% Don’t Graduate

Included in the presentation was a report showing that 29% of pupils entering the ninth grade in the district never graduate from high school.

That’s bad enough, but when the figures are broken down, they show that the dropout rate is entirely out of proportion for minority students at 43% for Latino students in the district and 31% for blacks. Only about 14% of non-minority students drop out.

“The figures show that nearly half the Hispanic students never get their diplomas and almost one-third of the black students don’t graduate,” Luna said.

He told the trustees in no uncertain terms that they’ve spent too much time studying the problem and that it is now time to go to work to solve it.

“I think we’ve talked this problem to death,” Luna said as he gave his report. “While we were talking about the problem, the students arounds us, hundreds and hundreds of them, dropped out of school.”

Heads Task Force

Luna is principal at Calwa Elementary School on Fresno’s southeast side. He was appointed last year to head the community task force to find ways to cut the district’s dropout rate.

He told the trustees that he sees signs even among grade school students that they will not complete their high school education.