By José Reyes, Reporter
ROME, Ga. — Some Latino students in Rome say city and county public schools are not supporting them in ways that prepare them for life after high school.
While resources such as college application sessions in which teachers and counselors help students and their parents with the process are welcome, these sorts of sessions are conducted in English. For many Latino students and even more acutely their parents, this presents an added challenge.
“In high school, I had to be an advocate for myself,” said Emily Pineda-Duarte, a Latina junior at Berry College and an alumna of Pepperell High School. Her high school counselor, relied upon for advice, emotional support and post-high school preparedness, proved to be “little or no help, to be honest,” Pineda-Duarte said.
She said she found that whenever she would share her post-graduation plans with the counselor, she was immediately shut down. The counselor advised her not to bother applying to certain colleges because “she didn’t really see a future for me” at those institutions. One of those colleges was Berry, where she is a Junior Bonner Scholar, a peer counselor, and student manager of the Diversity and Belonging Office.
“She told me not to even apply to Berry because she did not see a future for me there, so I really had to advocate for myself for higher education,” Pineda-Duarte recalled.
Overcoming Barriers
Unfortunately, Pineda-Duarte’s experience is not unusual. Latino students in the English to Speakers of Other Languages program at Rome High School have struggled to even imagine college as an option, said Eliana Campbell, an ESOL teacher at Rome High.
She said that cultural and family forces often push Latino students into the workforce straight out of high school in order to help support their families.
“A lot of the time students already have their mind set on working after high school,” Campbell said, “which is sad, because you can do both. You can work and go to school, even if you don’t go full time. It is very hard to change their mentality.”
Campbell said she was the first in her family to graduate from high school and attend college. Growing up in a Brazilian household, she said she shares many of the experiences that her Latino students are going through. She uses her experiences to show Latino students that it is possible to aim higher.
The seeming priority to enter the workforce after high school often comes from cultural values instilled by Latino families in the home, which makes it doubly hard to break the cycle, according to Father Rafael Carballo, for seven years a priest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rome.
“There are some families who don’t see any worth in spending all of this money on formal education for their kids when they can just go to work right after high school,” he said.
In addition, many Latino families come from rural areas in Latin America where work is valued over education, said Carballo, who is now a priest at Transfiguration Catholic Church in Marietta.
Marginalized and Minimized
Another, more subtle barrier is the reification of the dominant culture at the expense of minority cultures and languages. Unable to find a space in which to embrace her culture in the public school system, Wendy Sontay-Reyes, a Rome High alumna and Latina student at Berry College, said she simply pushed her culture to the side while at school.
Rome High did not even note or otherwise celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, she said.
Adan Escutia, a Latino Rome High alumnus and now a student at Kennesaw State, said he shared Sontay-Reyes’s experience, describing his culture as “unseen” at Rome High.
He said he wished that he had had a vibrant Latino community in which to find support and affinity.
The demographics suggest that this tacit marginalization is not sustainable. Rome High has a student population of more than 2,000 students, three-quarters of which are minority students, according to U.S. News and World Report.
Rome High’s own descriptions back this up: “The diversity of the school is divided approximately as 30 percent African-American, 40 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent Caucasian,” according the school’s website.
The balance of 10 percent comprises students reporting two or more races, including Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, according to data from the U.S. News and World Report.
Finding Community in College
By contrast, Vanessa Juarez, a first-generation college student at Kennesaw State, and a Latina alumna of Rome High, said finding a Latino community in college has helped her navigate and succeed.
Juarez is a part of a community of Latino and Hispanic students at KSU known as the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.
Members are “Latinos and Hispanic people who all come from the same background (and) who can relate to each other,” she said. “They will help you fill out resumes (and) tell you about scholarships that are for Hispanics or the field that you are concentrated in or work opportunities.”
Juarez said that had she enjoyed such community at Rome High, she would have been much better prepared for college and life after graduation.
What’s Best for Rome
With already such a large Hispanic population and projections of continued growth, the Rome area should probably be doing far more to include Latinos in civic and community life, to resource and support Latino students in its public schools and ensure adequate representation wherever public policy and funding decisions are being made.
About one in four Americans are projected to self-identify as Latino by the year 2060, according to NBC News, and Latinos are already the majority population group in cities such as Miami, San Antonio, San Jose and Houston.
The growing student Latino populations will inevitably have a huge impact throughout the United States, Campbell said.
“A huge percentage of Latinos will be voters, so they will be deciding the future of our government,” she said.