The Browning Of America

What gets me excited about this is the political shift this will bring in about 10 years, when more and more ethnic groups will have voters come of age.

Maybe we can steer clear of horrible people like Bush, becoming president again in the future.

Schools reflect jump in Latinos

Denver metro area sees ethnic-population shift

'To see the dramatic ethnic-population shift that has taken place throughout the metro-Denver area in recent years, take a look inside a classroom.

In some Adams County schools, for instance, fewer than a third of the students were Latino a little more than a decade ago.

Today, they are more than just the majority - they make up 65 percent of the student pop ulation, according to Adams County School District 50 statistics.

Now, only about a quarter of the students in that district are white.

Those numbers go hand in hand with figures released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau, showing that no single race or ethnicity, not even whites, makes up a majority of the Denver population.

Surging Latino populations can be found in many other metro-Denver counties, including Douglas, with a 99 percent increase from 2000 to 2006, and Arapahoe (55 percent).

If the current trends continue, Denver eventually won't be alone in losing a white majority.

Nearly nine out of 10 people who were born in or who moved to Adams County since 2000 are Latino, a trend repeated in other metro-Denver counties, albeit not as dramatically.

"We now sell more tortillas than white bread in the country. We sell more salsa than ketchup," said Stan Perea, the president of the Thornton- based New America Consulting Group, which helps businesses understand how demographics are changing. "The nation is becoming more Latino."

Of Adams County's new Latino residents, about a third are younger than 19 years old, resulting in some profound changes for the county's schools.

The spokeswoman for Adams County School District 50, Deb Haviland, points to Pecos Street, just a couple miles from district headquarters, to show how the population is changing.

In just the past few years, bakeries along there have become "panaderias." Laundromats and convenience stores have translated their signs into Spanish, too.

"Everything has pretty much been renamed and relabeled into Spanish names," she said.

This shift has pushed District 50 to recraft the way it teaches students and interacts with the community, Haviland said.

"We're keeping right up with the Joneses - or the census, so to speak," she said.

Among the changes was the 2004 creation of the VOICES Community Resource Center, located at Hidden Lake High School in Westminster.

Run by the school district, the center works to build bridges between the dozens of diverse communities in Adams County. In District 50 alone, 28 languages are spoken, Haviland said.

So the center, for example, offers Spanish classes for English speakers and English classes for Spanish speakers. It also points people to resources for health care, housing and taxes.

Most of the services are available to people who live within the district, even if they don't have a child who attends one of its schools.

"The school district is the hub of our community, so it's important that we help people understand their community," Haviland said.

In many ways, VOICES is unique to Colorado education, said its director, Daniel Vallez.

About five years ago, the school board saw figures showing the district's population was shifting and began looking into ways it could serve people better, Vallez said.

Most school districts aren't doing that as heavily as District 50, he said.

"The kids in our classrooms are changing, the ethnicity's changing, and (most are) still doing the same thing," Vallez said.'