por Bianca Fortis
Hispanic Link News Service
President Obama officially launched his re-election campaign today with a strategy to engage super-rich supporters, but he has already started efforts to court the three constituencies that helped ignite early fires under his 2008 presidential bid — Latinos, youth and immigrants.
Obama roped in all three during a forum March 28 at a high school established in 1979 to serve immigrant students in the heart of the capital’s biggest barrio.
The president’s message rang like a dinner-bell: “The Latino community in this country will be a key for our future success,” he told the assemblage of 300 students, parents and community members in the gymnasium of Bell Multicultural High School, one of two public institutions located on the Columbia Heights Educational Campus.
“And all of the young people who are sitting here are going to be a key to our success.” He pressed the point, “It is critical for all American students to have language skills…Make sure you don’t speak just one language. You speak a bunch of languages. That’s a priority.”
The forum was hosted and telecast nationally that evening by Univisión, the Spanish-language TV network, as part of its threeyear- long “Es El Momento” initiative to inspire academic achievement among Latino students.
It followed by only three weeks Obama’s first diplomatic venture into Latin America since his election nearly two and a half years ago..
Linking last month’s trip with a First Family vacation, he visited Brazil, Chile and El Salvador. Only days prior to that, he hosted Mexico President Felipe Calderón for talks at the White House while First Ladies Michele Obama and Margarita Zavala paid a photo-op visit to Oyster Elementary, a model Spanish- English bilingual school nearby.
Both Bell and Lincoln Multicultural Middle School embrace diversity and focus on multiple languages as a cornerstone of their curricula. Together, they enroll 1,300 students, predominantly from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. Two-thirds are Hispanic and nearly onethird black, with a sprinkling of students from Asia.
At the Town Hall-style session, President Obama acknowledged that the U.S. public education system is failing the Latino community, which new 2010 Census Bureau data show has exceeded the 50-million threshold. In nearly every major urban community, the Hispanic dropout rate exceeds 50 percent.
Univisión news anchor Jorge Ramos led the questioning, calling on some students and parents in the gym and playing video submissions by others from the community. Bell senior Kenrry Alvarado, 17, whose family emigrated from El Salvador, asked the President about funding for Pell Grants.
Obama said his administration has boosted their level of funding by $800 per recipient. Afterwards, Alvarado said that while he liked the additional funding, he wished the President had addressed the program’s cost, whichcould reach $20 billion.
“I wanted to find out how he’s going to reduce the deficit for that program.”
A parent asked what the President what he was doing to support Head Start. Obama answered that his administration increased its funding during the past two years, but more still needs to be done.
Head Start director Yvette Sánchez Fuentes told Hispanic Link that the budget passed by the House would cut its funding by $2 billion. She added that children make better progress academically when taught in their first language.
“Clearly we do want kids to learn English, but it is not the be-all, end-all to being academically prepared to go into the public school system,” she said. “Being bilingual plays a huge part in how the brain develops and the skills that kids pick up.”
José Rico, deputy director of the White House Initiative on Education Excellence for Hispanics, added that the administration’s plan to improve Latino education involves three steps: 1) improve the Head Start program’s quality and funding 2) raise high school graduation rates and 3) guarantee access to higher education.
He called the educational status of Latinos “terrible,” pointing out that only 13% of its adult population has a bachelor’s degree.
“That rate has been about the same for the past 30 years.”
In his closing remarks, Obama assured the students, “I’m confident that not only is the Latino community going to succeed, but the American family is going to thrive and succeed in the 21st century.”
(Bianca Fortis is the editor of Hispanic Link Weekly Report. Email her at biancafortis@gmail.com.)
