Schools see gap not improving for minorities.

Byline: ANNE WILLIAMS The Register-Guard

Mirroring a pattern found in school systems across the country, Hispanic, black and American Indian students in the Eugene School District lag behind their white and Asian peers on test scores.

They're also more likely to qualify for special education, be suspended or expelled, and drop out of school, according to district data for the 2001-02 school year.

The information, presented to the Eugene School Board and the district's Equity Committee on Wednesday night, showed most groups - including whites - making gains over the previous year.

"But the gap isn't lessening," evaluations specialist Dennis Urso said.

Closing the "achievement gap" - the disparity in academic performance between white and nonwhite, rich and poor - is a prime focus for the district.

It's been a top priority with the school board for several years, one that got a boost in 2001 with a $5 million grant from the Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds LEAD Program. The grant is providing extensive staff training aimed at closing the gap.

But several Equity Committee members said the numbers were discouraging.

For example, among 11th-graders, 31 percent of Hispanic males and 38 percent of Hispanic females met the performance standards on state reading tests their sophomore year. Among white students, 67 percent of males and 61 percent of females did.

Hispanic males posted a 9 percent dropout rate, compared with 3 percent for white males.

For black males, the dropout rate was also 3 percent but the rate of suspensions was 26 percent - close to four times the rate among white males.

And among black 11th-grade boys, just 24 percent met reading benchmarks, compared with 58 percent of their white counterparts.

Urso said black males appear to be struggling the most of any group, though their numbers are small: just 58 in district high schools that year, compared to 2,219 white males.

The smaller the number, the more difficult it is to gauge statistical significance, he said.

Urso also noted that some students opt not to disclose race on district forms, and an increasing number of students are of mixed race.

"Whenever we do this reporting we like to squeeze this data into nice little categories," he said. "But we're becoming a nation where it's become more difficult to do that."

Several Equity Committee members said they wanted more detailed information, and criticized the district's reporting method. Urso said additional information is available from individual schools, but he noted that his reporting follows federal policy.

"What I'm giving you is an overall snapshot, and what you really want to see is the two-hour video," he said.

Superintendent George Russell said the numbers tell the same story they've told for years. The question, he said, "is what are we going to do to make sure we're not losing kids ... while we're looking at the numbers?"

Urso also presented a report on incidents of harassment in the schools, showing numbers so far for this school year and the previous two school years. According to the report, there were 96 in 2000-01, 224 last year and 59 as of Jan. 21.

But the fact that some schools, including Roosevelt Middle School, reported no incidents at all prompted criticism. Equity Committee member Joe Brainard, who works in middle schools as a mentor with the NATIVES program, said he knows the real numbers are higher.

"We need to put regulations on school administrators to track this stuff," he said.

Urso said the district's new computer system, which is being implemented this year, will help provide more integrated and meaningful data on achievement, harassment and many other kinds of student information.