Inquiry: US SNS population and courses

[Scott McGinnis]

Apologies for duplicate listserv postings.

I plan to scour my bookmarked websites and the new CAL heritage book to
document this info, but I thought someone might have it handy.  Plus, a
few questions.

1)  I've read that the % of heritage lang speaking schoolchildren in the

US is 13%, and that 75% of them speak Spanish. That would mean that 9%
of US schoolchildren are heritage Spanish speakers. That seemed a little

low to me, since 13% of the pop is Hispanic (granted, not all of them
are SNS).

2)  I also read that 9% of US high schools offer SNS courses.  One might

conclude that this 9% of schools exactly meets the number of SNS
students, but so many students do not receive SNS.  I can't put my
finger on how to explain why this 9% of schools does not  meet the
needs.

3)  In an attempt to answer #2:  What is the easiest way to find out the

# of SNS programs that a city's public school system offers?  I have
been calling school districts in LA, Miami, and NYC but it's really hard

to get through to the people with the info, and even when I do, they
give me back of the envelope calculations as opposed to a documented
source.

If there isn't a national survey of some kind that I don't know about,
it would be great if someone like the NCES could do one.  Then we could
demonstrate (for example) that 71% of LA's public schools are 50%+
Hispanic, but only -X- percent of high schools offer SNS, which probably

don't serve all SNS students.

Thanks for any assistance,

Kim Potowski, Ph.D.
Director, Heritage Language Teacher Corps
<http://www2.uic.edu/%7Ekpotow1/hltc.html>
Coordinator, Spanish for Students of Hispanic Background
<http://www2.uic.edu/%7Ekpotow1/bilingues.html>
University of Illinois at Chicago <http://www.uic.edu> , Dept. of
Spanish, French, Italian & Portuguese <http://www.uic.edu/depts/sfip>
601 S. Morgan St., 1727 UH, MC-315 Chicago, IL 60618
(312) 996-8524, Fax (312) 413-1044