New coalition Arizona for Latino Leaders in Education is looking to bring more diversity to the Board of Education with its official launch Dec. 2 at the State Capitol.
The coalition’s mission is to ensure that the communities most impacted by educational inequality are the ones making decisions for all children, Founding President Luis Avila said.
Arizona for Latino Leaders held an event at Paz Cantina restaurant earlier this month to gather supporters for the organization’s official launch.
Avila said at the event that it would take a group effort to get Latino leaders on the Board of Education.
“It’s going to take our parents, sons, sisters and cousins,” he said. “Every single one of us, graduated or not, we are going to have to take the power ourselves.”
Latinos are the fastest-growing population group in Arizona. Roughly 46 percent of Pre-Kindergarten to 12th grade students are Hispanic, but only 10 percent of the three main Boards of Education are, according to the coalition’s website.
The coalition was formed in response to this gap and is beginning to make moves to influence education policy in Arizona.
Jeff Zetino, an education campaign consultant for Instituto, a nonprofit dedicated to giving political power to voters of color and low-income voters in Arizona, said the Latino community has all the qualities and strength to change the leadership of education.
“We build power through people, money and ideas,” Zetino said. “We need a foundation of people that care about these issues.”
Avila said due to the current education system, many Hispanic students are below the target reading level, graduating unprepared for college and dropping out of school.
“So if what we have is not working, then we should take our lived experiences and inform the policymaking,” Avila said. “Because being undocumented, being the son of immigrants, being a person of color, being targeted by biases and other things are important for us to inform the way we make policy. And that’s not happening right now.”
Latino students are oftentimes affected by generational poverty, which is a contributing factor to why Latino students receive lower grades, have lower high school graduation rates, and live in families with lower incomes and household property values than their white counterparts, Zetino said.
He highlighted his experience in high school, where a principal told students they weren’t going to graduate.
“I remember my first assembly in high school,” Zetino said. “Our principal sat us down in a class of a thousand kids and he said, ‘Look next to you. One of you isn’t going to graduate.”
The fact that 50 percent of his class was not going to graduate was just a statistical reality.
The coalition wants to serve as an intermediary for Hispanic children’s educational needs and highlight the need for equal representation of them in the decision-making.
Identifying and developing leadership on a communal and governmental level is a primary goal for the coalition. Latino Leaders in Education is launching “Communities Investing in Education”, which will identify 100 Latinos to serve as a founding community to make funds available for future advocacy efforts.
Following the organization’s launch in December, it plans to focus on Hispanic communities for the first year and then expand to other communities in the following years.
Avila said the coalition will change its name to ALL in Arizona after its first year to make it more inclusive. He said this change would begin an effort to create a new Arizona majority by recruiting Native American, African American and low-income communities to help educate children.
“We’re going to lift all communities by this work,” Avila said.
Contact the reporter at mmozee@asu.edu.
