Racial diversity lags in many areas

School officials say classrooms must reflect real-world situations

05/27/2001

By Michael A. Lindenberger / The Dallas Morning News

The story told by area census figures is one of booming growth and increasing diversity from Dallas to Arlington to Fort Worth.

Nowhere has the growth been more impressive than in the suburban boomtowns filling the landscape between the larger cities. But while racial diversity has increased in much of the area – in Dallas, for instance, whites account for 50.8 percent of residents – pockets of fast-growing northeast Tarrant County, home to several of the most sought-after addresses in the region, remain as uniformly white as ever.

In Hurst, Grapevine and North Richland Hills, for instance, about 88 of every 100 residents are white. And in Southlake, Keller and Colleyville, the white population is well above 90 percent, with black residents comprising less than 2 percent of each city's population. Those of Hispanic origin make up no more than Keller's 4.5 percent.

In fact, whites are so dominant in Southlake's Carroll Independent School District, where 95.3 percent of students are non-Hispanic whites, officials work hard to manufacture diversity to ensure their students are prepared to work in a world far less uniform than the one in which they are schooled.

"Over the last several years, a major focus has been to enrich our curriculum and to expand the cultural base of our kids," said Steve Johnson, assistant superintendent for student resources for CISD. "You can do that with the Internet, of course, but we also bring in guest speakers. You have to make a concerted effort, because diversity is important, and our kids don't really experience it here."

Mr. Johnson said that outside the confines of the school district, which had 6,681 students in the school year just ending, diversity is a fact of life.

"The more diversity you have your kids exposed to, the more ready they are for the workforce, because the workforce is truly international."

Elaine Tate, coordinator of student services for the Grapevine Colleyville Independent School District, said white students are strongly in the majority there as well, though nonwhites are slowly making inroads.

Between the 1995-96 school year and 2000-01, enrollment grew from 12,393 to 13,626. In the same time, the percentage of white students decreased from 90.4 percent to 85 percent.

In part, reflecting the slow but noticeable growth of minorities in the district, Ms. Tate said, administrators have increased its courses in English as a second language.

The need for ESL classes is not confined to districts where the white population has dipped below 90 percent. In the Carroll district, Mr. Johnson said at least two new ESL instructors have been hired in the last couple years.

"The ESL program is real diverse here," he said. "Most of the students in it are coming here basically due to a relocation. We have students from Finland, Czechoslovakia and all over Asia."

Mr. Johnson said the school district's growth rate has slowed to just about 400 students a year, but grew at about 650 students a year between 1993 and 1999.

Some areas of northeast Tarrant County buck the trend of uniformity.

In Haltom City, closer to Fort Worth, 77 percent are white, and 20 percent of the residents there are Hispanics. The number of residents of Hispanic origin grew 177 percent since the 1990 census.

In some of the more pricey environs of northeast Tarrant County, however, such percentage increases can be misleading.

Take Colleyville and its 202 percent increase in the number of black residents. Or its 121 percent jump in the number of residents of Hispanic origin. By 2000, when the rest of the area – and indeed most of the country – was seeing a huge growth of minority communities, the city, population 19,636, had 257 black residents and 634 residents of Hispanic origin.