For some Texas schools, demographic future is now
Certain characteristics set the Laredo Independent School District apart from most districts in the state.
Its western boundary aligns directly with the Mexican border. Nearly all its students are poor, and nearly all are Hispanic. Most rely on the school to provide two meals a day. On the first day of school this week, some showed up without shoes or without parents accompanying them.
“It’s hard to work on teaching them about reading and writing and math when they haven’t eaten. It’s hard to really welcome them into their class with their textbooks and their lockers when they don’t have on shoes,” said Marcus Nelson, the Laredo superintendent, who said the district solicited donations of shoes and dress-code appropriate clothes all summer to prepare for the new school year.
But geography aside, Texas public schools may increasingly find more in common with the South Texas district. In 2011, the state reached two landmarks. For the first time, Hispanics became the majority of public school students. And to cope with a historic budget deficit, the Legislature did not finance enrollment growth in the state’s schools — something that had not happened since the modernization of the state’s public school system in 1949. Though the first turning point passed quietly and the second with much political strife, they both underscored the challenges ahead as a dramatic demographic shift occurs in public school classrooms statewide.
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