The growing diversity of central Ohio’s population means that schools continue to change. It’s up to families and school officials to take advantage of the opportunities this presents, even as they deal with the challenges.

The change is especially noticeable in suburban districts, where the percentage of nonwhite students has doubled, or something close to it, in most districts. Much of the change is because of immigration. While black students still are the largest nonwhite group, their percentage countywide is smaller than it was 10 years ago.

Percentages of Asian, Latino and multiracial students are up. The changes are detailed in a new report by KidsOhio.org, a nonprofit organization that studies education issues.

Click here to read full editorial from the Columbus Dispatch.

Its 29.3 percent rate would have qualified Dublin as most diverse among 17 suburban Columbus districts 10 years ago. Now, it ranks seventh.

Whitehall topped the list a decade ago, when 29.7 percent of its students were not white. Today, white students are in the minority.

In every Franklin County school district, the percentage of white students has dropped while minority-student populations have grown, according to a study being released today by KidsOhio.org, a nonpartisan research group based in Columbus.

Click here to read the full Dispatch article.

Click here to read the full KidsOhio/Columbus Urban League report.

In the 2000-01 school year, when charters still were new in Ohio, 87 percent of the 748 Franklin County charter students were members of minorities. In the 2010-11 school year, roughly 33,000 students attended local charters, and 63 percent were nonwhite.

The local shift mirrors one statewide, where the total percentage of black, Latino, Asian, American Indian and multiracial students has dropped from 86 percent to about 60 percent in the past 10 years.

The reason for the shift, experts say, is twofold: Parents now have more charter schools from which to choose, which makes the option attractive to a wider range of parents. And many schools now are marketing to suburban families instead of focusing on students from urban districts such as Columbus.

“Charters are starting to look somewhat like the districts,” said Mark Real, president and CEO of KidsOhio, a Columbus nonprofit group that studies education issues.

A KidsOhio report to be made public today discusses enrollment trends in county public schools. It notes that all 16 Franklin County districts have more students of color than they did a decade ago.

Click here to read the full article.

Today, KidsOhio and School Choice Ohio jointly released a guide for parents and students, Get a Jumpstart on College & Your Career: High School Classes Can Count for College without Costing You a Dime.

The brochure showcases four opportunities for students to earn from a few credits up to two years of college credit or more while they are in high school: 1) Early College High Schools, 2) College TechPrep, 3) Post Secondary Enrollment Options, and 4) Advanced Placement.

“Our state and national college attainment goals are to increase the number of degrees awarded in Ohio from 75,000 in 2009 to 100,000 by 2017 and to reclaim the United States’ top rank among nations,” said Ann Bischoff of KidsOhio, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education policy organization. “If we are going to meet these goals, we have to bolster college-going among low-income students and would-be first generation college-goers.”

One way to increase college success is to educate more Ohio students about opportunities for earning tuition-free college credit while in high school, known as dual enrollment. Not only does dual enrollment alleviate a financial burden for families, but it also exposes students to the real-life demands of college. This exposure builds confidence among would-be first generation college students about college-level work.

“The students who need these options the most are the ones who are last to find out about them,” said Sarah Pechan of School Choice Ohio. “Students are excited about the chance to ‘kill two birds with one stone’ and earn both college credit and high school credit for a single class. This brochure is the first place where all of these options have been compiled into one source.”

To download a copy of the brochure, click here. To request copies, please call School Choice Ohio at 614.223.1555 or KidsOhio at 614.228.6400.

A new KidsOhio study of the Weinland school zone, one of the poorest and most-troubled in Columbus, offers new insight into how parents choose schools for their children.

Click here to read the article in full.

BY RITA PRICE

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Suburban school districts more known for their affluence are seeing double- and triple-digit increases in the percentage of students considered to be economically disadvantaged.

A report to be released this week by KidsOhio, a Columbus-based education nonprofit organization, found that nearly half of the disadvantaged students in Franklin County now are enrolled in a suburban school district.

The report documented the change over five years, from the 2004-05 school year to last school year.

Although Columbus schools have the highest rate of disadvantaged kids, that district’s increase was more modest.

In Worthington, where just 6 percent of students were disadvantaged five years ago, the rate now stands at 22 percent.

In Hilliard, the figure jumped to 21 percent, up from 10 percent.

“If you tell people there’s an increase in poverty in Columbus, they get that,” said Mark Real, president and CEO of KidsOhio. “But this information is really striking to them. It shows that this is a shared issue.”

Click here to read the full article from the Dispatch.

By Jennifer Smith Richards

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

For the third year in a row, the Columbus school district has earned a C on its state report card.

And for the second year in a row, district students met six of 30 state testing, graduation and attendance goals.

But the district is cheering progress on a measure called value-added, which shows that students learned more than a year’s worth of material. The year before, students gained about a year’s worth.

“When you think about a district where so many kids come in behind, and three-quarters of them are eligible for free- and reduced-price lunch, and the kids are above the state expectations in terms of progress, I think that’s significant,” said Mark Real, president and CEO of KidsOhio.org. The Columbus-based nonprofit group studies school issues and Columbus schools in particular.

The state grades districts on a number of measures, but Columbus has earned its C in recent years because of an index of how students scored on tests, not just how many passed.

For the first time in five years, however, Columbus’ performance-index score declined, albeit slightly. For last school year, the index score was 80.4, down from 81.7 in the previous year.

An index score of 80 is required for a C, which the state calls “continuous improvement.” The highest index score is 120.

Superintendent Gene Harris said the dip was so slight that she doesn’t view it as negative.

“Five years of straight growth is just not what typically happens. You can have an upward growth trend, but growth every year is not typical. I would be more concerned if we had a steeper dip or if you were seeing it over several years,” Harris said.

Mike Wiles, a candidate for the Columbus school board, said the district hasn’t made enough progress.

“That’s just a breadth of difference between not making it and making it,” he said. “If your bar is to maintain or minimally improve over the previous year, you really come up short. I think that’s the problem.”

School-board member Ramona Reyes, who is running for re-election, saw the results as promising.

“Unfortunately, we can’t do this overnight,” she said, but “we are improving.”

The district showed a slight decline on a federal measure of students’ progress in math and reading, too. The federal adequate yearly progress goals track how well different groups of students are doing instead of merely looking at the student body as a whole. For example, it singles out black, Latino and special-needs students.

If they aren’t improving quickly enough, then the whole school or district fails the federal measure.

Harris said she’s focused on the fact that students got more than a year’s work during the school year, and that even those students singled out in the federal progress measure are catching up.

“I feel like we’re going in the right direction. While I’m pleased, I’m not satisfied,” she said.

Harris wouldn’t say when she thinks the district can climb a rung on the grade scale, only that it would — just as it moved from the lowest grades over the years.

“We didn’t pop right out of ‘academic emergency’ and ‘academic watch.’ It was the result of a strategic action and long-term hard work. That’s the same way we’ll reach the next level of ‘effective,’  ” she said. “It can be expected.”

jsmithrichards@dispatch.com