A Russellville School System Oddity?

 

While doing some research into the Franklin County School Board appointments, we came upon some very interesting information concerning the Russellville School System. Is it meaningful? Obviously, school demographics play at least a small role, if not a large one, in school success.

Several years ago, we discussed the meaning of Hispanic, a word widely misused. A Hispanic is a person from Central or South America whose first language is Spanish. Yet not all agencies/systems use the word correctly. That limits what statistics can tell us, but they are nevertheless interesting in this case. 

According to the most recent census, the population of Russellville is approximately 35% Hispanic. The number of Hispanic students in the Russellville system? Approximately 54%. While we expected a difference, we didn't expect it to be 19%.

What could account for this? There would seem to be four possibilities:

1. Hispanic families have more children than their non-Hispanic counterparts.

2. Non-Hispanic residents of Russellville send a large percentage of their children to county or private schools.

3. The U.S. Census Bureau and the Russellville City School System are using vastly differing definitions of Hispanic.

4. Russellville City Schools are somehow inflating the number of Hispanic students.

Perhaps we should add that more than one of these scenarios could be involved. The most troubling is that the system could be inflating the number of Hispanic children for tax dollars. 

It will be interesting to look at these same two stats in five years...