The faces of Maryland's public school children have quietly been changing over the past several years, and minorities - primarily Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans - now outnumber white students in the state.
Maryland public school enrollment data show that 48 percent of the students in the state's 24 school systems are white. African-Americans represent 38 percent of the school population, Hispanics 8 percent and Asian-Americans most of the remaining 6 percent.
FOR THE RECORD - An article Monday on Page 1A incorrectly reported the number of teachers hired in Frederick County in the past several years to teach students for whom English is a second language. Twelve new teachers were hired at a cost of $600,000 a year.
The Sun regrets the errors.
The shift officially took place in 2004, after both a decline in the number of white students and growth in the number of minorities. But schools have been adapting to the change over several years - expanding classes for non-English speakers, bringing in translators for parent nights and creating smaller classes in schools with large numbers of minority students.
At Dumbarton Middle School in the Rodgers Forge neighborhood of Baltimore County, 48 languages are spoken, and the school population is 38 percent minority.
In Howard County, the school system provided interpreters last month for 2,000 conferences between parents and teachers; 16 of the county's 38 elementary schools have a larger minority enrollment than white.
And at Frederick County High School, dozens of new students arrive every year who are not fluent in English; some have had little formal education in their home country.
"I think this is the future of America, the high degree of diversity we see in some of the urban states," said William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, pointing to the growing number of minorities, especially Latinos, in the U.S. population as a whole.
Maryland's total population is not majority nonwhite, but it is one of 15 states in which public school enrollment is predominantly minority. The changing demographics are a result of several factors, including a decline in the white birth rate and the departure of families for cheaper housing in Pennsylvania, according to Mark Goldstein of the Maryland Department of Planning.
From 2002 to 2006, Hispanic school enrollment statewide rose by 20,000 while white enrollment dropped by 40,000. That change mirrored a decline in the total population of white school-age children in the state and was not a result of parents transferring children into private schools, according to Goldstein.
Minorities outnumber whites in five school systems - Baltimore City and Montgomery, Prince George's, Charles and Somerset counties. Baltimore County is 50 percent minority as of Sept. 30. In many places where whites are still a majority, the number of Hispanic students has doubled or tripled since 1999. Garrett County, where 99 percent of students are white, seems the only jurisdiction exempt from the trend of diversification.
At many schools, cultural changes have seeped into virtually every routine - from parent meetings conducted in Chinese and Spanish to lunch tables divided not only into jocks and nerds but by the language spoken.
Nancy Fink, the principal at Dumbarton Middle, said the school has been learning how best to teach immigrant children - what the federal government calls English language learners. Once, she said, the school put all immigrant students in a classroom for a year to get them adjusted to American schools. Today, it pushes those who are ready into mainstream classrooms as quickly as it can.
Those students move first into math, "a symbolic language they have already known," Fink said, and then into science, social studies and, finally, language arts.
Dumbarton, a magnet school for English language learners, used to be filled primarily with Russian and Asian immigrants, often students who had received a good education before they arrived in this country.
Now, the school has nearly 200 English language learners, including refugees from Africa or Spanish-speaking countries who might not have had a formal education. Those students sometimes need to stay in separate classes much longer before they can move into a regular math or language arts classroom, she said.
In some cases, top students volunteer to help tutor the English language learners before school, giving them a chance to get to know one another.
The school also has begun providing training to help classroom teachers be sensitive to different cultures. Teachers learn, for instance, that some cultures discourage girls from speaking up in class, a fact that might not sit well with teachers used to rewarding students for class participation.
Frederick County, with a small but growing population of Hispanics and Burmese, has hired 100 new ELL teachers at a cost of about $500,000 annually over the past several years, said Superintendent Linda D. Burgee.
That is not a large percentage of her roughly $500 million budget, but she said there have been other costs, including buying additional materials, working with families, training teachers and providing interpreters.
