Despite efforts to improve the performance of black and Latino students in Montgomery County, community leaders want more done to erase the dramatic achievement gap between whites and minorities, especially at the middle and high school levels.
But while Latino organizations urge patience for time to allow efforts in early childhood and English-language education to work, black leaders lamented a problem they say has plagued the county since the 1950s.
“This is the same crap we’ve had before,” said Charlies Sye, an educational advocate for blacks in Montgomery County since 1973. “They’ve said since then ‘We’re working on it.’ If you’re working on it, why haven’t you got it fixed?”
Sye was especially concerned with suspension rates and special education status.
In high school, 2,600 black students were suspended in 2007, meaning 14.8 percent of blacks were removed from school from some period of time, compared with only 3.3 percent of whites and 2.5 percent of Asians.
Compared with whites, black students are two and a half times as likely to be labeled with mental retardation, and nearly twice as likely to be labeled with emotional disturbance.
School officials “look around and say ‘Everyone’s doing well,’” Sye said. “We look around and say ‘I wonder who they’re talking about.’”
Data on Latino students is equally dire. In 2007, they dropped out at a rate of 5.3 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 2002.
And while 67.4 percent of Asian and 62.2 percent of white students completed upperlevel math by ninth grade, only 20.5 percent of Latinos had done the same.
“The school system and the County Council need to see that the Latino youth population is not doing well,” said Diego Uriburu, acting director of Identity, a Latino social service provider based in Gaithersburg.
Uriburu said the schools have been receptive to his organization’s outreach programs trained on Latino families.
“Improvements have been made, but the frustrating part is they take time,” he said.
