Brown and White Vol. 129 no. 13

              The Brown and White Vol. 129 No. 13
Tuesday, October 20, 2015 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
The Bethlehem Area School
District strives to give all stu-dents
an equal opportunity to suc-ceed,
but researchers continue to
see disturbing trends year after
year when academic statistics like
test scores and graduation rates
are analyzed in terms of race and
socioeconomic status.
The Latino/Hispanic population
is one subdivision that struggles
the most, and according to the
National Center for Education
Statistics, nearly one in three stu-dents
enrolled in the school in the
Bethlehem Area School District
fall into that group.
Data from the Pennsylvania
Department of Education
Adequate Yearly Progress report,
commonly referred to as AYP,
showed that neither Freedom nor
Liberty High School, the two high
schools in the Bethlehem Area
School District, met the target
AYP in 2011 or 2012. When
assessed at a demographic level, it
is clear that the Latino/Hispanic
population is severely underper-forming
in relation to their peers.
AYP reports are a direct result
of the 2001 No Child Left Behind
Act, an effort by the George W.
Bush administration to even the
standards in public schools. AYP
is measured in terms of individual
school and its subpopulations as
well as by district. It calculates
the final status of each school
using a combination of graduation
rates and test participation and
scores from the assessment given
during 11th grade.
While White non-Hispanic
students met the AYP in read-ing
at both schools and math at
Freedom, students who identified
as Latino or Hispanic did not meet
any progress measures in either
subject. The graduation rate for
Latino/Hispanic students from
Liberty High School in 2012 was
72.3 percent, about 15 percent
lower than the White non-Hispan-ic
group. At Freedom, the gap was
even larger. Only 68.2 percent of
Latino/Hispanic students gradu-ated,
which is more than 23 per-cent
lower than the rate of their
White non-Hispanic counterparts.
Despite efforts by the school
district, academic success encom-passes
more than just money and
resources. At the most basic level,
the differentiating factor between
successful and struggling stu-dents
is deeply rooted in familial
cultural understanding and stan-dards
of achievement.
Leigh Kuenne Rusnak, the
administrator for high school spe-cial
education in the Bethlehem
Area School District, said teachers
and researchers often talk about
performance starting at home, but
then wrongly assume that kids
who don’t do well have parents
who don’t love them or care about
them. But this is nearly never the
By MADELEINE SMITH
Special to The Brown and White
Local thrift store aims to ben-efit
the Greater Lehigh Valley
by offering affordable cloth-ing
and household items.
See Page 5
Inside Lifestyle
See SCHOOLS Page 2
Crisis protocol varies across campus
See THREAT Page 4
A week after a shooting at an
Oregon community college where
nine students were killed by a fel-low
student at the school, a new
threat surfaced targeting colleges in
the greater Philadelphia area. The
threat alluded to a potential shoot-ing
at a Philadelphia-area college or
university to take place on Oct. 5 at
2 p.m.
Subsequently, the Lehigh
University Police department noti-fied
the community that security
would be heightened on campus that
day.
Lehigh has university-wide policies
and instructions that come from the
Lehigh University Police Department
and the Office of Residence Life in
case emergencies like natural disas-ters,
an active shooters or a bomb
threat. However, when faced with a
potential emergency, some students
are uninformed of these procedures.
Joe Sterrett, the chair of the
Crisis Management Team at Lehigh,
said there are two dimensions of
increased security. One condition of
increased security is attention to
activities that might not spark con-cern
during the average day, such as
unusual-looking vehicles.
The other dimension is a more
personnel coverage, according to
Sterrett.
“It isn’t that they hire new people,
but they work lower shifts that over-lap
in the same spots that ensures
we are able to cover the entire cam-pus
and be aware of what is going
on,” he said.
Sterrett said the LUPD deter-
By ABBY MCBRIDE
& COURTNEY MESILAS
B&W Staff
Defining the achievement gap
Race, socioeconomic status influence academic success
Kelly McCoy/Made with Canva