Duval School Board Recognizes National Hispanic Heritage Month

Duval County Public Schools | by Vickie Pierre | October 9, 2020

The Duval County School Board recently celebrated National Hispanic Heritage month by highlighting the successes, achievements, and contributions of Team Duval’s diverse Hispanic student population.

Running September 15 to October 15, National Hispanic Heritage Month honors the impact of Hispanic and Latino Americans in our culture and society.

District leaders dedicated a portion of the October School Board meeting to share these interesting facts and figures about Team Duval’s Hispanic and Latino students:

• As of this school year, there are 18,647 Hispanic students enrolled in this district. The highest level of enrollment can be found among our fourth graders, at 1,626 students.
• The graduation rate among the district’s Hispanic students has grown dramatically, from 74.4 percent in the 2014-2015 school year, to a record-high 87.5 percent in the 2018-2019 school year.
• A 2019 assessment that compared Duval County Public Schools students to those in other large cities like New York, LA and Atlanta revealed that the district’s Hispanic students:
  • Ranked first in 4th grade reading
  • Ranked second in 4th grade math
  • Ranked third in 8th grade reading
• Eighty-one percent of our Hispanic or Latino students were born in the US or Puerto Rico. The remaining students were born in other countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and El Salvador.
• Spanish is the first language for 51 percent of the district’s Hispanic and Latino students. For 46 percent of those students, their first language is English. Forty other languages are represented among the district’s Hispanic and Latino students, including Portuguese, Tagalog, and Mam.
• The district serves 7,950 English Language Learners. Forty-nine percent of them are Spanish Speakers.

These statistics come from the district’s Accountably and Assessment team as well as the ESOL, Dual Language, and World Languages Departments.