New Tack Urged to Halt Latino School Dropouts

Major new efforts, including more work in preventing teen-age pregnancies, are needed if Orange County is to reduce its high dropout rate among Latino students, a newly issued report says.

The two groups that prepared the report, the county Human Relations Commission and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, noted that although student dropouts are a major problem affecting all ethnic groups, Latino dropouts were studied because they are so numerous.

According to the county Department of Education, about 41% of all dropouts in the county are Latino--with Latinos making up only about 23% of the county school enrollment.

“If the dropout rate among Hispanic students continues to ascend, it will place an entire generation of young people in educational jeopardy,” the report said.

The report also warned that the county’s economic future largely hinges on better educating young Latinos. The county’s many technical industries will lose potential workers if such high percentages of young local residents fail to finish school, the report added.

Recommendations in the report include:

- Early identification of children in the first three grades who are likely to become dropouts.

- New programs to intervene and help potential dropouts.

- A requirement that local school districts “set specific numerical goals for reducing the number of school dropouts.”

- An expansion of programs for teen-age mothers still in school.

- Efforts to prevent pregnancies among unwed teen-age girls attending school.

One of the recommendations aimed at halting teen-age pregnancies involves expanded sex education, a frequently controversial item in county education. The report called for “information about human reproduction and family life, starting in kindergarten and continuing through 12th grade.”

The report said that in 1984, about 7,000 teen-age unwed girls in the county became pregnant, and about 3,000 of that number completed their pregnancies and had babies. Of the 3,000 unwed mothers, about 2,400 dropped out of county schools, the report noted.

The statistics on these unwed mothers were not broken down into ethnic groups, but since Latinos have such a high percentage of dropouts, the report indicated that a large number of the teen-age pregnancies were among Latinas.

An analysis of dropouts in one Santa Ana high school showed that the need for money was the most dominant reason given by the students. The second most frequent reason was either pregnancy or the need to get married.

While much of the report’s material speculates about the effect of “low self-esteem” of Latino students and lack of school expectations in the lower grades, the Santa Ana high school analysis indicated that poverty is the dominant dropout factor. That segment of the report showed that student dropouts, when interviewed, said they had to get full-time jobs to help support their family.

No specific recommendations were made in the report about how to help such Latino students who feel financially pressed to drop out of school.

The report noted that Latino young people--who make up almost a fourth of all the students in Orange County--will be needed by county businesses and industries.

Leo Estrada, a population analyst with The Tomas Rivera Center in Claremont, said in the report that if nothing is done about Latino dropouts, “a harvest of unprepared and unskilled Latino youth will come forth at a time when Orange County is beginning to look at itself as a potential center for high-tech industries and other kinds of growth.”

Estrada also said that the county now has one of the fastest-growing Latino populations in California. Most of the older Latino residents, he said, are those who came to the county during the building-boom years in the 1960s and 1970s, when unskilled labor was in high demand.

Now, the sons and daughters of these laborers are in county schools, he added.

In 1985-1986, there were 8,437 students in Orange County who became dropouts.

About 50% of the dropouts were white, with whites accounting for about 62% of the student enrollment countywide. By contrast, 41% of the dropouts were Latino, with Latinos accounting for about 23% of the total enrollment.

The breakdown of the 8,437 dropouts, listing the ethnic group, the number and the percentage (in parentheses), is as follows:

American Indian 29 (.3); Asian 545 (6.5); Pacific Islanders 31 (.4); filipinos 21 (.2); Hispanic 3,464 (41.1); Blacks 135 (1.6); White (non-hispanic) 4,212 (49.9).