Colleges Get Grant for Serving Latinos

The Los Angeles Community College District has been awarded $10 million from a new federal program designed to help so-called “Hispanic-serving institutions.”

Valley, Trade-Technical, Harbor, City and Southwest colleges will receive portions of the five-year grant, said John Rude, resource development director for the Los Angeles district. Other local colleges that received grants include Antelope Valley College and El Camino College.

The grants spring from a $25- million fund set aside nationally for Hispanic-serving institutions, Rude said. The federal government has long offered grants for institutions serving high percentages of black students and those with minority students, but only recently created a specific category for those with large numbers of Latinos.

That, said Steve Fasteau, a dean at El Camino College, has given California a new edge in grant competitions. Only about 1,000 colleges nationally have the required 25% ratio of Latino students needed to qualify.

Forty-six percent of students at Los Angeles’s nine colleges are Latino.

The rules of the grant program allow colleges to seek funds for a range of services. Planned expenditures locally range from better ovens in culinary arts at Trade-Technical College to better high school outreach programs at El Camino.

In Los Angeles, district leaders were delighted. Chancellor Marshall Drummond has made raising new federal funds one of his priorities since being appointed last year, and hired Rude in January to step up the district’s efforts to get federal funds.