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<title>UnidosUS’s Latino Infant Initiative Brings Data, Recommendations to Capitol Hill</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/unidosuss-latino-infant-initiative-brings-data-recommendations-to-capitol-hill/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Vergara]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2024 13:32:50 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Early Childhood Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[K-12 Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Early Childhood]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[early childhood development]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Latino Family Report]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Latino Infant Initiative]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[LII]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[UnidosUS 2024 National Latino Family Report]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=55592</guid>
<description><![CDATA[UnidosUS has long advocated for the rights of Hispanic youth, and today, as those children make up a growing number of the United States’ early childhood population, UnidosUS is taking […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[UnidosUS has long advocated for the rights of Hispanic youth, and today, as those children make up a growing number of the United States’ early childhood population, UnidosUS is taking the lead in advocating for their future. In early February, the organization took a five-member delegation to Capitol Hill to present a briefing titled “Investing in the Future: Advancing a National Latino Infant Policy Agenda.”
– Author Julienne Gage is a former UnidosUS Senior Web Content Manager who currently serves the organization as a consultant.
The briefing is the latest fruit of a now two-year effort by UnidosUS and its partner Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors known as the Latino Infant Initiative (LII), whose goal is to improve the outlook for a demographic of children who will make up more than 50% of the K-12 public school population by 2050. 
Relying on a $300,000 per year grant from the Pritzker Children’s Initiative, the LII leverages the networks of its members to strengthen content knowledge and increase program capacity to provide high-quality services for Latino infants prenatally through age three (PN-3).
“This has truly been a labor of love for the past year and a half with our project partner Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors,” UnidosUS Education Policy Project Director Amalia Chamorro said in her remarks to introduce briefing sponsor Representative Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico. 
Chamorro called Leger Fernández “a close ally, friend, and champion to UnidosUS because she has such a strong record for standing up for children, families, and workers and for fighting for full equity and inclusion of this Hispanic community,” noting that the congresswoman sits on the House Rules Committee, the Natural Resources Committee, and the Education Committee, and is also the Vice Chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, a staunch advocate for strong, pro-family, and early childhood policies. She has also fought for billions of dollars in additional financial support for childcare and has succeeded in passing a bill in the U.S. Congress that approved New Mexico’s Constitutional amendment for increased early childhood education funding.
“That was monumental,” added Chamorro as robust applause broke out from the audience, “and kudos to New Mexico for getting it done.” 
In celebration of a vibrant multicultural and multilingual society, Leger Fernández came to the podium speaking first in Spanish, then transitioned into an impassioned speech about the importance of holding onto a vision for early childhood services even when funding gets cut or becomes limited. 
“Este es el momento. Este es el momento. This is the moment when we decide whether we invest in what we believe. And when we invest in our children, we are investing in not just what we believe, but we are investing in our future,” said Leger Fernández, who brought together over 100 attendees for the event. Those included 50 Congressional staff, and five representatives of the LII’s 16-member advisory council, which is made up of Latino parents, advocates, and program staff.
Leger Fernández’s main policy agenda is to promote the Child Tax Credit which offers tax breaks to enhance economic security for lower and middle-class families. However, she is also an outspoken advocate of the federally funded Head Start program which provides early education to underserved children from prenatal through pre-school. In fact, she credited her ability to be working in Congress to her own childhood Head Start experience, one which taught her to be curious.
She also noted that diversifying the early education workforce and encouraging multilingual learning are two important ways to help an increasingly diverse population of youngsters become both curious and confident as they grow. 
“We need all of that in our school so that when those babies look up, they have somebody who understands them”, she said. “When we feel strong in who we are and what our language is and who our identity is, guess what? We forget to hate. We forget that there are issues that divide us.” 
<h3>What’s on the Latino Infant Policy Agenda? </h3>
The <a href="https://unidosus.org/publications/latino-infant-initiative-policy-agenda/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Latino Infant Initiative Policy Agenda</a> aims to improve on a number of areas where Latino families are struggling. For example, about 20% of Latino families have no health insurance, they’re twice as likely as white families to experience food insecurity, one in five of their children have already been exposed to gun violence, and Latinx parents are about 40% more likely than other parents to experience postpartum depression.
“This is not just a Latino issue, and it’s not just a children’s issue. It’s an American issue because how we serve our Latino children today will impact how America is going to be tomorrow,” said UnidosUS Early Childhood Senior Policy Analyst Tania Villarroel, noting that today, one in four babies in the U.S. are Latino, and that number is expected to jump to one in three by 2061. ”This is how fast the Latino population is growing. They are the workers, the innovators, and the leaders who will drive our economy and democracy in the coming decades. But right now, these infants and toddlers are facing huge gaps in education and healthcare, in nutrition, in economic well-being. This should outrage us all.”
These are all the reasons UnidosUS has been working to grow the LII, she added. 
“The research is clear. A child’s experiences from the womb to age three shape brain development and have lifelong impacts,” she said, explaining that the LII’s partners conducted a survey with 1,300 parents and families with children under age five to learn about their experiences and their greatest areas of need and concern. And through that, came the council, whose members worked with her and other policy analysts to distill the information and create a cross-cutting policy agenda for this February 6 briefing on Capitol Hill.
The agenda and corresponding briefing focused on eight recommendations related to education, health, economic security, and immigration, many of which were informed by the findings of a UnidosUS <a href="https://unidosus.org/publications/national-latino-family-report-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2024 National Latino Family Report</a>. Those recommendations are:
<ol>
<li data-leveltext="%2." data-font="" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":0,"335559685":1440,"335559991":360,"469769242":[65533,0],"469777803":"left","469777804":"%2.","469777815":"multilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">Improve access to high-quality, culturally responsive early childhood programs. </li>
<li data-leveltext="%2." data-font="" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":0,"335559685":1440,"335559991":360,"469769242":[65533,0],"469777803":"left","469777804":"%2.","469777815":"multilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">Increase salaries, diversify, and train the early childhood workforce on dual language development. </li>
<li data-leveltext="%2." data-font="" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":0,"335559685":1440,"335559991":360,"469769242":[65533,0],"469777803":"left","469777804":"%2.","469777815":"multilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">Promote family engagement and home visiting efforts that are respectful of home languages. </li>
<li data-leveltext="%2." data-font="" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":0,"335559685":1440,"335559991":360,"469769242":[65533,0],"469777803":"left","469777804":"%2.","469777815":"multilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">Expand health care access, including mental health care. </li>
<li data-leveltext="%2." data-font="" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":0,"335559685":1440,"335559991":360,"469769242":[65533,0],"469777803":"left","469777804":"%2.","469777815":"multilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">Address food insecurity among Latino families, supporting programs like SNAP and WIC. </li>
<li data-leveltext="%2." data-font="" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":0,"335559685":1440,"335559991":360,"469769242":[65533,0],"469777803":"left","469777804":"%2.","469777815":"multilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">Tackle gun violence as a public health crisis affecting children. </li>
<li data-leveltext="%2." data-font="" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":0,"335559685":1440,"335559991":360,"469769242":[65533,0],"469777803":"left","469777804":"%2.","469777815":"multilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">Boost economic security for Latina mothers and families by championing paid family leave and expanding child tax credit. </li>
<li data-leveltext="%2." data-font="" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":0,"335559685":1440,"335559991":360,"469769242":[65533,0],"469777803":"left","469777804":"%2.","469777815":"multilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="2">Support humane immigration policies since they affect every aspect of Latino children’s lives. </li>
</ol>
“You have the power to create change, and now is the time to act,” said Villarroel. “Within the past 24 hours, 2,500 Latino babies were born in this country. We have three years to implement the policies that prevent these gaps from affecting their future. Latino children are depending on you. Our nation is depending on you.”
<h3>What Neuroscience Can Tell Us About Early Childhood Development </h3>
Given that the brains of infants and toddlers grow at lightning speed (about one million new neural connections per second), the LII also stays abreast of the latest scientific research on infant and toddler brain development, using webinars, special reports, and briefings like this one hear from the subject matter experts.
For this briefing, that expert was Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramírez, a University of Washington professor and Advisory Council member, who presented on brain development and bilingualism. 
She started by showing an illustration of rapid infant brain development, explaining that babies start their lives with 25% of their adult brain volume, and reach a whopping 85% of that volume by the age of three. 
“There’s an incredible amount of growth that takes place during this critical period,” said Ferjan Ramírez. “This is particularly impressive if you consider that no new neurons or brain cells are actually being born. It is the connections that are growing at an astonishing rate, at a rate that will never be the same again.” 
She went on to say how important language development, or better yet, multilingual development is to strengthen those connections. First, she explained that children begin picking up language in utero and differentiate between languages at birth. She also noted that contrary to the popular myth that children will be confused by more than one language, research shows greater brain activity in the frontal cortex for children who are receiving high-quality exposure to and interaction with more than one language.
“Early interactions prepare children for a lifetime of success, and for infants learning two languages, those interactions have to happen in both languages,” Dr. Ferjan Ramírez said. 
Before launching the final panel discussion part of the program, Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors Executive Director Adrián Pedroza hailed the unique opportunity the LII offers to explore the intersection of science, education, culture, and language in a policymaking context.
“How fascinating to see the science behind our lived experience and what we know from interacting with families, communities, [and] our own upbringing,” he said. 
<h3>Testimonials to Good Childcare Services </h3>
In recognition of the hard work and wisdom that partnering organizations bring to the LII, UnidosUS asked two representatives of their Texas-based Affiliate organization to join Dr. Ferjan Ramírez on that panel. 
Panelist Melanie Monroe, an AVANCE Parent Leader, began working with AVANCE about a decade ago just as she was giving birth to and raising two children in close succession (now aged 10 and 11). She said the program’s parental engagement and home visit program was key to helping her develop the awareness and the confidence she needed to rear well-rounded children and to transfer that skill to others.
She was also grateful for the affordable care and for the way that the AVANCE staff taught her how to make toys and other learning resources out of things she had right there at home. AVANCE was once again instrumental in her life when she found herself raising a third toddler during the pandemic as a single mom.
“They would give me diapers, referrals for food, and all these things that I was worrying about,” she said. “Once that stress was gone, I was able to focus and learn, and I received tools that I use to help my kids.” 
Dr. Ferjan Ramírez reiterated the importance of quality interactions through play, infant-directed speech, and activities that require a back-and-forth exchange between caregiver and baby. 
“Of course, what gets in the way is finding that time to have these high-quality interactions,” Dr. Ferjan Ramírez said, adding that she wants to see policies that give all parents more quality time with their babies and policies that support them in speaking to their babies in the language for which they are most comfortable. “If that’s Spanish, it’s Spanish. If it’s English, it’s English. If it’s both languages, then it’s both languages, but high-quality interactions.”
Dr. Teresa Granillo, CEO of AVANCE, said that programs like Head Start should be shifting some of their historical focus from four and five-year-olds to Early Head Start, which covers prenatal to three-year-olds, even though it’s more expensive to do so. 
“If we know that Head Start, and especially Early Head Start works, why not start increasing the presence of that into other places,” Dr. Granillo said, suggesting that those places should include communities where parents are struggling to get back to work or to go back to school. 
Granillo also noted that part of the funding increase should include better pay for the educators and caregivers—very often women of color—who are doing this crucial work. 
“If we get it right on the front end, think about how many other programs we wouldn’t need to fund anymore because the children would already be on the right track, educationally, socio-emotionally– all of those different factors,” Granillo said, adding that in an ideal world, policymakers would come to early childhood education centers to observe these kinds of dynamics so often taken for granted when viewed without a scientific lens.
“What I would urge—because I know a lot of you are staffers—urge the folks that you work for, the elected officials, to go on the ground, get in a classroom, spend one day or a couple of hours in an early childhood classroom, and watch that teacher. Watch every single move they make, every word that they share, every serve and return. It is all intentional, and it is hard work, and it’s exhausting,” Dr. Granillo said.
]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>Fight Continues Against AZ’s English-only Law</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/fight-continues-against-azs-english-only-law/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Vergara]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2024 13:32:34 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Early Childhood Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Arizona English Learners]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Arizona State Board of Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[multilingual learners]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Prop 203]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Proposition 203]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=55588</guid>
<description><![CDATA[UnidosUS began National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month in April requesting that the Arizona Board of Education address the adverse implications of the current attacks on English Language Learners. –Author Julienne […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[UnidosUS began National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month in April requesting that the Arizona Board of Education address the adverse implications of the current attacks on English Language Learners.
 –Author Julienne Gage is a former UnidosUS staff member and longtime contributor to the Progress Report blog.
April 30 marked the end of National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month, but UnidosUS’s longstanding efforts to celebrate the power of multilingualism continue, as does its fight against Arizona’s Proposition 203 (Prop. 203), the sole English-only law in the nation that is still standing. The organization stands firm in its belief that this policy is detrimental, reinforcing racial inequities and hindering both students and the broader Arizona community.
The state of Arizona has over 1.1 million students, 107 thousand of which speak a language other than English at home, and of those, 86.2% are Latino, according to data from the Arizona State Board of Education.
On April 4, UnidosUS <a href="https://unidosus.org/publications/letter-to-the-arizona-state-board-of-education/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sent a letter to the Arizona State Board of Educators</a> asking that the board denounce Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne’s yearlong efforts to obstruct multilingual learners (MLLs) in Arizona from accessing state-approved bilingual education programs, such as the 50-50 Dual-Language Immersion (DLI) model. Horne claims that, unlike their English-speaking peers, MLLs must be segregated from other students to learn in structured English immersion programs unless they have a burdensome waiver.
UnidosUS has found that since getting re-elected to the position in 2022, Horne has continuously attacked the educational opportunities of multilingual learners in Arizona, including orchestrating lawsuits alleging that dual-language programs, such as the 50-50 model, violate Prop. 203’s English-only mandate. 
“We are steadfast in our belief that educational policies should uplift every student, irrespective of their linguistic or cultural heritage,” the letter stated. “Prop 203 has proven detrimental to English Learners (ELs), limiting their English proficiency and widening academic disparities with their non-EL counterparts.”
UnidosUS has been calling out Prop. 203 since its enactment in 2000. In 2019, it led a near-successful bipartisan campaign to end it in the Arizona state legislature, which unanimously approved a bill to ease restrictions by reducing the mandatory four-hours of daily English immersion to two hours. It also put the Arizona State Board of Education in charge of identifying research-based English-instruction models for MLLs. The Arizona State Board of Education went on to approve four such models, including the 50-50 DLI one.
The issue reached a critical point in June 2023 when Horne threatened to cut English teaching funds to any schools using a DLI model, calling it unlawful and arguing that parents can sue to remove school board members or administrators who use it. 
Doubling down on his unjustified attacks on the educational opportunities of multilingual learners in Arizona, Horne said, “I want to emphasize that these rules only apply to students who have not yet attained proficiency in English…I personally have studied six languages. Knowing multiple languages is beneficial and develops the brain in ways that help learn other subjects.”
Attorney General Kris Mayes quickly refuted Horne’s threats, explaining that Horne was exercising authority outside his powers and that only the Arizona State School Board can decide if a school district isn’t complying with the law. 
“The Board has sole statutory authority to delete or modify an SEI (Structured English Immersion) model,” the AG wrote in a <a href="https://www.azag.gov/opinions/i23-005-r23-013" target="_blank" rel="noopener">formal opinion</a> that came in response to a request from Democratic legislators. “Neither the Department nor the Superintendent has statutory authority to reject an SEI model approved by the Board or to declare its illegality. Nor does the Superintendent or the Department have authority to withhold monies from school districts or otherwise impose consequences on schools for utilizing the Dual Language Model.”
In spite of that, on September 6, 2023, Horne filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court of Maricopa County, where there is a high population of EL students. The lawsuit named Hayes, Governor Katie Hobbs, and the Creighton School District east of Phoenix as defendants. 
While the judge was reviewing the case, the Arizona State Board of Education and Attorney General Hayes stated their commitment to upholding the revised guidelines for dual-language programs and reaffirmed their support for educational flexibility. 
Meanwhile, UnidosUS, in partnership with caretakers, educators, community-based organizations, and national bilingual education research and advocacy groups ramped up its advocacy for dual-language learning, touting bilingualism as a superpower that makes students better problem solvers and critical thinkers with strong social, and emotional and multicultural competencies, all of which can lead to a more competitive workforce and a compassionate society in an increasingly diverse nation and an interconnected world.
Many of those groups, including Aliento, All In Education, Arizona Community Foundation, Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, CPLC AF, Children’s Action Alliance, Stand for Children, Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), ONE Community, and Save Our Schools Arizona, also signed the April 4 letter. 
On March 8, the court issued a legal opinion stating that Horne was not in a position to act on his claims. 
“Simply put, no Arizona statute grants the Superintendent an open-ended general grant of authority to sue,” Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper wrote in her 14-page ruling. 
But Horne remained defiant, stating: “The districts that opposed our position will regret this development. A near identical action will be filed by a parent, and this will have much worse consequences for the districts.” 
True to his word, a few days later, Horne recruited a parent whose child attends school in the city of Scottsdale to file a lawsuit against the Creighton School District 10 miles away. 
“The day has come,” said Horne, whose wife, attorney Carmen Chenal Horne, represented the parent in the filing.
UnidosUS believes this latest lawsuit is symbolic of Horne’s desperation to make an unfounded and ill-intended case against multilingual programming. Rather than seeking to hold ELs back further, Superintendent Horne should focus on addressing pressing issues like academic recovery and the teacher shortage crisis so that students have the support and resources they need to succeed. 
“These actions disregard the proven benefits of this model and would deprive Latino students, which make up a significant portion of EL students in Arizona, and other MLLs across the state of equitable access to high-quality education and opportunities,” the April 4 letter stated, noting that “with a substantial body of evidence pointing to [Prop. 203’s] limitations, there is a pressing need for Arizona to transition towards comprehensive, research-endorsed instructional approaches.”
<h3>The importance of advocacy</h3>
Strict English-only education policies came into effect in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Massachusetts during the late 1990s and 2000s, just as the United States was seeing major growth in student diversity, especially among English learners. Through research and advocacy in the Latino community and beyond, UnidosUS has contributed to the successful repeal of these policies in all states but Arizona. 
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, the latest legislation guaranteeing an equal right to U.S. education in the U.S. school system, requires states to identify and provide targeted, comprehensive support for low-performing schools. A 2020 UnidosUS fact sheet noted that, on average, Arizona’s F-rated schools had a 63% Latino student population, while the Latino population in A-rated schools was just 27%. 
UnidosUS and its partners have found that DLI programs are effective in helping students learn English while developing fluency in another language and that DLI programs lead to higher academic outcomes in both languages. For example, a<a href="https://unidosus.org/publications/2028-arizona-latino-students-english-learners-fast-facts-2020/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> 2020 UnidosUS fact sheet </a>showed that, by 2013, with more than a decade of English-only Prop. 203 programming in place throughout Arizona, less than 8% of ELs in the state school system had met basic or above level reading in the fourth grade.
Ironically, Horne has not required students who speak English as a first language to obtain a waiver for participating in DLI programs. 
“We ardently believe that Arizona’s children deserve an education that acknowledges and elevates their diverse backgrounds, preparing them for a multicultural and global tomorrow,” the letter stated in its conclusion. “We urge the Board to solidify its dedication to this vision by endorsing dual-language programs and shunning policies that disadvantage our future leaders.” 
UnidosUS plans to continue working alongside Affiliates, partners, caretakers, and other stakeholders to advocate for and implement policies that better serve the needs of MLLs and all students in Arizona and prepare them to be part of a global society and not an isolated one. 
“We believe in the power of collaborative efforts to create an educational environment where we celebrate diversity and afford every student the chance to succeed,” the letter stated. 
]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>New rules protect Latino students affected by college closures</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/new-rules-protect-latino-students-affected-by-college-closures/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alessandra Cespedes]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:33:01 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Latino college student debt]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Latino students]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Student Debt]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=55153</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Education Department’s new institutional accountability rules also make it easier for students to get the information they need on funding, access to transcripts, and support for jobs Last fall, the […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Education Department’s new institutional accountability rules also make it easier for students to get the information they need on funding, access to transcripts, and support for jobs 
Last fall, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) published a series of regulatory reforms to strengthen outcomes for students in higher education. The first was a landmark <a href="https://unidosus.org/progress-report/combatting-predatory-inclusion-the-u-s-department-of-educations-new-gainful-employment-rule-holds-for-profit-institutions-of-higher-education-accountable-for-the-outcomes-of-latino-students/">Gainful Employment rule</a>, which holds institutions of higher education— especially for-profit ones— accountable for the financial and professional success of their students. A few weeks later, it was followed with a second package aimed at protecting students and taxpayers from sudden college closures, restricting the practice of withholding transcripts, and giving students more detailed information on financial aid, as well as more robust career services.
“Multiple studies show that a higher ed degree is still considered the best way to achieve greater career opportunities and financial advancement in the United States, but there are many barriers, and we’re hopeful these new rules will help to break them,” said UnidosUS Higher Education Policy Analyst Magin Sanchez. He noted that the GE rule was crucial for paving the way to the latter protections, and it came after 12 years of court proceedings and repeals. “This is great news for Latino students who have often struggled to get through and pay for their degrees.”
Since 2000, Latino enrollment has grown by 164%, but they are also among the populations who struggle hardest to complete and pay for those degrees. The new rules can help to improve this outlook by enhancing the career services capacity of colleges and universities, banning the blanket withholding of transcripts for students defaulting on their loan payments to those institutions, and improving financial transparency by making sure students are fully informed of all costs associated with the pursuit of these degrees.
 
Protecting Students Against Sudden College Closures 
Often left with high debt and poor outcomes, these regulations aim to provide students greater protection from the devastating effects of sudden college closures. Latino students are heavily impacted because of their high enrollment in private, for-profit colleges, where the largest number of such closures occur. Therefore, these protections are vital for Latino college students.
“Too many students have been abandoned by shady colleges that close their doors and leave borrowers with unaffordable debt and little hope of completing their educational journeys and embarking on rewarding careers,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in an October 24, 2023 <a href="https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/biden-harris-administration-releases-final-rules-strengthen-accountability-colleges-and-consumer-protection-students#:~:text=%E2%80%9CToo%20many%20students%20have%20been,Secretary%20of%20Education%20Miguel%20Cardona.">press release</a>.
These new regulations require schools exhibiting warning signs to have teach-out plans or agreements in place and a written plan that provides students with the reasonable opportunity to complete their studies elsewhere in the event of a closure.
<a href="https://sheeo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/SHEEO_CollegeClosures_Report3.pdf">A 2023 report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association</a> found that students who experienced an orderly closure, one with a teach-out plan and records retention, were positively correlated with enrollment and time to complete degrees.
“These rules will help ensure that students affected by low-performing schools aren’t forced to abandon their aspirations for higher education at no-fault of their own,” said UnidosUS Higher Education Policy Analyst Magin Sanchez.
 
Combatting the Practice of Transcript Withholding
Another major area of concern is that some institutions, especially for-profit colleges, have a history of withholding transcripts from students with unsettled debt, a practice the educational non-profit educational organization the Young Invincibles calls the “transcript trap.”
“Without access to their official transcript, students are not only unable to reenroll or transfer to another college — their credit is ruined, their total debt load also increases due to collection fees and interest, and they may even be sued,” explains the organization’s website.
Last year, the Young Invincibles collaborated with the Student Borrower Protection Center and the Community Service Society of New York to study a sample of 1,000 students in their state to better understand who is most impacted. The study revealed that in zip codes with the heaviest Latino populations, colleges withheld transcripts at a rate eight times higher than those with the fewest Latinos. The rates were ten times higher in zip codes with the highest Black populations.
“The minimal change to schools’ balance sheets does not justify the long-lasting harm to thousands of students,” the report stated.
About six million students have “stranded credits” due to transcript withholding, according to the research and consulting group <a href="https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/solving-stranded-credits/">Ithaka S+R</a>. UnidosUS has spent years advocating for their right to retrieve these documents.
In 2022, then UnidosUS Higher Education Senior Analyst Amanda Martinez served as the civil rights representative in the <a href="https://unidosus.org/progress-report/department-of-education-adds-unidosus-senior-education-policy-analyst-as-civil-rights-representative-for-higher-ed-policies/">negotiated rulemaking process</a>. At that time, she cited a Student Borrower Protection Center <a href="https://protectborrowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/SBPC-Mapping-Exploitation-Report.pdf">report</a> showing that there were twice as many for-profit institutions in zip codes with majority Latino populations. She also noted that during the pandemic, enrollment rates at for-profit institutions had gone up 3%, while other colleges and universities had seen an enrollment decline.
“This should really raise alarm and signal to those who are trying to advance racial equity and close gaps in the higher education system,” Martinez said. But she had also expressed hope that rule strengthening would help to curtail the damages of an unregulated market and restore the promise of the nation’s Higher Education Act.
“It was a civil rights law built on the idea that education is essential to all Americans… But in an unregulated market, that promise is being broken by one specific sector: for-profits,” she said.
“These regulations are a meaningful step towards ending what the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] CFPB deemed an abusive practice that has had dire effects on Latino and other students of color. We are glad the department went beyond its original proposed language to provide such broader protections for students”, said .
 
Improving Information on Financial Aid Packages
These rules also provide Latinos with a more detailed understanding of the financial aid process so that they have a clearer sense of what they will owe and also what opportunities there are to get grant-based funding.
“Many Latinos, like myself, are first-generation college students who don’t have other family members going through the college and financial aid process, so they’re not as well-versed in filling out financial aid forms, learning about scholarships, or considering hidden costs and fees associated with obtaining their degree,” explained Sanchez.
These realities are reflected in data collected by <a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/financingstudent_loans_brief_32519.pdf">a 2019 </a><a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/financingstudent_loans_brief_32519.pdf">UnidosUS</a><a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/financingstudent_loans_brief_32519.pdf"> statistical brief</a>, which found that in 2016, a majority of Latinos (64%) received a Pell Grant, and 74% applied for financial aid. However, fewer Latinos received institutional aid than their white peers. At four-year public institutions, 26% of Latino students received an award, compared to 31% of white students. At four-year private institutions, 48% of Latino students received an award, compared to 60% of white students.
According to <a href="https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-104708">2022 findings by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)</a>, 91% of colleges either do not include or understate net price, the actual amount a student needs to pay after subtracting grant and scholarship aid in their aid offers; 41% of college do not include a net price, leaving students guessing how much they need to pay; and 50% understate the net price by excluding key costs and/or factoring in loans.
To make matters worse, many financial aid notification letters refer to loans as “awards,” making it seem to some students and parents that the money is a grant or a scholarship. In her role as a civil rights representative, Martinez advocated for referring to any money provided in the form of loans as exactly that, and the new rules reflect these changes in language.
At the same time, the rules prohibit the employment of individuals with a risky history with financial student aid management.
“Students should receive accurate financial aid offers that clearly state the money they must repay. These regulations eliminate a key barrier affecting positive outcomes for first-generation students,” said Sanchez.
 
Career Services Capacity Building 
Finally, the new rules should help Latinos prepare better for the job market while they are still in school. showed that internships were one of the most effective tools for career readiness. In fact, the study noted that Black and Hispanic computer science graduates were much more likely to get well-paying jobs if they had such internships on their résumés.
Still, a 2023 report by the education research foundation Strada found that only <a href="https://stradaeducation.org/report/from-college-to-career-students-internship-expectations-and-experiences/">39% of Latinos had gotten an internship by senior year</a>, compared to 54% of white students.
UnidosUS’s education team is not surprised. Studies show that <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-uneven-climb-from-college-to-career">students with at least one parent who went to college</a> are more likely to seek out and take on an internship, but UnidosUS’s data shows that <a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/enrollment_completion_brief.pdf">70% of Latino college students are first-generation</a>.
The new rules address these gaps by requiring that higher education institutions have sufficient career services staff who are well-equipped to identify on-the-job opportunities.
“The success of students is impacted by the capability of institutions to provide a quality education free from abusive and deceptive practices that ultimately impact such students. These strengthened accountability rules for colleges and consumer protection rights will help ensure an equitable higher education system for all” said Sanchez.
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<title>Public Service Loan Forgiveness Works for Thousands – Hear from UnidosUS Staffers</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/public-service-loan-forgiveness-works-for-thousands-hear-from-unidosus-staffers/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alessandra Cespedes]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2024 16:59:28 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Higher Ed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Higher Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Public Service Loan Forgiveness]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Student Loans]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=55067</guid>
<description><![CDATA[On Monday, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a new round of relief for student borrowers, and some of its measures could alleviate a lot of financial and emotional stressors for thousands […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[On Monday, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a new round of relief for student borrowers, and some of its measures could alleviate a lot of financial and emotional stressors for thousands of Latinos who have dedicated their careers to public service. There are many, even ones working in the UnidosUS Familia network, who probably qualified for the U.S. government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, an initiative developed under the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007. Many spent years waiting for approval, and one of the administration’s measures was to approve a larger volume of cases and discharge those loans as quickly as possible.
Measures like these help to mitigate the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 2023 ruling that struck down President Biden’s executive order on student debt forgiveness. Millions of individuals who had pinned their hopes of debt relief on this decision were devastated.
“The plan would have cleared the debt of half of Latino student borrowers, many of whom face mountains of educational debt,” said UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguía in a <a href="https://unidosus.org/press-releases/unidosus-deplores-short-sighted-supreme-court-ruling-on-student-debt-relief/">statement</a>. “We call on the administration and Congress to respond to this decision by taking immediate steps to provide meaningful debt relief for lower-income borrowers.”
In spite of this blow, the Biden-Harris Administration has been steadfast in its efforts to continue chipping away at the student debt crisis.
Under this administration, 872,000 borrowers have been relieved of $62.5 billion through the PSLF program, compared to only 7,000 who had been approved throughout previous administrations.
News of these changes was music to the ears of UnidosUS staffers who have spent years advocating for them. Two UnidosUS policy team members experienced that relief even more personally when their own PSLF applications were finally approved.
 
UnidosUS Staffers Share Their PSLF Experiences 
In the mid-2000s, Esmeralda Lopez, a government affairs strategist who now serves as UnidosUS’s California state director, decided to attend law school to work in social justice and help make laws more equitable for all. The initial loan amount was not $100,000, but it grew over time with increasing interest rates and an inability to pay more than the minimum. As she graduated and moved into the workforce, the road to repayment would be much longer than she anticipated.
“I was expecting to pay the loans with the salary from my job, but my salary, combined with growing interest rates, was not enough to pay the loans off,” she told ProgressReport.co.
Luckily, she began making payments after the U.S. government began PSLF, and while it took a decade of minimal payments, her debt was wiped clean in 2023.
Under PSLF, the federal government will forgive the remaining balance on a borrower’s direct loans if they’ve made the equivalent of 120 qualifying monthly payments under an accepted repayment plan while working full-time for an eligible employer. Those employers include U.S. government organizations at any level as well as non-profit organizations focused on public services such as health, education, emergency management, law enforcement, and military personnel.
Lopez and other UnidosUS staff who have benefited from the program want to make sure that borrowers working in public service know about it and enroll. While obtaining loan forgiveness through this system can be complex and time consuming, recent adjustments have made it easier than when Lopez first signed on. For years, student borrowers who tried to access PSLF had to contend with a confusing application system, loan servicers who provided inaccurate information, challenges with tracking down former employers for verification, and not having the types of loans that were eligible under the program.
“I’d known about the PSLF program since 2009, however, the strict rules on which payment plans qualified for the program, and the lenders not giving clear information, as well as the stories I began hearing of people applying and not having their loans forgiven made it feel like PSLF wasn’t a viable option for me,” said Lopez.
In fact, it wasn’t until she joined UnidosUS in 2021 that she began to see a way forward through that program. That’s where she got a close-up look at the changes to PSLF that UnidosUS was pushing the government to implement. They included a temporary waiver that allowed borrowers who had previously been denied the opportunity to reapply and have their applications reconsidered. The organization also hosted informational webinars for staff and affiliates and partnered with Savi, a social impact technology startup founded by student loan experts and advocates, to provide technical assistance at no cost to staff. At the same time, Lopez started hearing PSLF stories from former law school classmates who had also chosen the public service career track.
UnidosUS Education Policy Project Director Amalia Chamorro had a similar experience. She took out loans for a BA in political science and then even more loans for law school, accumulating $120,000 after seven years of post-secondary education. At that time, it felt doable. Like Lopez, she knew she was more interested in using her law degree in public service than in a law firm, but both still figured those degrees would make it easier to find stable, well-paid public service jobs.
As it turned out, geopolitics and the world economy that responds to it would significantly delay her prospects for following her social justice passions.
“I graduated in the spring of 2002 when the economic fallout of 9/11 was impacting the job market, and it was a struggle to find a job right away,” she recalled. “Typically, over 80% of my school’s class had a job lined up when they graduated (it’s in the 90 percentile now), but that year, only about half of my classmates had secured employment.”
Like Lopez, Chamorro heard about the program around the time that it launched in 2008. But at that time, she was working for a business association.
“It wasn’t until I started working for United Way in 2012 that I could start the 10-year clock working for a nonprofit. I sent in my application and waited to hear back,” she explained, but even then, the rules of engagement were far from clear. “ The response I received was that I didn’t have the type of loan that was eligible under PSLF, but the letter also didn’t tell me what types of loans were eligible or what I would need to do to rectify the situation. I was so let down that I put the whole thing to the side for a while.”
While Chamorro made a seamless non-profit career move from United Way to UnidosUS in 2018, it wasn’t until the topic of PSLF became part of her work that she was fully able to navigate the process. In 2020, the Biden Administration announced a limited-time waiver to reapply for those who had been previously denied, so UnidosUS partnered with Savi to facilitate staff instructional sessions and individual support. Chamorro gained greater knowledge of the program as she helped provide the webinars and began registering for webinars in which Department of Education officials walked hopeful applicants through the waiver process.
These webinars provided her a platform for asking questions, and the momentum of these programs also created the circumstances for Chamorro to discuss and learn about the process through friends and colleagues who were also taking advantage of the temporary waiver.
“Honestly it was talking to people who were going through a similar experience that helped to motivate me to keep trying,” she said.
 
PSLF Resources for Facilitating the Process 
It’s through these success stories of loan forgiveness that many other borrowers keep the motivation to stick with the program, says UnidosUS’s education policy team. That’s because the program sometimes requires multiple rounds of submissions.
“It is definitely a tedious process,” said Lopez, noting that it requires a lot of research, reading, and conversation. But there are certainly steps that others can glean from what she did:
<ul style="text-align: left">
<li>Read everything about PSFL available on studentaid.gov. This includes the <a href="https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/public-service">rules, FAQs, and resources</a> on the program.</li>
<li>Ask if your public service employer offers resources or support to navigate PSLF or ask them to provide opportunities to learn more about the program like hosting a webinar for staff.</li>
<li>Reach out to colleagues in the public sector whom you know or believe may have gone through the program and ask for tips or even assistance on the application if you get stuck.</li>
</ul>
Advocates of PSLF recommend that individuals start the application process early in their public sector career and obtain their employer verification while they’re still employed by the institution.
“Getting my past employers to complete the information was the biggest challenge because they had to send me the completed form, then I had to mail it in,” Lopez said. Plus, she says she had to send all of her documentation through regular mail, rather than digitizing and uploading the information. The process is now easier with the <a href="https://studentaid.gov/pslf/">PSLF Help Tool</a>, which provides a one-stop-shop to search for a qualifying employer, learn what actions you may need to take to become eligible for PSLF, and generate a PSLF form. There is now only a single form that an applicant needs to complete to certify employment or to receive PSLF.
 
Getting PSLF Done and Getting on With Life
Lopez says the entire documentation and submission process took her about seven month. Though that might seem like a long time, Lopez considers it worth it when she compares that time to the 16 years she paid on those loans.
“I was stunned at first because until my loans were forgiven, I was skeptical I would qualify because I had been misinformed by student loan lenders in the past about how many qualifying payments I made,” Lopez said, noting that when she got the news last May, she texted friends and family and even called her mother to make sure she wasn’t just imagining the news of her forgiven loan balance. “It took some time for me to wrap my mind around the fact that I was no longer shackled with the student loan debt.”
Charmorro, who reapplied for PSLF in October of 2022, also found out in the fall of 2023 that her loans were forgiven, generating the same reaction as Lopez.
“I was in shock because I went to log in to my account to see about repayment since the payment pause had ended and payments were resuming [in] October 2023. I could not believe my eyes when I saw that my balance was 0. I shouted to my husband to come look and make sure I wasn’t mistaken, and I literally did a happy dance,” Chamorro recalled.
In the months since she received the good news, Lopez has felt a much greater sense of calm and hope for her future, even in an uncertain economy fraught with inflation.
The PSLF news, she says, “means I can save more to buy a house and increase my savings for retirement.”
Charmorro already owns a house with her husband, but she’s elated at what this will mean for her more distant future.
“I can actually think about retiring one day after years of hard work. The Biden-Harris administration has taken significant action to address student borrower issues in various ways, and while there is more work to do, I can personally attest to these actions making a real difference in people’s lives,” she said. “It sure helps to know that after working in public service for 10 years and paying back your loans during that time, that public sector employees are acknowledged and appreciated for our service.”
 
 –Author Julienne Gage is a former UnidosUS staff member and longtime contributor to ProgressReport.co. 
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<title>The new and improved FAFSA has proven to be anything but that up to now. Here’s how to deal while the government works out its kinks.</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/the-new-and-improved-fafsa-has-proven-to-be-anything-but-that-up-to-now-heres-how-to-deal-while-the-government-works-out-its-kinks/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Vergara]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 27 Feb 2024 16:05:49 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Higher Ed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[FAFSA]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Higher Education]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=54259</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Last year, Oklahoma educator Manuel Medina was excited to learn that the U.S. government would be revamping its Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The old form, the one […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Last year, Oklahoma educator Manuel Medina was excited to learn that the U.S. government would be revamping its Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The old form, the one he used to apply for his own financial aid in college, was long and cumbersome. This new form would streamline the way he engages the students in his college and career readiness class, many of whom are first generation or come from homes where their parents are undocumented.
– Author Julienne Gage is a former UnidosUS Senior Web Content Manager who now serves the organization as a consultant.
That was his hope anyway. By the time the online form went live in early January, it was already three months behind its expected schedule, and even then the government was working out glitches that left millions of applicants with online black outs or waiting for help on the site’s chat. Plus, some mixed-status families have expressed concern that the new form requires people without Social Security Numbers to go through a separate online process to receive identity verification for their parents to obtain an FSA ID, of which many students are simply unable to complete due to technical errors. As such, students must go through yet another process to validate their parents’ identity, starting with contacting a call-center to simply receive a case number.
Then, on January 23 came an even bigger glitch. That’s the day the U.S. Department of Education acknowledged it needed to make adjustments for inflation so that it wouldn’t cost students and their families an additional $1.8 billion. The student aid calculations in the new forms do not currently reflect the high inflation that families have been experiencing. Without that fix, many applicants would get a lesser award, but the fix added to the delay in sending FAFSA information to universities—meaning that school officials won’t receive the information they need until March. This has a domino effect that will cause delays at each institution’s financial aid departments and can jeopardize scholarships for students that use the information from the FAFSA as a benchmark for awards.
“Who knows how many students are going to slip through,” Medina added, noting that these delays and requirements may stop or at least deter many from following through with this year’s college plans. 
Had students been able to start filling out the FAFSA in October when they were applying for college, they might have gotten their financial aid offers along with their acceptance letters so that they could make informed decisions about their college choice. In January, less than a million high school seniors had filed an application, a nearly 45% drop in applicants from this time last year, according to <a href="https://www.ncan.org/page/FAFSAtracker" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> the National College Attainment Network</a>. As of mid-February, the Department of Education had about five million FAFSA filings overall, which is half of its usual amount. Communities with a high percentage of low-income and students of color have seen the worst drops, at 54% and 53% respectively. That has created a log jam for both the government and the nearly 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities developing the financial aid offers. It’s also a direct contradiction to what the Department of Education promised in a <a href="https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/library/electronic-announcements/2023-12-15/2024-25-fafsa-soft-launch-details-and-timelines-updated-jan-11-2024" target="_blank" rel="noopener">statement from December 15</a>.
“Students and families will have ample time to complete the 2024-2025 FAFSA, and do not need to rush to fill out the form immediately when the soft launch period opens,” it read. 
On February 21, the Department promised a permanent fix to the errors affecting mixed-status families by the first-half in March. In the meantime, a <a href="https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/fafsa-support/contributor-social-security-number" target="_blank" rel="noopener">temporary workaround </a>has been provided for students that must have an earlier submission date to be eligible for critical state or institutional scholarships. The Department of Education cautions however, only those whose deadlines come before the availability of the permanent fix should use the workaround, as they’ll be required to make corrections to fully complete the FAFSA once such ability becomes available. Furthermore, the Department announced that by the end of February, such students unable to complete the online verification of their parents identity will automatically receive a case number, reducing the need to rely on backed-up call centers.
<h3>How Latinos are disproportionately impacted</h3>
These hurdles may prove especially difficult for Latino students. According to <a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/financingstudent_loans_brief_32519.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a 2019 UnidosUS fact sheet</a>, Latino student enrollment has been on the rise since 2000, and as of 2016, 74% of them were applying for financial aid.<a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/unidosus_nationalhighereducation_factsheet.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> A 2020 UnidosUS fact sheet</a> notes that an estimated 70%of Latino students are first-generation college goers. A <a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/unidosus_beyondtheborder_executivesummary.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2019 UnidosUS executive summary on immigration</a> estimates that between 4.1 and and 5.7 million U.S.-citizen children live with an undocumented parent. There are an estimated<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-weighs-fate-daca-700000-young-immigrants/story?id=66864639" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> 700,000</a> people protected under the DACA program, but their parents are not. And then there’s the question of how last year’s Supreme Court decision to gut affirmative action will impact the acceptance rate for Latinos at selective universities.
“While we applaud the effort to streamline a notoriously difficult application for federal financial aid, we are concerned that these combined factors may significantly lower enrollment rates for historically underserved students,” said UnidosUS Higher Education Policy Analyst Magin Sanchez. 
<h3>Better FAFSA, better funding? </h3>
With the new FAFSA, applicants must identify both primary and secondary contributors, and the form recommends citing the main contributor as the one making the most income. This has become a point of contention for many applicants because that person may not actually live with the applicant or be contributing to their education. At the same time, the new FAFSA does not account, as it did in the past, for other siblings for whom caregivers would be providing for on that income.
A few weeks prior to announcing the decision to adjust for inflation, the Department of Education instructional site suggested that applicants “contact the school where you plan to attend and explain and document the change in income.” 
While cumbersome, students with deadlines for scholarships that require FAFSA may want to do just that, UnidosUS’s education team says. 
All of these factors are expected to shorten the time students will have to decide which school they want to attend or can afford to go to, or whether it’s even feasible to go this year, since most schools require students to make a decision about an admission offer by early May. In response to such shortened deadlines, some schools have delayed their decision day, a practice that UnidosUS encourages all institutions to do to ensure equitable admissions amidst the current delays facing students.
<h3>Troubleshooting this year’s form and the financial aid process </h3>
Medina says it’s not that there weren’t delays before the new FAFSA, it’s just that they’ve never been as big, plentiful, or far reaching as they are now. 
“Last year (2022) I worked with some students who applied for FAFSA in October, November, and December, and it took a while for their aid to get processed. They might have been selected to be one of the students who had to get verified, or they might (have needed) to send in additional documentation. This delayed their decisions because they were waiting to see which school could offer the most aid,” he said, adding that it can also impact their applications to other grants and scholarships.
While the U.S. government figures out how to rectify the roadblocks to what was supposed to be a quicker, easier, FAFSA, Medina suggested students, families, educators, and advocates revisit some of the methods he learned when he was a student enrolled in the U.S. government’s official college readiness support program TRIO. They’re lessons he used for himself but also shared with others. Before becoming a college and career readiness teacher, he spent his high school and college years volunteering to help his peers fill out their FAFSAs, a technique that can be beneficial to all involved.
He says applicants should consider tapping into those exact programs, which often hold FAFSA nights, and if you can’t find a program or event like that in your area, create one. It’s easier to fill out the FAFSA in a group setting where everyone can pitch in to figure it out. It also helps to reach out to college and career readiness teachers in the area, and contact the financial aid offices of the institutions students hope to attend. 
In mid-February, the Department of Education offered $50 million to help under-sourced non-profit schools strengthen their financial aid services with the new FAFSA. The department expects to administer those funds to the Education Credit Management Corporation. From there, the funds are to be given to at least two non-profit organizations. The first two are the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and the Partnership for Education Advancement, which would help to hire and train financial aid professionals for the purpose of getting these institutions up to speed. The department is looking into providing funding for NASFAA and ED Advancement, both institutions that serve underserved communities.
Medina has always encouraged students to apply to institutions in their region, especially community colleges, which have a reputation for readily lending this type of support, and that might be a good option for students caught up in the uncertainty of the current financial aid debacle.
“As a teacher, I would have my students fill out applications for local colleges because you never know,” said Medina, noting that even in years when the FAFSA process isn’t so delayed, “life happens.” 
When Congress passed the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hr133/BILLS-116hr133enr.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">FAFSA Simplification Act on Dec. 27, 2020, the bipartisan effort </a>represented a significant overhaul of the federal student aid system. UnidosUS had hoped for a smoother rollout of the new FAFSA and is now urging the U.S. Department of Education to fix the problems as quickly as possible.
“No doubt this has been a clunky rollout, but we also cannot lose sight of the potential of the new FAFSA to streamline the application process, expand access to financial aid, and improve the user experience over the long term,” says UnidosUS Education Policy Project Director Amalia Chamorro. “The form actually reduced the number of questions from <a href="https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-releases-new-data-highlighting-how-simplified-streamlined-and-redesigned-better-fafsa%C2%AE-form-will-help-deliver-maximum-pell-grants-15-million-more-students" target="_blank" rel="noopener">103 to as little as 18 questions</a>, and it increased the number of students who are eligible for Pell grants by 200,000. These are not minor improvements and should not be overlooked.”
“This year’s FAFSA process raises many concerns, but we at UnidosUS are just as invested in the implementation of the new FAFSA as we were in advocating for its passage. We are closely monitoring this issue as it unfolds and will continue to inform the Latino community to ensure that they are able to navigate the financial aid process successfully in school years to come.” As the department works toward permanent fixes and new information becomes available, UnidosUS will continue to keep its Network informed on the latest developments.
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<title>Combatting Predatory Inclusion: the U.S. Department of Education’s new Gainful Employment rule holds for-profit institutions of higher education accountable for the outcomes of Latino students</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/combatting-predatory-inclusion-the-u-s-department-of-educations-new-gainful-employment-rule-holds-for-profit-institutions-of-higher-education-accountable-for-the-outcomes-of-latino-students/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Vergara]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jan 2024 15:53:27 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Higher Ed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Progress Report]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[gainful employment rule]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Higher Education]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=53887</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In the mid-2000s Chicago resident Victoria De La Torre wanted to increase her earnings and prestige as a pastry chef by going back to school for an associates degree in […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[In the mid-2000s Chicago resident Victoria De La Torre wanted to increase her earnings and prestige as a pastry chef by going back to school for an associates degree in Applied Science. Le Cordon Bleu of North America, a for-profit culinary institute, originally affiliated with a famed culinary school of the same name, looked like a great place to do that. 
–Author Magin Sanchez serves as UnidosUS’s higher education policy analyst. 
“Initially drawn to culinary school to pursue my passion for baking, I chose Le Cordon Bleu, expecting the best,” said de La Torre. “Despite promises of a career jumpstart, the reality was that I earned the same as those without culinary school. The school’s open house misled me about job opportunities, and I faced stigma for attending a seemingly pointless institution.”
<a href="https://www.eater.com/2018/2/6/16980378/le-cordon-bleu-culinary-school-lawsuit-settlement" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Like thousands of fellow students</a> who attended Le Cordon Bleu’s 16 U.S.culinary schools, Victoria felt misled by the promises made by the institution. “The touted success stories were outliers,” said De La Torre.“Staff assured me of high future earnings to easily cover tuition, but this wasn’t the case.” Worse, in addition to low earnings, students like de La Torre were left with significant debt burdens. “Ten years post-graduation, I still owe $15,000, even after years of attempted debt repayment.”
It turned out that in 2008, a large number of graduates of Le Cordon Bleu North America, 2,200 to be exact, filed <a href="https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-culinary-students-getting-tuition-money-back-after-lawsuit/283-515118349" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a class-action suit </a>for similar complaints. In 2015, the Chicago-based for-profit Career Education Corporation that licensed the Le Cordon Bleu name, opted to close <a href="https://www.eater.com/2018/2/6/16980378/le-cordon-bleu-culinary-school-lawsuit-settlement" target="_blank" rel="noopener">all of its 16 U.S, schools,</a> citing the introduction of a 2014 federal education policy known as the gainful employment rule which resulted in their loss of federal financial aid.
Scenarios like these are common in reports by non-profit educational research organizations such as<a href="https://tcf.org/content/report/students-funneled-profit-colleges/"> The Century Foundation</a>, which have spent the past few years looking into the impact and credibility of for-profit higher education institutions. 
Over the past several decades, <a href="https://tcf.org/content/report/students-funneled-profit-colleges/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tens of thousands of students</a> have chased their higher-education dreams through a proliferation of for-profit programs only to discover a mirage. Multiple studies have shown that for-profit institutions often leave students, especially those who are first-generation and hailing from underserved communities, with<a href="https://www.nasfaa.org/news-item/31544/Untangling_Gainful_Employment_Mapping_a_Path_Toward_Accountability_in_Higher_Education" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> lower earnings and higher debt burdens</a> than those in similar programs in public or non-profit institutions.
A <a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/unidosus_nationalhighereducation_factsheet.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2020 UnidosUS factsheet </a>noted that only 29% of Latinos enrolled in four-year for-profit colleges graduate. Worse yet, more than 76% of such enrolled students took out loans to pay for their education, and were nearly four times as likely to default within 12 years compared to Latinos who attended other institutions. Furthermore, compared to public institutions, <a href="https://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/education/Gainful-Employment-Brief-Final.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">students borrowed $10,000 more in loans</a> when attending for-profit institutions.
As a result, some educational advocates have labeled these for-profit practices <a href="https://protectborrowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/SBPC-Mapping-Exploitation-Report.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">predatory inclusion</a>, and the Biden administration has a plan aimed at combating it. 
This past October, the Department of Education (ED) issued <a href="https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/biden-harris-administration-announces-landmark-final-rules-protect-consumers-unaffordable-student-debt-and-increase-transparency" target="_blank" rel="noopener">new final regulations</a> with the aim of holding higher education institutions accountable for fulfilling their promises of opening the door to economic and social mobility. Tasked with providing students with protections against unaffordable debt or no improvement to their earnings, the newly revitalized Gainful Employment (GE) rule should have life-changing impacts for Latino students. Students who transfer away from failing programs to nearby, higher-value programs could see a near<a href="https://tcf.org/content/report/for-profit-colleges-say-the-gainful-employment-rule-will-kill-access-dont-believe-them/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> $10,000 increase</a> in annual earnings and<a href="https://tcf.org/content/report/for-profit-colleges-say-the-gainful-employment-rule-will-kill-access-dont-believe-them/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> a $1,000 reduction</a> in annual debt payments, drastically improving the economic conditions for many Latino students.
First conceived during the Obama administration in 2011,<a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-tortured-path-of-the-gainful-employment-rule/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> implementation of GE has been a long road fraught with potholes and roadblocks. </a>Based on a provision in the Higher Education Act requiring that non-degree career education programs lead to “gainful employment in a recognized occupation,” the rule established the standard that graduates must leave such programs prepared for well-paying jobs.
In the 12 years since, the rule has been struck down in federal court, reinstated by ED,<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/business/student-loans-for-profit-schools-colleges.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> illegally derailed</a>, and ultimately repealed by the Trump administration, and has now been reinstated and strengthened by the Biden administration. 
This latest version goes into effect July 2024, and includes two metrics GE programs must pass in order to remain eligible to receive federal student aid funding, the lifeblood of the for-profit industry. First, programs must pass the debt-to-earnings metric, where debt payments must be no more than 8% of annual earnings or 20% of discretionary earnings for a single individual. Second, programs must pass the earnings premium metric, ensuring that the median graduate earns more than the median early-career high-school graduate in their state. Institutions that fail to pass either or both metrics in two out of three years will lose their federal funding for those programs.
Such protections are crucial, considering the increasing targeted recruitment of Latinos by for-profit colleges. A <a href="https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/researchcenter/viz/Spring23SIDashboard/Spring2023StayInformed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Spring 2023 report</a> by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center showed that in the last two years, <a href="https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/researchcenter/viz/Spring23SIDashboard/Spring2023StayInformed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Latino undergraduate enrollment at for-profit schools was increasing faster than at other higher education institutions</a>. Last year, for-profit schools were seeing nearly an 11% growth rate compared to negative growth seen in public four-year and two-year schools.
Ensuring that college graduates can afford to repay their debts and earn more than those with high school diplomas seems like common sense, but ED estimates that such outcomes are anything but common for Latino students attending for-profit colleges. 
According to the Department’s projections, <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2021/gainful-employment-notice-of-final-review-factsheet.pdf?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">over 90% of students</a> in a failing GE program would be attending a for-profit institution. While these numbers are staggering, they come as no surprise to UnidosUS. Under the previous version of the regulation in 2014, 166,000 Latino and Black students were enrolled in for-profit institutions ED considered to be failing or about to in the 2019-20 school year, representing nearly<a href="https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/search/viewtable?tableId=28440" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> one out of every three</a> of such students. Disproportionately, <a href="https://ticas.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Gainful-Employment-Using-Data-to-Examine-Potential-Effects-of-a-HS-Earnings-Threshold.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">failing for-profit programs enroll Latino and black students at higher rates.</a>
And despite the for-profit industry’s claims that closing their programs would adversely affect students in these communities, <a href="https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/new-data-msis-gainful-employment/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a recent ED data analysis</a> by the education think tank New America revealed that Hispanic-Serving Institutions were much less likely to fail the rule than their for-profit industry counterparts. This finding flies in the face of the argument that institutions serving underserved student groups would fail because of the systemic challenges facing the demographics of the students they enroll, such as discrepancies in salary according to race and gender. <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2021/gainful-employment-and-transparency-fact-sheet.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A 2021 ED fact sheet</a> noted that factors such as race and gender explained “relatively little” of whether a program passed or failed the GE rule. Rather, blame should fall on the shortcomings of for-profit schools, where more than half have at least one program that did not meet the GE standards.
Reflecting back, Victoria says she regrets not researching more. 
“My advice to prospective students is to inquire and not succumb to pressure during open houses,” she said, noting that a decade after obtaining her associates degree, she was still making minimum wage. These new regulations will ensure future students know about an institution’s poor outcomes before finishing their applications because they must formally acknowledge that they have viewed these disclosures before enrolling and accepting financial aid.
While UnidosUS sees this newly finalized rule as a major milestone, it also cautions that the rule has shortcomings. For example, it fails to capture data on debts taken in the form of ParentPLUS loans taken out by parents, but are often absorbed by the student. This omission is particularly concerning for Latino students, whose use of such loans has increased by 50% since the mid-1990s, according to a <a href="https://tcf.org/content/report/parent-plus-borrowers-the-hidden-casualties-of-the-student-debt-crisis/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2022 report by The Century Foundation</a>. This report also shows that disproportionately low-income Black and Latino families are more likely than low-income white families to take on debt through this program.
The new GE rule comes as a package deal with other new financial transparency <a href="https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/biden-harris-administration-releases-final-rules-strengthen-accountability-colleges-and-consumer-protection-students" target="_blank" rel="noopener">regulations</a> aimed at streamlining financial aid offers so that students are well-informed of the terms, such as the difference between a grant and a loan. It also seeks to curtail the practice of withholding transcripts paid for with federal money for students who have yet to settle remaining unpaid bills such as <a href="https://protectborrowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Creditor-Colleges.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">parking fees and remaining tuition balances</a>.
These are all positions for which UnidosUS has long advocated, and its education team will be closely following to see if these measures are implemented by the July 1 deadline. 
On December 22nd, the Texas-based for-profit institution Duvall’s School of Cosmetology and the American Association of Cosmetology Schools filed the new rule’s first lawsuit.
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<title>UnidosUS’s new online higher-education hub offers a one-stop shop for Latinx resources</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/unidosuss-new-online-higher-education-hub-offers-a-one-stop-shop-for-latinx-resources/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Vergara]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jan 2024 14:54:22 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Higher Ed]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Higher Education]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=53498</guid>
<description><![CDATA[UnidosUS has just launched a new higher-education resource hub where policymakers, advocates, and the general public can readily access information to engage in key issues around Latinx postsecondary enrollment, college […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[UnidosUS has just launched a <a href="https://unidosus.org/higher-ed/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">new higher-education resource hub</a> where policymakers, advocates, and the general public can readily access information to engage in key issues around Latinx postsecondary enrollment, college retention and completion, and student debt.
<div class="has-ctas ctas-rt p"><a href="https://unidosus.org/higher-ed/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Higher Education Resource Hub</a></div>
It comes with more than just easy-to-view facts and figures, uplifting the voices of Latinx students who share their stories. An emotive video published on the hub shows that obtaining a higher education degree is a dream for entire Latinx families since many parents of prospective students didn’t have the logistical or economic circumstances to go themselves. 
“It would definitely be my parents and my grandparents. They weren’t able to attend college and my grandparents only attended middle school,” noted a Latinx student named Kate who appears in a Latino Stories video at the top of the webpage. “So when I go to college, it’s not only my dreams, but their dreams too.” 
Other students in the video testimonials discuss the challenge of attending the U.S. school system while learning English as a second language, studying while working to contribute to their families’ household earnings and experiencing a sense of shame over not having the same access to information and resources for attending college as their more privileged classmates. 
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say that it’s going to be an easy transition,” said another Latinx student named Lauren. “Have a community of people who can really help you transition into college and not feel that feeling of isolation.” 
UnidosUS created this hub of online resources as part of its longstanding mission of advancing post-secondary education so that more Latinos have the tools to thrive in accessing career paths which can, in turn, provide Latinx families with dreams like home buying, child-rearing and retirement, and in many cases, greater opportunities for influencing the public policies that impact their communities. As it stands, between 2000 and 2020, Latinx students in the United States experienced a 164% increase in higher education enrollment, but getting to and through college is still a challenge.
<h3>Latinx Student Enrollment</h3>
Advocating for Latino students begins with understanding more about their particular enrollment experience, which differs greatly from their white, non-Latinx counterparts. For starters, they generally begin college later (average age 25), and they are far more likely than their white peers to be the first to attend college, at 70% compared to 45% respectively. About 60% of them receive Pell grants to fund their education, and while women make up more than half of college enrollment in white and Latinx student populations, the rate is especially high for Latinas: 60% for their demographic compared to 56% for white women. Within the Latinx or Hispanic community, most students are U.S. citizens claiming Mexican/Chicano or Puerto Rican heritage. Just under half a million students are undocumented, and of those, about half (48.5%) are Latino.
Latinx students are heavily represented in public and for-profit institutions, and many of them begin their degrees at two-year institutions, which analysts believe is due to the financial and logistical needs of a demographic of students. 
“Because many Latinx students may be the first in their families to go to college and make decisions on when and where to enroll based on their family’s economic situation, it is not uncommon for them to delay enrollment in college, attend school part-time, and work one or more jobs while studying.,” explained UnidosUS Education Policy Project Director Amalia Chamorro. “This is why it’s important not just to focus on increasing their college enrollment but to ensure that they have the systemic and institutional supports to stay in college and complete their degrees.”
<h3>Latinx Student Retention & Enrollment </h3>
While it is true that Latinx enrollment has been on a tremendous upswing for more than two decades, six years after entering college in 2015, an estimated 51% of Latinx students had completed degrees compared to 69% of white students—a completion gap of more than 18 points. 
Researching, applying for and choosing the right schools and programs with the strongest financial assistance and flexibility for attaining a degree is a complex process, and it all factors into students’ ability to stay the course in their programs. 
“Me being the first one in my family, there was not a lot of guidance. I had to figure out everything and try to translate that for my parents. It was complicated, choosing a university I wish I had help to… really think through it,” noted a student in Minnesota quoted in the UnidosUS higher education report <a href="https://unidosus.org/publications/2078-following-their-dreams-in-an-inequitable-system-latino-students-share-their-college-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Following Their Dreams in an Inequitable System</a>.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, say UnidosUS’s education experts. The hub’s data also shows that just 37% of Latinx adults aged 25 to 29 had associate’s degrees compared to 56% of white adults in the same age bracket, and when it comes to the BA challenge, those numbers dwindle to just 25% of Latinx adults compared to 45% of white adults. 
<h3>Latinx Student Debt</h3>
Whether Latinx students graduate or not, they often accumulate extensive debt given that so many come from families with limited economic means. In fact, the data presented in the hub shows that at least 5.6 million Latinos hold federal student loan debt, with 67% of Latinx bachelor recipients owing an average of $25,524, and Latinx associates’ recipients owing close to $16,000. But the most disconcerting news for UnidosUS is that 91.4% of those bachelor recipients and 69.7% of those associate’s recipients owe more than their principal balance, with Latinx borrowers defaulting at rates higher than white borrowers.
UnidosUS education experts have found that this is due in part to poor career services support for Latino and first-generation students. <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Additionally, data from the Economic Policy Institute shows that Latino graduates earn about 85 cents for every one dollar that white graduates earn. </a>
This data also raises concerns about student outcomes in for-profit institutions where Latinos are overrepresented. While students may be enticed to enroll in institutions that offer greater flexibility in online, weekend and evening courses, as well as more trade-focused training than traditional schools, research has shown that too often these degrees do not lead to gainful employment and make it harder for borrowers to pay off their loans. Default estimates go as high as 57% for Latinx borrowers who attended for-profit schools compared to 8% at schools that are non-profit and 35% at schools that are public.
<h3>Advocating for Better Outcomes</h3>
The final section of the online hub offers a set of state and federal-level measures that could improve the outlook for Latinx students in seeking higher education degrees, as well as a list of publications and resources where site visitors can obtain more extensive information and support. 
This section encourages educational institutions and policymakers to take such measures as: 
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400">making higher-education institutions more accessible and affordable to underserved populations</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400">improving the process for understanding and accessing financial aid</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400">engaging in equitable enrollment and culturally responsive educational practices</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400">requiring institutions to close racial and equity gaps by reporting how they are working to improve student outcomes</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400">ensuring that Latino students earn quality degrees across all institutions</li>
</ul>
“We hope that this online hub and the additional publications and resources it provides will contribute to greater public awareness and to developing a more equitable higher-education system for our increasingly diverse U.S. population,” said Sanchez. 
–Author Julienne Gage is a former UnidosUS staff member and longtime contributor to ProgressReport.co. 
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<title>Uplifting Uvalde: UnidosUS has spent more than a year helping local affiliates expand on their parent engagement services while building a blueprint for civic engagement</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/uplifting-uvalde-unidosus-has-spent-more-than-a-year-helping-local-affiliates-expand-on-their-parent-engagement-services-while-building-a-blueprint-for-civic-engagement/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alessandra Cespedes]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 08 Nov 2023 13:30:16 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Affiliates]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[school safety]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Uvalde]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=52423</guid>
<description><![CDATA[November is Parent Engagement Month, and UnidosUS is observing it by putting the spotlight on the collaborative efforts it has made with its Affiliates to help families in Uvalde heal […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[November is Parent Engagement Month, and UnidosUS is observing it by putting the spotlight on the collaborative efforts it has made with its Affiliates to help families in Uvalde heal from the mass school shooting that rocked their community in the spring of 2022. 
<figure id="attachment_52420" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-52420" style="width: 2560px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-52420" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde1-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1920" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde1-540x405.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde1-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde1-150x113.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde1-768x576.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde1-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde1-2048x1536.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-52420" class="wp-caption-text">Uvalde memorial</figcaption></figure>
In late July 2022, UnidosUS Director of Parent and Community Engagement Jose Rodriguez drove from his home in San Antonio to the neighboring town of Uvalde hoping to consider a plan for supporting local Affiliates impacted by a mass shooting at Robb Elementary which claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers on May 24 of that year.
“When I got there, it was fresh. The memorials were there, the flowers were there. I just stood there and shook, then I burst out crying,” said Rodriguez. On the way home, he felt another emotion all too familiar to this tiny community: rage.
“I could not imagine being a parent and walking into a store seeing all the back-to-school supplies that were already on the shelves. I think I’d throw everything on the floor. How do you fix this?” Asked the usually mild-mannered educator.
With so many government and grassroots entities providing crisis intervention, UnidosUS decided its role should be to help locals advocate for policy change rooted in the most pressing requests of its local affiliate organizations AVANCE and Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC). Both serve their community through Head Start programs, and both had staff whose former students, nieces and nephews were killed in that shooting. These Affiliates already have strong parent-engagement systems and processes, but the weight and the proximity of this crisis left everyone including staff feeling exhausted and vulnerable, so they welcomed UnidosUS’s offers to help them carry the load as they grieved.
<figure id="attachment_52421" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-52421" style="width: 2560px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img decoding="async" class="wp-image-52421 size-full" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde2-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1920" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde2-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde2-540x405.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde2-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde2-150x113.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/uvalde2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-52421" class="wp-caption-text">Chicanos Por La Causa with ACF Acting Assistant Secretary Jeff Hild.</figcaption></figure>
“Our whole purpose is for parents to become their own self advocates,” AVANCE Parent Support Coordinator Gregoria Ponce told ProgressReport.co. “We want to make sure they are building their capacity.”
Gun safety was certainly a difficult but much-needed conversation for this rural, ranching community where gun ownership is a longstanding tradition and residents are still divided along racial and class lines. And mental health? Who in the community wasn’t suffering anxiety and depression after this tragedy? But how do you write up a request for funding a project that could address all the above?
Meals, communion, conversation, the affiliates and their families replied.
From January until September of 2023, UnidosUS provided funding, training, and listening ears for nine monthly meals to about 350 AVANCE and Chicanos Por la Causa staff and families with the goal of helping them transform their grief, anger, and rage into civic engagement strategies aimed at healing communities affected by tragedies like this one and preventing such tragedies from happening again.
The Nine-Month Program 
The program was called Juntos con UnidosUS/Together with UnidosUS, and each month, participants would eat, talk, cry, and plan together, relying on their own family coordinators to drive their communion and conversation toward this goal. Most UnidosUS staff stayed to the sidelines, dropping in on just a handful of the meals while encouraging affiliates to drive the meetings.
“It was time to start the healing,” reflected Chicanos Por La Causa Vice-President of Early Childhood Francesca Brown, noting how helpful it was that UnidosUS provided tools, resources, and a structure for supporting that process. “We learned that we could lean on each other through difficult times. We had meals to set the environment for a family-style conversation. Mentally we didn’t want to overwhelm staff and parents but we wanted them to know we are here to help and listen.”
Developing a sense of rapport and openness didn’t happen right away.
“I remember the first time, the families were asked to introduce themselves and nobody wanted to speak, not even their name,” reflected Ponce, but she said as time went on, they took advantage of that platform to get up and speak. She was amazed at how their words and their voice tones changed as they did so, something that can be incredibly tough in a community where talking about mental health is so often stigmatized. “It helped them like a therapy session without them realizing that was what was happening.”
During the first few months, the program focused on creating a safe space for participants to express their grief and anxiety while Rodriguez, the one constant UnidosUS staff presence, listened and asked questions. One of those questions was what made participants hopeful, and along with that, he asked them to consider the programs AVANCE and Chicanos Por La Causa offer that help them get them to that emotional state.
They mentioned <a href="https://family-service.org/angels/">ANGELS</a>, a services provider for local Head Start Centers by providing wraparound services that address multiple areas of people’s lives from workforce development to early childhood to mental wellbeing. ANGELS gives parents the opportunity to discuss their efforts to advocate not just for their children’s education but also for their own. Through that program, dozens of parents have taken English classes or finished their GED’s. There was also an ANGEL participant who obtained her nursing degree and another who left her work in the fields and to become a school teacher.
But when it came to public speaking, the families struggled to express their fears, concerns, ideas, hopes and dreams to people in positions of authority over their lives and those of their children.
“We were seeing parents in our community coming to speak at the school board meetings, and they knew what their goal was– to get help, to get answers because of what had happened– but they didn’t have the knowledge of how to do the self-advocacy, how to use the words they were needing to get their point across without shutting the people at the ISD (Independent School District) down,” said AVANCE Family Engagement Manager Janie Cazares noting that while the food, childcare, and materials offered was key, so too was helping the parents hone the messages weighing on their hearts.
“It’s only been 17 months since this happened and we’re still going through the grieving process. We didn’t directly speak about what had happened during our sessions. We just spoke about how you can speak for yourselves? How can you be your own advocate? How can you get your point across to the community when you are needing something? It was an unspoken thing that all of us went through this but we’re looking at how we’re going to get stronger,” said Ramirez.
UnidosUS has a mandate of supporting the affiliates as the direct service providers, so his job was to promote a curriculum that made them the changemakers. But there were times when he found he should leverage his own experience to offer more input. When he heard parents saying they often felt too overcome with emotion to provide the standard two-minutes of input they were given when speaking at board meetings, he gave them an assignment. He provided a set of slides from UnidosUS’s own Padres Comprometidos curriculum in which parents learned to share their thoughts in a two-minute elevator pitch.
“They had to identify a problem and a possible solution, then they had to talk about the benefits,” he explained.
As campaigns began this summer for Uvalde’s November 7 municipal elections, many parents — especially ones who came from countries where the rule of law is rarely followed — said they saw little point in going to vote even if they were eligible to cast a ballot. Rodriguez took this occasion to discuss how UnidosUS strives to hold U.S. elected officials accountable to this country’s history of democracy by encouraging U.S. citizens to vote.
Then in July, some members of the group were invited to attend UnidosUS’s 2023 Annual Conference in Chicago. There, the Administration of Children and Families (ACF) Assistant Secretary January Contreras hoped to host a parent engagement listening session, so, UnidosUS obtained travel funds for several Uvalde families to convene with families from California, as well as ones based in Chicago.
It was an awesome experience seeing how they were soaking up meeting everybody and taking in all the different sessions,” said AVANCE San Antonio Office Coordinator Jennifer Ramirez, noting that they joined in the discussion during sessions on gun violence, voter engagement, health, and early childhood education. “One of them was a father who was fully engaged in anything father-ish, so he was meeting all the gentlemen there and getting their contacts.”
Not surprisingly, the parents had a resounding request for more culturally and linguistically responsive mental health services.
One Uvalde family said they took their child to the doctor after he began exhibiting serious mental health behaviors and that the medical team initially said the child was fine. It wasn’t until later that the team admitted they simply didn’t have a Spanish speaking counselor available to attend to the child in a timely manner.
While Contreras’s term ended shortly after that meeting, the ACF continued to follow up on stories like that one. When they learned that UnidosUS’s nine-month Uvalde parent and educator support program would culminate in September with a graduation ceremony hosted in an Uvalde community space, they sent their new acting assistant secretary Jeff Hild to join them.
This ceremony was a chance for all stakeholders to come together in a more public facing meeting, one aimed at projecting a feeling of hope for the future and a happier outlook for the new school year. For UnidosUS and its stakeholders, one of the most symbolic moments came when a single father in the program walked onto stage with tears streaming down his face, his young son perched atop his shoulders as he shook the hands of the program’s sponsors.
“I’ve never graduated from anything before,” he told the crowd.
That graduation ceremony marked the first time UnidosUS Director of Education Elizabeth Zamudio, an educator and parent who joined the team a year prior, had been logistically able and emotionally ready to visit Uvalde. The feeling that came over her was one of pride.
“It was incredible to see the work that the team had done to get the community where they were at that convening,” she said.
“I was aware over the months of all the emotional management Jose was helping the community work through, and then when I came in person and was able to see the community smiling and thriving and showing their resilience, I thought, ‘okay, mission accomplished,’” Zamudio told ProgressReport.co. “We haven’t healed everything, but I think that what we set out to do was to bring the community together. And I was proud of the work that the team had done, and how they were giving credit to our Affiliates who are so invested.”
“There are only about 10 or 11 people in our office, and more than half of them lost someone but we still had to stay strong for our families because they were really going through a lot with the children,” noted Ramirez. “So many things changed in an instant. AVANCE San Antonio really came through in putting in safety measures that were already there but we strengthened them, bringing in security, counseling, mental wellness opportunities, and giving us time to grieve and bury our loved ones but we also knew that we had to be resilient. UnidosUS came at a perfect time.”
The Future of Parent Engagement in Uvalde and Beyond
Chicanos Por La Causa hailed the way the nine-month program created a safe, reflective space for families to let down their guard and entertain their children while the adults developed their advocacy and leadership roles. It was also glad to see how the graduation ceremony created a space for handing out much-needed school supplies for children.
“Families enjoyed these events and children were laughing and smiling at all of them. That is what can help us send the “mejor juntos, better together” message for healing community,” said Chicanos Por La Causa Center Service Manager Pearl Moreno, adding that participants expressed a desire to keep these activities going. “We want to see more community events, more get togethers, more mental health events.”
UnidosUS’s education team is now working to build out new proposals with that goal in mind. They’re using this and other UnidosUS curricula as a reference, taking in notes and reports from AVANCE and Chicanos Por La Causa as they do.
“We now have a blueprint of what worked and what didn’t work, so how can we replicate this for future crises?” Zamudio said.
The UnidosUS education team is creating a curriculum called Civics for All focused on helping families learn the democratic system in the United States and how they can become civically engaged.
“The hope is that as we engage families in civic engagement efforts in their community, that that will then trickle down to their youth,” she said, noting this curriculum will borrow from a past one known as the High School Democracy Project.
“We’ll take elements of that, and tailor it to the families, and one thing we’re really intentional about doing is that we want to create exposure opportunities for families through these kinds of listening sessions and round tables. We know we can’t do that in all 38 states where our affiliates are located in, so we’re going to connect them to their local school boards, school board meetings, or to local city council meetings.”
Rodriguez is already offering the participants of the nine-month Uvalde program articles on how this works. Along with that, he offers tips and encouragement.
“You have to go and support each other,” he told the Uvalde program participants, explaining that it’s understandable that their emotions will be running high at such events. But for example, he asked them “who put the school board there? Who runs the school? You. You elected them and you can fire them.”
Finally, he reminds them that UnidosUS has spent 60 years answering to the needs of its Latino constituents through the affiliate network.
“This is what we do. We provide opportunities for Latinos to thrive,” he tells them. “Yes, the community is hurting. Yes, the community is in pain. But you know, we’re going to get through this.”
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<title>Navigating the Impact of the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Decision on Higher Education</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/navigating-impact-supreme-courts-affirmative-action-decision-on-higher-education/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alessandra Cespedes]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 18 Oct 2023 13:15:40 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=51821</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This fall, high school students begin an annual ritual of going on college tours and starting to work on their college applications, while current college students consider their options to […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[This fall, high school students begin an annual ritual of going on college tours and starting to work on their college applications, while current college students consider their options to transfer. But next year’s prospects could be very different than what they always imagined for themselves.
Nearly two months after the Supreme Court’s June 29 decision to gut affirmative action, civil rights advocates are still reeling from its effects and responding to mitigate its impact on underrepresented communities. The SCOTUS decision came as a punch in the stomach to civil rights organizations who have spent decades ensuring that policy created a more equitable pathway to college and, with it, greater professional and societal success. Immediately following the ruling, UnidosUS joined like-minded groups such as The National Urban League, NAACP, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Council of Negro Women, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice in a webinar to denounce the decision and to remind viewers that there are still plenty of avenues to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.
<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-51823 alignleft" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-armin-rimoldi-5554303-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="355" height="236" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-armin-rimoldi-5554303-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-armin-rimoldi-5554303-540x360.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-armin-rimoldi-5554303-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-armin-rimoldi-5554303-150x100.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-armin-rimoldi-5554303-768x512.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-armin-rimoldi-5554303-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-armin-rimoldi-5554303-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 355px) 100vw, 355px" />“Higher education is the gateway to economic achievement and the training ground for our nation’s future leaders. We are short-changing not only our communities but our country by failing to ensure access to higher education for all, and thus preventing too many from fully contributing to our country’s well-being,” UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguía said during the video conference. “We call on leaders in higher education and our elected officials to take the necessary steps to ensure that we are investing in our people, all of them, by providing a path to higher education.”
She added that the court ruling was “a narrow decision on just one aspect of the college admission process,” and noted, “it would be wrong and unsupportable to take this decision as a referendum on the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion overall.”
Heeding calls like these, UnidosUS published a brief detailing key strategies to keep the American Dream alive for the nation’s increasingly diverse population.
The publication, titled “<a href="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/unidosus_equityinhighereducation.pdf">Supreme Court Ruling Must Lead to Action to Advance Opportunity in Postsecondary Education: Equity in Access to Higher Education Is—and Should Remain—a Core Value</a>,” was released during the 2023 UnidosUS Annual Conference in Chicago, where U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was the keynote speaker. Harris touched on the gutting of Affirmative Action as one of many recent legal and policy actions eroding years of civil rights advances. Among others, she mentioned the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a rollback of non-discrimination protections for businesses, a weakening of voting rights, an uptick in legislation aimed at creating a climate of fear among immigrants, the banning of books, and a campaign to rewrite history with the idea that enslaved people actually benefited from slavery.
“Well we will not have it. We will not have it,” she said, adding that conference goers should take inspiration to fight back from UnidosUS’s long history of organizing and coalition building.
The brief begins with a reminder that while Latinos make up 20% of the U.S. population and 20% of those enrolled in postsecondary education, they are still largely underrepresented in selective colleges and universities which so often serve as the gateway to upward mobility and high-powered leadership roles. Latinos make up 24% of high school graduates, but only represent 14% of admissions to those institutions.
The brief adds that while the decision was limited to the factor of race in college admissions, it “should not disturb institutional commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion among the student body or in hiring and retention in educational or other employment settings, and it should not be treated as an impediment to creating welcoming spaces for Latinos and other people of color.”
At the same time, it said SCOTUS’s decision should be a “wake-up call,” and that measurable progress on equity in education “must be a central focus of how we all think about our shared prospects for realizing the American dream.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-51822 alignright" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-william-fortunato-6140676-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="355" height="236" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-william-fortunato-6140676-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-william-fortunato-6140676-540x360.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-william-fortunato-6140676-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-william-fortunato-6140676-150x100.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-william-fortunato-6140676-768x512.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-william-fortunato-6140676-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-william-fortunato-6140676-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 355px) 100vw, 355px" />The brief also echoed the words of Justice Kagan, who warned during oral arguments that gutting affirmative action could lead to a “precipitous decline in minority admissions” and noted that Latino student enrollments in selective schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA plummeted 50% when California barred race-conscious admissions through Proposition 209 in 1996.
“Although there has been improvement after decades of recruitment and changes to admissions practices, there still is work to do: in 2019, more than half of California’s public high school graduates identified as Hispanic, but Latinos were just 25% of the first-year student body at all University of California schools, and 15% of first-year students at the Universities of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley,” it stated.
The rest of the brief focuses on actions that can be taken to forge ahead with the pursuit of educational equity, and it starts with a breakout box about first-generation students, a demographic in which 70% of Latino students find themselves.
Under the Supreme Court decision, it notes, “colleges and universities may use alternative considerations.” That, the brief says, can translate to recognizing a student’s socio-economic circumstances, acknowledging the often-limited realities of their K-12 educational experiences, and their life stories and testimonies of grit and determination. At the same time, the federal government can improve and clarify the financial aid process, while institutions of higher education can cut back on legacy admissions and heavy reliance on testing and course requirements for admissions, expand the communities and regions in which they recruit students, and consider options for making applicants of diverse backgrounds feel welcome on their campuses.
Specific Recommendations
The brief outlines which actions the Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Education, Congress, governors and state lawmakers, colleges and universities, and students themselves can each take toward those goals.
For example, the Biden administration can call for racial equity and diversity as a national imperative and direct government agencies to issue non-discrimination guidance, while asking U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to provide greater clarity on the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action ruling.
The U.S. Department of Education can provide more funding and guidance for helping underserved student groups have the college readiness resources and coursework they need and prepare more educators to teach advanced placement courses to students who have so often been overlooked and underserved for such classes. It can also work with the National Center for Education Statistics to increase data transparency by reporting disaggregated data by race and ethnicity for the purpose of admissions, enrollment, and identifying barriers in the college application process.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-51826 alignleft" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="355" height="236" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1-540x360.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1-150x100.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 355px) 100vw, 355px" />The brief says Congress can take action by enacting legislation to ban early admissions that require a commitment before offering financial aid packages, develop a federal/state partnership to fully cover tuition costs for Pell-eligible and other lower-income students, increase funding for Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), increase funding, and expand on federal programs such as GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) and TRIO which help first-generation and low-income students navigate the college application process.
At the governor and state legislature level, policymakers can examine whether programs that allow admission to the top performing percentiles of a state help or hinder equitable education practices, map inequities in the distribution of and placement in courses, including Advanced Placement math and science courses, increase needs-based grants and scholarships, pass legislation that imposes “public service” fees on selective schools that continue to engage in legacy enrollment practices, and then use those fees to fund the state’s more under-sourced institutions.
The brief encourages colleges and universities “not to overreact” to the Supreme Court’s decision and continue to push for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion by moving from a merit-based to a needs-based system of financial aid, as well as to end early admissions, recognize multilingualism among students as an asset, not a hindrance, and provide enhanced services in tutoring and advising, as well as stipends and grants for transportation and food security.
Finally, the brief notes that students also have a voice and a role to play in advocating for themselves and their peers by continuing to pursue selective universities that give them a better chance of professional success, and engage in advocacy to challenge institutions of higher education to “live up to their commitments to diversity and inclusion,” while demanding a process for student input where they can inform actionable recommendations for educational equity.
“We don’t yet know what the full impact of the SCOTUS decision will be on next year’s college enrollment,” said UnidosUS Director of Education Policy Project, “ but what we do know is that UnidosUS will keep fighting for representation of Latinos in postsecondary education. We belong on college campuses. Full stop.”
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<title>UnidosUS to help the Biden Administration usher in the nation’s most affordable student loan plan ever</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/to-help-the-biden-administration-the-nations-most-affordable-student-loan-plan/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alessandra Cespedes]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 18 Sep 2023 16:55:23 +0000</pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=51229</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Over the past few years, President Biden has centered much of his education policy efforts on easing the widespread burden that student loan debt poses to millions of U.S. borrowers, […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Over the past few years, President Biden has centered much of his education policy efforts on easing the widespread burden that student loan debt poses to millions of U.S. borrowers, and their families, especially for non-completers, women, and borrowers of color. Just a few weeks before federal student loan payments are set to resume for millions of borrowers, he and Vice President Kamala Harris announced a new income-driven repayment plan they’re calling “the most affordable repayment ever created.”
The new plan, Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE), aims to do just that by refining the nation’s approach to post-secondary education while addressing inequities in the student loan system. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class=" wp-image-51231 alignleft" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7713166-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="333" height="222" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7713166-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7713166-540x360.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7713166-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7713166-150x100.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7713166-768x512.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7713166-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7713166-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 333px) 100vw, 333px" />The SAVE plan offers the greatest benefit to borrowers who are low-income, which encompasses a significant portion of the Latinos in post-secondary education. In fact, borrowers in this income bracket won’t have monthly payments until their earnings rise above $15 an hour or their annual income exceeds $30,000. The plan also seeks to ease the financial pressures on graduates from both four-year universities and community colleges by reducing the repayment cap from 10% to 5% of a borrower’s disposable income–the money left after deducting essential living expenses like rent and groceries from total earnings.
“The SAVE plan is another huge step forward in President Biden’s tireless efforts to fix the broken student loan system, reduce the burden of student debt on working families, and put borrowers first,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a <a href="https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/biden-harris-administration-launches-most-affordable-repayment-plan-ever-transforming-income-driven-repayment-cutting-undergraduate-payments-half-and-preventing-unpaid-interest-accumulation">Department of Education press release</a>. “SAVE isn’t just about helping borrowers today, it’s about creating a more affordable pathway for millions of aspiring students who dream of earning college degrees and achieving the American dream—that’s exactly what the Biden-Harris Administration has fought to do since day one.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-51224 alignright" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="333" height="222" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-540x360.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-150x100.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-768x512.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-rdne-stock-project-7683704-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 333px) 100vw, 333px" />
Research by the White House Council of Economic Advisors indicates that the SAVE plan could prevent the balance for lower-income borrowers from increasing as much as 78% over a 20-year repayment period. 
“The benefits of the SAVE plan will be particularly critical for the low- and middle-income borrowers, community college students, and borrowers who work in public service,” President Biden said about the new program. 
He noted that with the implementation of this new plan, a significant reduction in loan payments is anticipated. Qualified borrowers could, on average, experience a 40% decrease in total payments for every dollar borrowed. Those with the lowest predicted lifetime earnings can expect an 83% reduction in payments per dollar borrowed, while the top earners will witness a 5% cut. A first-year teacher, typically with a debt of $24,425 and a starting salary of $43,596, might see payments drop by two-thirds, saving more than $17,000, while engaging with the <a href="https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/public-service">Public Service Loan Forgiveness</a> program. Furthermore, undergraduates can anticipate their loan payments being halved under the SAVE plan.
The administration has launched a streamlined online system, <a href="http://saveonstudentdebt.org/">SaveOnStudentDebt.org,</a> for borrowers to check their eligibility and register for a repayment plan. The system also allows borrowers to grant access and permission to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to securely take payments and automatically certify borrowers for each subsequent year.
“As long as you pay under this plan, you’ll no longer see your loan balance grow because of unpaid interest. Under the SAVE plan, monthly payments are based on your interest, not your student loan balance,” President Biden said, noting that it should take only ten minutes to fill out the online form. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class=" wp-image-51223 alignleft" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lazaro-rodriguez-Ij5oHzQEh8Q-unsplash.jpg" alt="" width="330" height="330" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lazaro-rodriguez-Ij5oHzQEh8Q-unsplash.jpg 2237w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lazaro-rodriguez-Ij5oHzQEh8Q-unsplash-540x540.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lazaro-rodriguez-Ij5oHzQEh8Q-unsplash-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lazaro-rodriguez-Ij5oHzQEh8Q-unsplash-150x150.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lazaro-rodriguez-Ij5oHzQEh8Q-unsplash-768x768.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lazaro-rodriguez-Ij5oHzQEh8Q-unsplash-1536x1536.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lazaro-rodriguez-Ij5oHzQEh8Q-unsplash-2048x2048.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 330px) 100vw, 330px" />
Empowering Latino Students: UnidosUS Champions the SAVE Plan for Equitable Student Debt Relief
For UnidosUS, the SAVE plan represents a key step in addressing systemic disparities in the student loan system that have historically burdened and harmed the progress of the Latino community. The SAVE plan offers a chance to alleviate these challenges. It is a great step in leveling the playing field and fostering a more inclusive and equitable educational landscape.
Last month, the Department joined forces with multiple national grassroots organizations to spread the word to groups across the country about the SAVE plan. To that end, UnidosUS, in collaboration with Civic Nation, the NAACP, the National Urban League, Rise, the Student Debt Crisis Center, and Young Invincibles, is<a href="https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/100-groups-join-%E2%80%9Csave-student-debt%E2%80%9D-outreach-campaign-reaching-more-18-million-americans?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term="> taking significant strides </a>to empower borrowers with the essential information they need to capitalize on the student debt relief offered by the SAVE program.
“The Department of Education’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan is another step toward meaningful debt relief for millions of student borrowers in our country. Mountains of student debt are obstructing the economic potential of Latinos pursuing higher education and keeping many graduates from being able to buy a house, start a family, or build generational wealth,” UnidosUS Senior Vice President of Programs Mauricio Garcia said in a press statement. “This plan will further enable Hispanic students to contribute more fully to our country’s shared prosperity while building their own economic resilience. We commend the Biden administration for their commitment to increasing accessibility to higher education and paving the way for Latinos to widen their place in America.”
“The SAVE Plan represents a transformative approach to higher education in our country, focusing on both present and future aspirations of countless students. The heavy weight of student debt has for too long hindered the ambitions of the Latino community, preventing many from realizing the pillars of the American dream – homeownership, starting a family, and building wealth” added Carmen Feliciano, UnidosUS’s Vice President of Policy and Advocacy. “This isn’t just about debt relief; it’s about reshaping the trajectory of our nation’s youth, fostering an environment where Latino students are empowered to realize their fullest potential without the looming shadow of financial burden. UnidosUS salutes the Biden administration’s commitment and echoes the call for equitable access to higher education.”
Borrowers can view more resources and tools that help them find the right repayment plan for their current circumstances at <a href="https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/prepare-payments-restart?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=">StudentAid.gov/restart</a>. More information about SAVE is available at <a href="https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/save-plan?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=">StudentAid.gov/save</a>.
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<title>A new policy brief from UnidosUS’s Latino Infant Initiative outlines concrete policy recommendations for helping Latino families succeed as their demographic grows</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/new-policy-brief-latino-infant-initiative-outlines-policy-recommendations-helping-latino-families/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alessandra Cespedes]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 11 Sep 2023 21:10:42 +0000</pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=51111</guid>
<description><![CDATA[By 2060, the U.S. Latino population is expected to grow to 111 million people, and UnidosUS believes the best way to prepare for this monumental demographic shift is by bolstering […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[By 2060, the U.S. Latino population is expected to grow to 111 million people, and UnidosUS believes the best way to prepare for this monumental demographic shift is by bolstering support for the youngest of them. Over the past year, it has been working closely with the early childhood non-profit organization Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors to conduct surveys of Latino families and turn the needs and concerns they expressed into an agenda for policy change at the federal and state level.
That <a href="https://unidosus.org/publications/latino-infant-initiative-policy-agenda/#:~:text=The%20overarching%20goal%20of%20the,and%20linguistically%20responsive%20programs%20and">agenda</a> is the latest product of UnidosUS’s Latino Infant Initiative (LII), a program run in partnership with Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors and funded by a grant from the Pritzker Children’s Initiative to create and develop a network to guide the development of a national policy agenda and enable high-quality programs to Latino infants more readily.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-51125 alignleft" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-agung-pandit-wiguna-1128318-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="303" height="240" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-agung-pandit-wiguna-1128318-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-agung-pandit-wiguna-1128318-540x427.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-agung-pandit-wiguna-1128318-1024x810.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-agung-pandit-wiguna-1128318-150x119.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-agung-pandit-wiguna-1128318-768x607.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-agung-pandit-wiguna-1128318-1536x1215.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-agung-pandit-wiguna-1128318-2048x1620.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 303px) 100vw, 303px" />
“The overarching goal of the Latino Infant Initiative policy agenda is to influence federal and state policies that will ensure that all Latino infants, toddlers, and their families, regardless of background or circumstances, have equitable access to high-quality, culturally and linguistically responsive programs and services that support their healthy physical, mental, and social development and learning,” explains the document, which was released in time for last month’s UnidosUS Annual Conference. “This policy agenda will provide a roadmap to the system-wide changes that are needed to advance this goal.”
The agenda begins with a detailed explanation of how the partnering organizations have taken an equitable approach to the agenda by ensuring and acknowledging: 
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">the intersectionality of issues that Latino families experience </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">the importance of policies that are evidence-based and informed by research </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="3" data-aria-level="1">the importance of policies that are child-centered and family-focused </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="4" data-aria-level="1">the urgent need to remove barriers to enrollment in child and family programming </li>
</ul>
“Collaboration and coordination among service providers and systems are essential to ensuring that families can access the services they need when they need them,” the document states; then, it lays out eight goals with actionable steps for education, health, the economy, and immigration.
Education (Goals 1-3)
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">GOAL 1: Improve access to high-quality, culturally and linguistically responsive early childhood education programs to serve more children, particularly Dual-Language Learners (DLLs). </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">GOAL 2: Retain, support, and develop Latinos in the prenatal to age three workforce to meet the need for a diverse and qualified workforce that reflects today’s multicultural and multilingual child population. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">GOAL 3: Support authentic family engagement that acknowledges the historical legacy of language suppression and respects home language(s). </li>
</ul>
These goals and recommendations begin with early childhood education (ECE) as the basis for key interventions. In fact, UnidosUS’s 2023 National Latino Family Report found that 46% of Latino families with children under the age of three have received no formal childcare since birth. Daycare programs don’t align with working hours, and limited vacancies, high transportation costs, and income thresholds for need-based services that are so narrow that they don’t correspond to the economic realities of many families are all reasons for this. Plus, low salaries and hefty educational requirements lead to high turnover among a workforce made up largely of women of color and multilingual speakers, making it much harder to create a culturally and linguistically responsive ECE system.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-51121" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/kenny-eliason-zFSo6bnZJTw-unsplash-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="302" height="188" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/kenny-eliason-zFSo6bnZJTw-unsplash-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/kenny-eliason-zFSo6bnZJTw-unsplash-540x336.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/kenny-eliason-zFSo6bnZJTw-unsplash-1024x637.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/kenny-eliason-zFSo6bnZJTw-unsplash-150x93.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/kenny-eliason-zFSo6bnZJTw-unsplash-768x478.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/kenny-eliason-zFSo6bnZJTw-unsplash-1536x956.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/kenny-eliason-zFSo6bnZJTw-unsplash-2048x1275.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 302px) 100vw, 302px" />
To achieve this, the Latino Infant Initiative wants the federal government to hire more bilingual staff for the needs-based Head Start program, provide scholarships and other accreditation incentives for educators, and develop support systems for aspiring Latino educators to attain their degrees while employing more robust multicultural and multilingual training for the whole of the early childhood workforce. Meanwhile, it encourages states to increase salaries for early childhood educators and improve class sizes, nutritional standards, and family-engagement programming.
The push for multilingual learning also comes with the goal of ensuring family engagement programs acknowledge the nation’s history of language suppression. At the federal level, this could mean everything from the dissemination of culturally appropriate research for families to increases in funding for home-based visitation and father engagement, as well as the development of a national Latino Infant Research-to-Practice (R2P) Center to foment evidence-based child rearing and education.
“Research consistently highlights the critical role of family engagement in the development of Latino infants,” the agenda notes. “Studies also show that parent engagement significantly contributes to reducing the achievement gap among immigrant populations, with parent engagement playing the most significant role in increased achievement for Latinos.”
Health (Goals 4-6) 
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">GOAL 4: Improve access to healthcare, including mental health, for pregnant women and families of infants and toddlers. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">GOAL 5: Improve access to healthy and affordable food for families with young children and expecting parents. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="3" data-aria-level="1">GOAL 6: Address gun violence as a civil rights and public health crisis in response to community concerns for child well-being.
 </li>
</ul>
Closely tied to early childhood education is the goal of greater health in areas including overall coverage, mental health access, and gun violence prevention. The agenda notes that great strides were made to insure Latinos under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but 20% of Latinos still lack coverage and only half of Latinos qualify for ACA health programs. Barriers include immigration status and limitations on Medicaid, all of which exacerbate rates of inadequate prenatal and postpartum support for Latina women. Food insecurity was always high among Latinos but skyrocketed during the pandemic, and in recent studies conducted by UnidosUS and Abriendo Puertas, Latino families have rated gun violence as a constant source of fear.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class=" wp-image-51126 alignleft" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-greta-hoffman-9705830-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-greta-hoffman-9705830-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-greta-hoffman-9705830-540x360.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-greta-hoffman-9705830-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-greta-hoffman-9705830-150x100.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-greta-hoffman-9705830-768x512.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-greta-hoffman-9705830-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pexels-greta-hoffman-9705830-2048x1365.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />There are numerous existing and upcoming programs to help provide healthcare and nutritional services to young children and their families, and states can seek waivers to expand on who can access those and for how long, so one of the biggest asks for the federal government is that it converts these options “into guarantees that protect pregnant people, infants, and toddlers in every state.”
The agenda also says the federal government should do more to lift barriers on programs such as Medicaid and CHIP while incentivizing states to increase culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health services for the families of young children. It says states can do their part by eliminating the existing five-year wait period on Medicaid and CHIP for lawfully residing immigrant families; providing CHIP coverage to pregnant people regardless of their immigration status; expanding health coverage for children from birth to age six; and subsidizing the costs of healthcare for families who don’t qualify for federal health and nutrition programs.
On the topic of nutrition, the agenda reminds readers that “having access to and consuming nutritious foods provides the essential building blocks for brain development, healthy growth, and a strong immune system,” but warns that “far too many people in America, including Latino families and children, lack the basic ingredients needed for a healthy life, including consistent and affordable access to nutritious food.”
With this in mind, LII wants to see the federal government make federal services such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) more flexible by not imposing work requirements, lifting wait periods for non-citizens, allowing for remote enrollment services, and extending the time people can be in such programs before having to recertify.
Last but certainly not least on the health front is addressing gun violence. The agenda notes that more than 4,700 Latinos die from gun violence each year (about 13 deaths a day) and that many mass shootings have proven to be motivated by racism and homophobia, as was the case in Uvalde, TX (2022); El Paso, TX (2019); and Orlando, FL (2016).
To help prevent this, the Latino Infant Initiative wants to see the federal government enact common-sense gun safety laws to protect schools and other sensitive locations. These can include creating more liability for gun manufacturers, better licensing and background checks, and a ban on assault weapons. And at the state level, LII wants to see similar legislation for background checks and licensing, better gun storage laws, assault weapons bans, increased training for police, gun permits for concealed weapons in public, a ban on gun licensing for people convicted of hate crimes, funding for community violence intervention, and greater mental health support for families affected by gun violence.
The Economy (Goal 7) 
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="2" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">GOAL 7: Improve the economic well-being of pregnant women and families of infants and toddlers. </li>
</ul>
Lifting people out of poverty, especially communities disproportionately affected, is also a key area of concern for the Latino Infant Initiative. With that in mind, the agenda notes that Latinos have a “higher-than-average labor force participation rate, start businesses at higher rates than their non-Hispanic counterparts, and wield significant purchasing power. Yet they remain overrepresented in low-wage occupations.” It also points out that Latinas, including those who are mothers, represent a growing share of the female workforce but make vastly lower wages.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class=" wp-image-51127 alignright" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/nathan-dumlao-Wr3comVZJxU-unsplash.jpg" alt="" width="301" height="201" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/nathan-dumlao-Wr3comVZJxU-unsplash.jpg 7963w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/nathan-dumlao-Wr3comVZJxU-unsplash-540x360.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/nathan-dumlao-Wr3comVZJxU-unsplash-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/nathan-dumlao-Wr3comVZJxU-unsplash-150x100.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/nathan-dumlao-Wr3comVZJxU-unsplash-768x512.jpg 768w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/nathan-dumlao-Wr3comVZJxU-unsplash-1536x1024.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 301px) 100vw, 301px" />“For every year that non-Latino white men work, Latinas must work an extra 10 months to make the same amount of money,” the agenda notes.
Other contributing factors to poverty rates among Latinos include lack of access to housing and paid family leave and discrepancies in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) which doesn’t always extend to some immigrant families. To address these concerns, the Latino Infant Initiative wants to see the federal government adopt the Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) to help Latino workers with time off due to illness or caring for a newborn; push for equal pay for Latinas; implement tax codes that reduce poverty among workers and their families, including those who are immigrants; and improve the pathway to homeownership through access to credit, an increase in the housing supply, and greater representation of Latino leadership in the agencies that regulate housing.
Immigration (GOAL 8) 
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="3" data-list-defn-props="{"335552541":1,"335559684":-2,"335559685":720,"335559991":360,"469769226":"Symbol","469769242":[8226],"469777803":"left","469777804":"","469777815":"hybridMultilevel"}" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">GOAL 8: Pass policies that address the needs of all children and center the dignity and humanity of immigrants and their families. </li>
</ul>
Most Latino children in the United States are U.S.-born. Still, they often live in mixed-status families where other members may be completely undocumented or have some sort of temporary status, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS). People in these immigration categories are ineligible for most federal assistance programs, exposing small children to an array of traumatic situations involving financial struggle, fear of authority, and even deportation. To mitigate these risks, LII is calling on the federal government to enact comprehensive immigration reform, push judges to consider the hardships of family separation due to deportation, and conduct training of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who may be in regular contact with children and their families and have a role to play in minimizing the terror and stress on the community.
Bringing the Agenda and the Stakeholders Together 
“The demographic imperative compels urgent and strong action: local, state, and federal policymakers must work together to develop, finance, and implement equitable and effective policy solutions,” the agenda states, and that message was ever present during the various meetings and sessions at the 2023 UnidosUS Annual Conference in July.
Panelists’ own lived experiences served as a reminder of what leadership roles today’s young Latinos might one day have in this country. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-49945 alignleft" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/856x520_unidosus_lii_policyagenda.jpg" alt="Parents with baby by window" width="301" height="183" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/856x520_unidosus_lii_policyagenda.jpg 856w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/856x520_unidosus_lii_policyagenda-540x328.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/856x520_unidosus_lii_policyagenda-150x91.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/856x520_unidosus_lii_policyagenda-768x467.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 301px) 100vw, 301px" />
“I’m a product of Family, Friends and Neighbor programs (FFN). My mom took me to friends before leaving for work every morning,” said Teresa Granillo, who has dedicated the past two decades of her career to ECE research and interventions. Dr. Teresa Granillo is the CEO of the Texas-based UnidosUS Affiliate AVANCE, Inc., a non-profit that supports Latino families with young children to achieve social and economic justice through innovative, holistic, two-generation education programs.
Panelist Javier Martínez, the managing director of national policy for Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors and the 31st Speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives, noted that he gained his subject matter knowledge spending his earliest years as the child of immigrants along the southern border. “We know what our Latino community needs; our work is centered on our policy systems around it,” he said. 
Unidos US Early Childhood Education Programs Director Robert Stechuk seconded that in a comment to ProgressReport. “Latino infants have been change agents for several decades, reshaping the United States. This will continue for decades to come,” he said. “Today’s Latino infants are the U.S. workforce of tomorrow. It is urgent that we invest in supports for Latino families to ensure the healthy development and effective learning of their babies.”
 
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<title>California’s English Learner (ELs) student population is not a monolith: A spotlight on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, & Pacific Islander ELs</title>
<link>https://unidosus.org/progress-report/californias-english-learner-els-student-population-is-not-a-monolith-a-spotlight-on-asian-american-native-hawaiian-pacific-islander-els/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alessandra Cespedes]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 08 Jun 2023 20:04:48 +0000</pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://unidosus.org/?post_type=progress&p=49295</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Most Americans know that the U.S. school population is rapidly changing and that increasing numbers of students are English Learners (ELs). What they may not know is that this segment […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Most Americans know that the U.S. school population is rapidly changing and that increasing numbers of students are English Learners (ELs). What they may not know is that this segment is now the fastest-growing demographic in our school system, and they come from incredibly diverse backgrounds, so their academic success hinges on tailored cultural and linguistic approaches. To ensure all students in our country have a real and equitable opportunity to learn, grow, and thrive, the U.S. education system needs to expand opportunities and remove barriers that create unequal challenges for students.
Nearly five decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Lau v. Nichols, the landmark civil rights U.S. Supreme Court decision which unanimously decided that public schools in San Francisco failed to provide thousands of non-English-speaking students of Chinese ancestry supplemental language instruction. The case established that non-English speakers were denied access to a meaningful education and that “equal treatment” does not mean “equal opportunity.” While the case was brought on by parents of non-English-speaking students of Chinese ancestry, this ruling greatly benefits English Learners from all languages, cultures, ethnicities, and nationalities. History continues to show that advancing the civil rights of Latino students is tied to the civil rights of all students of color, therefore, and that groups like UnidosUS must continue to work across multi-racial coalitions to advance the civil rights of all students.
Even though California has the highest number of English Learners (ELs) in the nation, comprising 18% of the state’s total public elementary and secondary school enrollment in the fall of 2021, the state’s EL student population is linguistically and culturally diverse. Understanding this diversity is critical to developing a more culturally and linguistically responsive system that considers diverse languages, ethnic and cultural subgroups, historical context, socioeconomic barriers, and the structural and institutional barriers that stand in the way.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class=" wp-image-49297 alignleft" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AAPI-Blog.png" alt="" width="639" height="376" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AAPI-Blog.png 715w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AAPI-Blog-540x318.png 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AAPI-Blog-150x88.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, 639px" />In honor of Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month and as part of our efforts to support English Learners (ELs) in California, UnidosUS joined Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholars (APIA Scholars) and Californians Together in Sacramento, CA, to highlight the new APIA Scholars report <a href="https://apiascholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AANHPI_EL_CA_2023_Final.pdf">Asian American, Native Hawaiian, & Pacific Islander English Learners: A Focus on California</a>. Their report focused on the unique needs of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) EL students in the state.
“There is so much intersection across the research and recommendations among our three organizations. We are grateful for this opportunity to present with our esteemed colleagues at UnidosUS and CalTog and look forward to more collaboration in the future,” said Jo Ann Paanio, Senior Director of Policy and Advocacy of APIA Scholars.
Importance of accurate data 
The report showed that people of AANHPI heritage represented 15% of the state’s residents and 11.8% of its EL student population and highlighted their incredible linguistic diversity. AANHPI EL students reported 43 different languages and dialects as their primary language spoken at home, with the top five languages being Vietnamese (23,927), Mandarin (20,648), Cantonese (13,683), Filipino (Pilipino and Tagalog) (11,553), and Punjabi (9,375).
Uplifting the diversity of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) EL student population is critical, given that there is often the misconception that EL students are a monolithic group. Ensuring there is meaningful and disaggregated data of this culturally and linguistically diverse student group, meaning breaking down student data by categories such as racial and ethnic groups, gender, and socioeconomic identity, will provide additional insight on student performance and allow for English Learner (EL) students to be served more equitably.
“A critical facet of understanding the demographic composition of English Learner students is challenging the ways they are often misunderstood, misrepresented, and discussed in education research and policy as a monolithic group,” the report stated. 
Language access and storytelling 
The report’s authors noted that the stereotype of AANHPI as “model students” who are studious and self-sufficient can lead educators and educational systems to overlook students who do not fit the stereotype. One of the ways to address this is by promoting an asset-based approach in curriculum and pedagogy that centers the strengths of their cultural and linguistic background. The state of California made it easier to do that when it passed Proposition 58 in 2016, which rescinded the controversial Proposition 227 of 1998, a law that largely prohibited the teaching of bilingual and multilingual education.
Now, schools can more easily provide literacy engagement in the home languages of ELs through an asset-based approach, an action the report noted can “uplift a student’s individual lived experiences and can include having more AANHPI narratives represented in the curriculum to combat monolithic and inaccurate representations like the model minority myth and other stereotypes.”
This literacy engagement should cover everything from more inclusive textbooks to classroom libraries with stories and characters reflecting the backgrounds of the diverse EL population, as well as literature in students’ home languages. 
Teacher education and representation 
The report stated that the state needs to do more to recruit, compensate and sustain multilingual teachers of APIA backgrounds while ensuring that all teachers, regardless of their heritage, are sensitized and culturally prepared to engage California’s diverse population.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class=" wp-image-49423 alignright" src="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/856x520_unidosus_progressreport_appi_raisedhand.jpg" alt="" width="579" height="352" srcset="https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/856x520_unidosus_progressreport_appi_raisedhand.jpg 856w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/856x520_unidosus_progressreport_appi_raisedhand-540x328.jpg 540w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/856x520_unidosus_progressreport_appi_raisedhand-150x91.jpg 150w, https://unidosus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/856x520_unidosus_progressreport_appi_raisedhand-768x467.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 579px) 100vw, 579px" />
“Traditional approaches to teacher professional development have often focused on the technical concepts of teaching like lesson planning, classroom management, and literacy growth,” the report stated. “While these aspects of teacher training and development are essential to the profession, there is a growing need to invest in training teachers to work with culturally and linguistically diverse groups of students.”
 
“As California’s population and its AANHPI student base become increasingly diverse, the teacher population has not kept pace with the demographic changes. We need to start with more representation and recruitment of AANHPI teachers as well as ongoing training and resources for all teachers,” said Dr. Florie Mendiola, Senior Director of Research and Pacific Island Partnerships of APIA Scholars.
Latino solidarity 
In the first quarter of 2023, UnidosUS conducted a series of interviews with members of the UnidosUS Affiliate Network to learn more about their experiences supporting and serving English Learners following multiple years of disrupted learning in California. The findings of these sessions can be found in <a href="https://unidosus.org/publications/from-practice-to-policy-english-learners-and-multilingual-learners-in-california/">From Practice to Policy: English Learners and Multilingual Learners in California.</a>
While it is important to step away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach when addressing the needs of EL students, there are solutions that can significantly benefit all EL students. The <a href="https://apiascholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AANHPI_EL_CA_2023_Final.pdf">AANHPI report </a>and the UnidosUS <a href="https://unidosus.org/publications/from-practice-to-policy-english-learners-and-multilingual-learners-in-california/">Practice to Policy brief</a> offer similar approaches to effectively support ELs across the state.
UnidosUS California Policy Strategist Viviana Martin acknowledged that many students identifying as Latino also identify as Asian and that California’s 1.1 million ELs, who represent one in five students in that state, face challenges not just with language but with their overall emotional well-being and self-confidence. She said UnidosUS’s listening sessions highlighted how the pandemic exacerbated learning gaps for ELs, leading to a growing call for mental health support.
 “It is important for us to identify the similarities across communities while working to uplift the unique needs and solutions of the diverse EL student population.” 
Recommendations for better policies and programs 
Like UnidosUS, APIA Scholars recognizes that California launched and operates several statewide initiatives that helped to improve support systems for ELs. However, both organizations acknowledge that more must be done to support EL students in reaching their full potential and maximize their contributions to the state and the U.S. economy.
As such, UnidosUS encourages policymakers to support robust funding to build the infrastructure to support English Learners in the long term. This includes addressing the lack of consistent and high-quality data about individual students, such as disaggregating data, and the support they are provided, as well as for programs that can diversify the teacher pipeline through initiatives such as California’s Grow Your Own Programs and Career Technical Education. It also supports investing in social and emotional support for students and educators, as well as content, culturally and linguistically responsive curricula.
In addition, UnidosUS also recommends that school district leaders, administrators, and teachers engage with caretakers and community-based organizations representing ELs and their families in the development and implementation of their policies and programs. Ensuring that those closest to the student, such as a caretaker or members of their community, are involved in their child’s education is key to the child’s success in school.
 
 
–Author Julienne Gage is a former UnidosUS Senior Web Content Manager who now serves the organization as a consultant. 
 
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