Execs Push Plan to Get Latinos Back to School

Citing a dramatic growth in the number of Latino students who are either dropping out of school or are choosing not to go to college, a group of business executives this week called for a nationwide mobilization effort to change the basic educational system and target disadvantaged youth.

The effort, dubbed Partners in Education, would combine the resources of the public and private sectors to work with schools and disadvantaged youths to ensure that they are employable, said Lodwrick M. Cook, chairman of Atlantic Richfield Co. and one of the participants in a Washington seminar sponsored by the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.

“Leadership at all levels must implement the strategy to help these students participate in the workplace,” Cook said during a news conference featuring a 47-page report developed by the Aspen Institute recommending the creation of the Partners in Education program.

The business leaders are calling for a presidential commission to help Latino youth, a group that appears headed for crisis by the beginning of the next century, according to the report.

By the year 2000, Latinos will make up 14% of the total youth population of the United States, the report said. Yet Latino youths already have a high-school dropout rate of more than 45%. And 25% of the Latinos who do graduate are not considered to have the basic skills necessary to survive in the nation’s high-technology industries, the report said.

“They are going to endanger the future of our nation,” Cook said. Of the estimated 21 million new jobs that will be created in the United States by the year 2000, half will demand an education beyond high school, the report said.

Those people who eventually are unemployable or underemployed will cost taxpayers more than $240 billion in lost earnings and lost taxes over their lifetime, said Soloman D. Trujillo, a trustee of the Aspen Institute and vice president of US West Inc., the Colorado-based regional telephone company.

The Partners in Education program proposed by the executives would:

- Work with Latino families, including child-development training for parents, resettlement help for immigrants and a parent-school partnership.

- Support Latino institutions that would help the community in such areas as health, education, housing, entrepreneurship and voter registration.

- Develop flexible strategies to prepare Latino youths for the workplace, including the revision of school hours that would allow working youths to attend classes at night or during the summer.

- Provide financial support, transportation or child care to young Latinos going through job-training programs.