NAACP Meeting With Superintendent

Pat, 

When you and the organization’s president meet with the superintendent on Friday, please give her a copy of the Thursday, January 24, 2008, St. Petersburg’s Times article, http://www.sptimes.com/2008/01/24/State/Students_to_feel_crun.shtml “Students to feel crunch.”  At the bottom of the article is data from the Florida Board of Governors, the organization that provides oversight for the State University System.  The last group of figures show enrollment for the system from 1997 through 2006.   

Click here for  a Word document showing the number of blacks who received bachelor’s degrees from Florida’s public universities during the same time period.  Briefly, less than 2,000 black males and less than 4,000 black females receive bachelor’s degrees annually from a system that has an enrollment approaching 300,000 college undergrad and graduate students.  (Anyone want to guess how many black males from zip code 33610 are among the total students enrolled at USF?  Does 27, including 4 freshmen, sound about right?) 

There may be something that the NAACP and the nation’s eighth largest school district can do together to raise the volume on community-based discussions and ACTIONS related to getting students prepared for college.  The gist of the Times article is that the wide-open access gates to state universities are about to close! 

Article excerpt:  “Better to give a high-quality education to fewer students than a mediocre degree to the masses, they say.  The proposal to be considered today would direct all 11 universities to “align” their enrollment with the money available, even if it means admitting significantly fewer students starting this fall and laying off faculty members in the months to come.  ”My hope would be that we tie enrollment to the funding available,” said Roberts. “Because the reality is, if you admit students who don’t get a quality education when they attend, you’ve done them a disservice. You cannot keep growing enrollment to the detriment of the students.”   

In His Service,

Jason