Hispanic children now for the first time make up the majority of Texas public school students, the Associated Press is reporting. The story notes that Texas Education Agency officials say Latinos make up 50.2% of Texas' 4.9 million public school students. This trend is only expected to continue. White students are expected to continue following a trend of declining numbers. Two of every three public school students students are now minorities--a funny word to use nowadays and really a misnomer.

So Irving ISD is not alone and certainly has been leading in this trend for quite some time. Currently, about 73% of the district's elementary students are Latino.

In recent years other suburban districts, including Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD, have tipped to become majority Hispanic as well.

The El Paso Times also has a story on this.

Steve Murdoch, the state's former demographer, said the future of Texas depends on improving performance of minority students--otherwise the state will face a poorer population and a decline in college-educated residents. READ MORE

 Contact: Grace Valadez

March 21, 2011

(773) 878-7044

Chicago, IL – The Hispanic American Construction Industry Association (HACIA) recognized St. Augustine College’s contributions to the educational development of Chicago residents by presenting the college with the Community Leadership Award at its 32nd Annual Awards Banquet. At this event, one of the largest and most prestigious in Chicago, Mayor Richard M. Daley received the Lifetime Achievement Award and other HACIA members received awards for their accomplishments.

St. Augustine was particularly recognized for providing a variety of educational, vocational and construction trade training programs that are critical to skill development and to the progress of Chicago area residents. St. Augustine’s Institute for Workforce Development has partnered with HACIA, the City of Chicago, and other local and state agencies to expand its program offerings, while becoming the leading dual workforce development training provider in the Illinois.

The award was presented by the newly appointed HACIA Executive Director, Jorge Perez, and HACIA’s President of the Board, Federico J. D’Escoto. “It truly is an honor to receive this award from such a prestigious and important organization. This serves as motivation for us to continue expanding the breadth and quality of our educational services to the communities we serve,” stated Andrew C. Sund, President, St. Augustine College. “We appreciate this recognition, as well as the partnership we have developed with HACIA to produce a well trained workforce that creates more and better job opportunities for local residents, including Hispanic workers and business owners,” added Norman Ruano, Vice president of St. Augustine’s Institute of Workforce development.

Source: PRNewswire-USNewswire

President Barack Obama has designated Marty Castro as the Chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. A unanimous vote of the Commission approved the President's designation of Mr. Castro as the Chairperson at its regular business meeting on March 11, 2011.

Mr. Castro becomes the eighth chairperson of the Commission since its inception in 1957, and the first Latino chairperson in the Commission's history. Mr. Castro was appointed by President Obama to the Commission on January 27, 2011.

Chairperson Castro said, "I am humbled by the confidence that President Obama and my fellow Commissioners have shown in me by elevating me to Chairperson of the Commission. As the son and grandson of immigrants from Mexico who came to this county for the hope it offered, and as a proud American, I am honored to serve my country in this important capacity. I believe the Commission has an important role to play in ensuring that the American Dream continues to be available to all persons in the United States. I also look forward to working with my fellow Commissioners and our staff to ensure that the Commission renews its mission to be our Nation's conscience on civil rights issues."

Chairperson Castro is President of Castro Synergies, LLC in Chicago, and Chair of the Illinois Human Rights Commission.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, bipartisan agency charged with monitoring federal civil rights enforcement. Members include Chairperson Martin Castro and Commissioners Roberta Achtenberg, Todd Gaziano, Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow, Abigail Thernstrom, and Dina Titus. Commission meetings are open to the general public. The Commission's website is http://www.usccr.gov.

Contact: Lenore Ostrowsky

Acting Chief, Public Affairs Unit

(202) 376-8591

SOURCE U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

http://www.usccr.gov 

With several risk factors affecting local young Latinas at disproportionate rates, Saturday's Soy Unica! Soy Latina! rally had an important goal: Helping girls make smart decisions.

The rally, organized annually by Latinas Unidas, attracted more than 150 girls to the University of Rochester for a Saturday morning mix of fun and serious business.

Girls aged 7 to 18 participated in workshops on topics such as healthy living, healthy and unhealthy relationships, personal finance, cultural traditions and college admissions.

"It's a great opportunity to meet new friends," said Mila Sutton, a 14-year-old Spencerport High School student who has been attending Soy Unica! Soy Latina! for years. "It really makes you appreciate who you are."

University of Rochester freshman Stephanie Hoppe has fond memories of attending past Soy Unica! Soy Latina! rallies and stopped by Saturday's event for the Zumba demonstration and fashion show.

"It was definitely an experience that helped motivate me and solidify my Latino identity," she said. "It's warm and welcoming and you learn a lot."

Latinas Unidas President Daisy Rivera Algarin said that this ninth annual rally placed a strong emphasis on higher education and hoped that each participant left the event saying, "I'm going to college."

Toward that end, girls were given tours of the UR campus, and their parents received information about available financial aid. Attendees also had the chance to mingle with UR students and Latinas who have found notable professional success. READ MORE

The Spanish-language soap topped Univision and English-language broadcast networks in the adults 18-34 demo in its time period Tuesday.

It's not a good sign when a Spanish-language soap tops English-language broadcast networks. That's what happened Tuesday night at 10 p.m. with Telemundo's La Reina del Sur. The program was No. 1 in its time slot in the adults 18-49 and 18-34 demographics, according to Nielsen. In the latter demo, La Reina topped CBS, ABC, NBC and Univision in the period.

La Reina drew 2.9 million viewers and roughly 1.93 million were in the ad-favored 18-49 demo. For Monday and Tuesday's telecasts, La Reina has averaged 1.89 million in the demo, up 7 percent from its premiere week.

In adults 18-34, La Reina had its best ratings to date with 1.13 million.

MacArthur, Boeing, Others Provide $500,000+ for New Business Model for Arts Organizations

CHICAGO—The Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP), embarking upon its third decade as the world’s first year-round presenter of American tap dance and contemporary percussive arts, has announced the establishment of the Collaborative Space for Sustainable Development (CSSD—working title), which will serve as a shared, affordable and eventually self-sufficient education, rehearsal and administrative facility.

CHRP’s CSSD has secured financial support of more than $500,000 to date. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is providing $275,000 over four years toward the CSSD’s development and implementation. This crucial contribution follows lead support for program development from The Boeing Company, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Pamela Crutchfield and the Arts Work Fund for Organizational Development. Most recently, the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation approved $120,000 of support, and the James S. Kemper Foundation and the Polk Bros. Foundation committed funding. Jenner & Block LLP and ProTen Realty Group are providing pro bono support.

CHRP’s mission and 21 years of program development are rooted in community organizing and collaborative action. “The gift from MacArthur, which may be the largest ever to an institution dedicated to American tap, is significant in a national and international context for the tap dance field,” commented CHRP Founder/Director Lane Alexander, who was appointed last week to Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel’s Arts and Culture transition team. “It demonstrates that the funding community has confidence in the singular value of this new initiative and is comfortable with a non-mainstream institution leading the way.”

About the Collaborative Space for Sustainable Development

CHRP’s CSSD will centralize and professionalize the administrative, rehearsal and education space needs of several resident companies, as well as numerous additional arts space users. The facility will maximize space, equipment and shared service use through a well-designed suite of facility and service options customized and economized for each participant.

CSSD will be managed as a CHRP program initially, with collaborating resident companies to include:

Jump Rhythm Jazz Project
Kalapriya, Center for Indian Performing Arts
Luna Negra Dance Theater
Ping Pong Productions, which facilitates collaborations between Chinese and international artists
River North Dance Chicago
CSSD is creating a physical space for smaller and mid-sized organizations to stabilize operations and pursue facility-centric program growth opportunities as resourcefully and cost-effectively as possible. CSSD will provide a long-term platform for stability and growth in several key areas by:

responding to the near-universal need among small and mid-sized dance and other arts organizations for professional administrative, rehearsal and education spaces as well as a desire to unify as many organizational functions as possible in a single location creating a venue that will allow arts organizations to develop and maximize earned income from tuition-based education programs while lessening reliance on subsidies
enabling longer-term program planning as well as enhancing the potential scope and impact of tuition-based education programs managing the facility, mitigating many users’ current space management burdens Initial funding has supported the hiring of respected arts administrator Suellen Burns as program director. CSSD has a lead space option in downtown Chicago and continues to pursue additional funding, which would facilitate a development timeline culminating in a grand opening in fall 2011.

Project background

The brainchild of CHRP Founder and Director Lane Alexander, CSSD grew from CHRP’s two-year strategic planning process, led by then-Board Chair Susan Oppenheimer (Ph.D., organizational development), which produced a plan for 2010–12 focusing on long-term opportunities for collaborative space and earned income development. In cultivating other prospective resident companies, CHRP found many groups that cited similar priorities, as well as the need to streamline operations and reduce overhead, as both fundamental challenges and untapped opportunities.

Most cultural institutions in the United States, regardless of size, have experienced declining ticket revenue while education programs have held steady or grown. The medium- to long-term trend may require cultural institutions to recalibrate the balance between performance and education, and CSSD will create a sustainable platform for that purpose. In studies funded by the Chicago Community Trust and the MacArthur Foundation, as well as from a market survey donated to CHRP by the Boston Consulting Group and CSSD’s more informal information-gathering, there was a strong desire for centralized space for meetings, performances and classes.

“We are proposing to alter the traditional business model by offering arts groups the opportunity to shift their reliance on earned revenue from ticket sales and contributed income to self-sustaining revenue via educational programming,” commented Alexander.

About CSSD Program Director Suellen Burns

Suellen Burns was program manager, then executive director, of Arts Bridge, the nation’s first business incubator for the arts, which doubled the number of groups it served during her eight years. Burns led Arts Bridge’s 1997 facility project, developing and securing a new home for its Incubator Program as anchor tenant in the Athenaeum Theatre Building, a multi-purpose arts complex. Burns’ experience also includes positions with Friends of the Chicago River, Suzuki-Orff School for Young Musicians and Guild Complex. She has lectured on organizational development and arts stabilization at dozens of local and national forums. She served as project leader, contributing author and contributing editor for Incubating the Arts, a book published by the National Business Incubation Association in 2000.
About Chicago Human Rhythm Project

Founded in 1990, Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) builds community by presenting American tap dance and contemporary percussive arts in world-class and innovative performance, education and community outreach programs. During the last 20 years, CHRP has produced multiple community-based collaborations including shared revenue programs, concerts and touring opportunities, including:
annual National Tap Dance Day concerts, featuring an array of tap and percussive dance artists a shared revenue program designed to assist Chicago’s budding tap community to build capacity through audience development, created in 2001

Thanks 4 Giving, another innovative shared revenue program launched in 2005 as part of its annual Global Rhythms concerts at the Harris Theater, through which CHRP has partnered with more than 100 Chicago-based nonprofits to raise funds for a wide variety of service agencies participation in the 5th Anniversary Beijing International Dance Festival, assembling 70 artists to represent the United States CHRP’s vision is to establish the first global center for American tap and percussive arts (The American Rhythm Center), which will create a complete ecosystem of education, performance, creation and community in a state-of-the-art facility uniting generations of diverse artists and the general public.
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The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places and understand how technology is affecting children and society.

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Inland Southern California's booming Hispanic population has spurred the growth of new business serving the Latino community, but it is also changing the cultural and economic landscape in broader ways as companies seek to tap into the community's growing economic clout.

New Census data show Hispanic residents made up nearly 2 million of the Inland Empire's 4.2 million population in 2010, and the growth of Hispanic residents continues to outpace population growth overall. In the most recent Census, Hispanics made up 45.5 percent of Riverside County's population; that's up from 36.2 percent in 2000. And in San Bernardino County, Hispanics made up 49.2 percent of the population in 2010, up from 39.2 percent.

"If you look back at what the Inland Empire used to look like, even 10 years ago, it was completely different than it is today," said Marco Robles, a spokesman for Cardenas Markets, an Ontario-based grocery chain that has grown in tandem with the Inland region's Hispanic population.

Cardenas Markets started as a single store in 1981 and today employs 3,500 people in a chain of stores that extends throughout the Inland region and into Los Angeles County and Nevada. The Cardenas Markets are among several grocers that have found fast growth serving the Inland market's Latino community. Los Angeles County-based Superior Grocers moved inland in 2005 and has quickly racked up seven locations in Ontario, Fontana, Rialto, San Bernardino, Corona, Chino and Moreno Valley.

STARS COME OUT

Demographic changes have also made the Inland region a hub for Latin entertainment over the last decade, with some of the biggest stars routinely stopping through the area. READ MORE

If it seems like the rest of the world is getting richer, it's true, it is.

The world's wealthiest people had a record-breaking good year in 2011, says Forbes magazine, which released its list of the globe's billionaires. During the year, 214 people became billionaires, bringing the world's total to 1,210 people holding $4.5 trillion. These billionaires' wealth is larger than the Gross Domestic Product of Germany.

THE LIST: World's richest people as ranked by 'Forbes' magazine
These wealthy individuals saw their average net worth jump 5.7% to $3.7 billion, powered in large part by soaring stock and commodity prices.

The U.S., with 413, is still home to more billionaires than any other country. But the rising influence of wealth outside the U.S. is becoming more clear in that:

•The world's richest person, again, isn't American. Carlos Slim of Mexico was again the wealthiest with a net worth of $74 billion, adding $20.5 billion. Slim widened his lead over Microsoft's Bill Gates by $18 billion, largely due to Gates' massive philanthropic efforts valued so far at roughly $30 billion, says Steven Bertoni of Forbes. "Bill Gates is only losing because he's helping the rest of the world," he says.

•Most new billionaires aren't being created in the U.S. During the year, 23 new billionaires were minted in the U.S., in large part resulting from the swelling paper value of social media site Facebook. Meanwhile, China added 54 new billionaires and Russia added 31. More than 108 new billionaires came from Brazil, Russian, India and China, the so-called BRIC nations. READ MORE

It's official: Latinos are the new majority across the Coachella Valley.

Their numbers are up, and dramatically so.

In 2000, roughly 122,000 Latinos called the valley home.

In 2010 U.S. Census data released Tuesday, that number is now 187,900, a 54 percent increase. The total includes the valley's nine cities, Bermuda Dunes, Mecca, Thermal and Thousand Palms.

The 65,900-plus Latinos gained in the past decade across the valley are nearly the equivalent of adding another Desert Hot Springs and Palm Springs.

Proximity to the border, available jobs, lower housing costs and weather are among some of the reasons why Latinos might choose to live here, some local Latino residents said.

“They feel like they're at home,” said Erika Omier, a Spanish teacher at Palm Springs High School. “If you go to Montana or Seattle, you're not going to feel like you're at home.

“When you're in California, you feel like you're in Mexico or Nicaragua.”

Erika Omier and her husband, Julio Omier, an assistant principal at Raymond Cree Middle School, are among the valley's recent transplants, having moved here from Oregon five years ago.

Erika Omier is originally from Mexico, Julio Omier from Nicaragua.

For an educator passionate about English language learners, as Julio Omier is, California was the obvious choice. READ MORE

Despite "significant" job growth in sectors with high Hispanic participation, Latinos face ever greater job insecurity, according to a report released Monday by the National Council of La Raza.

While Latinos "are making important contributions to the industries that are helping drive our economic recovery," they remain "in a precarious position when it comes to keeping their jobs and advancing in the labor market," Eric Rodríguez, NCLR Vice President of Research, Advocacy and Legislation, said in a statement accompanying the report.

Citing Labor Department statistics, NCLR notes that the service sector contributed most of the 192,000 jobs created in January and February, especially in areas of high Latino representation such as administrative services and waste management, nursing, residential care facilities for seniors and truck transport.

In 2010, Hispanics made up 17 percent of the labor force in the area of home nursing care, and 15 percent of general nursing and residential care facilities. At the same time they made up 29 percent of storage services, 21 percent of "transportation support activities," and 16 percent of the truck transport sector.

However, February was the third consecutive month during which Latinos exited the workforce, which probably contributed to the slight lowering of their unemployment rate to 11.6 percent in February, compared to 11.9 percent the month before.READ MORE

In 2010, Americans started their own businesses at the highest rate in 15 years—but they were more apt to go at it alone, says a new study.

According to a study done by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, there were 565,000 new businesses created per month in 2010 (.34 percent of American adults created them). That's the same as the 2009 rate, but an uptick from 2007, and "represents the highest level over the past decade and a half," says the study. But the rate at which these businesses employ others dropped from .13 percent in 2007 to just .10 percent in 2010.

"Since it began, the recession has triggered annual declines in the rate of employer enterprise births," Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, said in a statement. "Far too many founders are choosing jobless entrepreneurship, preferring to remain self-employed or to avoid assuming the economic responsibility of hiring employees. This trend, if it continues, could have both short- and long-term impacts on economic growth and job creation.

The Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, as it's called, tracks businesses from their first month of significant activity. (The owner must spend at least 15 hours per week on the business for two months consecutively, to rule out part-time business owners and very small business activities.)

Other study findings:

By race, Latinos' entrepreneurial activity increased the most. Latino business-creation rate rose from .46 percent in 2009 to .56 percent in 2010, the highest rate in 15 years. Entrepreneurial activity by Asians also rose, from .31 percent in 2009 to .37 percent in 2010. Business creation by African-Americans and non-Latino whites declined.

Immigrants were more than twice as likely to start businesses each month than were native born. The immigrant start-up business rate jumped from .51 percent in 2009 to .62 percent in 2010. The native-born rate is .28 percent. READ MORE

I grew up in Laredo, Texas, where the Latino population has always hovered close to 90 percent. I don’t remember being conscious of that, there were no Latinos or non-Latinos, we were all just people. Everyone had rich vowels in their names, mixed Spanish with their English and had tíos and primos.

So the recent revelation that Latinos will be the majority in Texas by 2040 was, for me, a foregone conclusion. Even all these years later, living in San Antonio for more than 25 years, the announcement that Latinos are 63 percent of the city’s population is not culturally astonishing or politically sobering. It is what it is, and that’s all.

In places other than Texas the fact is surprising, as if Latinos crept from behind the woodwork to be suddenly noticed by an unsuspecting majority. The more genteel folks thinking: “It’s not so much that they’re Latinos, it’s just that there are so many of them.” And we’re young and still reproducing at a championship rate: 95 percent of the children born in Texas, according to the Census count, are Latino. But here’s the thing: They’re also Texan, and American.

There’s a wise Spanish saying that goes como me ves, te veras, as you see me you will see yourself. It applies here. As Texas is today most parts of the country will be in the not too distant future. I see it as a great opportunity. READ MORE