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      Sources: 1) Gray, Mark M. (2014, June). Catholic Schools in the United States in the 21st Century: Importance in Church Life, Challenges, and Opportunities. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. 2) McDonald, D. & Schultz, M.M. (2014). United States Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools 2013–14: The Annual Statistical Report on Schools, Enrollment and Staffing.

      Note: Numbers are approximations.

      Poverty Among Hispanic Children is Real

      In the 2014 report America's Hispanic Children, the. Child Trends Hispanic Institute provides troubling statistics about the economic condition of Hispanic children in the United States. The report notes that 62% of Hispanic children live in low-income families, approximately one-third live in poverty, and one-in-eight lives in deep poverty. More than one-third of Hispanic children live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.³⁹ Only 11% of non-Hispanic white children live at or below the poverty level.

      Family Life

      Most Hispanic children live in low-income households. The majority (58%) live with parents who are married. Fifty-nine percent share home-cooked meals with their families at least seven times per week, which is a higher percentage compared to non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and the U.S. population as a whole. Seven out of 10 Hispanic children have at least one parent who is employed fulltime throughout the year.⁴⁰

      Language

      Eighty-seven percent of school-age Hispanic children speak only English at home or speak English very well. Among foreign-born Hispanic school-age children the proportion is 70%.

      Hispanic Adults Raising Hispanic Children

      Among Hispanics between the ages of 20 and 49, 51% are U.S. born and 49% are immigrants.

      More than 60% of Hispanic adults 18 and older say that they only speak English at home or speak English very well. English language proficiency drops by half among foreign-born Hispanic adults: only 32% report the same level of English language ability.⁴¹

      Six in 10 Hispanic adults ages 25 and older have earned a high school degree or less. Approximately one in four has an associate’s degree or attended some college, and 14% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.⁴²

      As of 2013, Hispanic adults 18 and older self-identified with the following religious traditions: Catholic: 55%, Protestant: up to 21% (16% Evangelical/Pentecostal; 5% mainline), Non-religiously affiliated: 18%, Other Christian: 3%, and Other: 1%.⁴³

      Hispanic Catholic Students

      More than half of all school-age Catholics in the United States are Hispanic. However, only 4% of Hispanic school-age Catholics are enrolled in Catholic schools. By comparison, among all school-age Catholics (including all races/ethnicities), 12% are enrolled in Catholic schools.⁴⁴

      Catholic school data for the academic year 2013–14 reveals that only 15% of students enrolled in Catholic schools were Hispanic.⁴⁵

      Hispanic Students in Responding Schools

      Enrollment

      Reponding principals report that the median percentage of their school’s student body identifying as Hispanic is 16%. However, this proportion varies widely based on region: principals from the South and the Midwest said that only about 10% of their students are Hispanic. This figure increases to 16% in the Northeast, and 33% in the West. (See Figure 5)

      Hispanic students represented by the survey attend schools with an average enrollment of 272 students compared to the national average of 295 based on NCEA data (2014–15). Yet over half of these Hispanic students go to schools where the majority of the student body is also Hispanic. Roughly one in four attends a school where over 75% of the student body identifies as Hispanic and over half of Hispanic students attend schools where 10% or less of the students are white.

      Catholic schools serving Hispanic students report an average of four different languages used by their students in addition to English. In decreasing order of frequency, languages most commonly spoken include Spanish, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

      Sharing the Workload

      As might be expected, Hispanic students are not evenly distributed across all participating study schools. Instead, just 15% of responding schools educate over half of the Hispanic students represented in the study. These schools—which enroll approximately 140 or more Hispanic students—are not concentrated in any one region. Instead, their distribution (19% in the Northeast, 22% in the Midwest, 30% in the South, and 29% in the West) generally aligns with the regional distribution of all survey respondents.

      Where Were Responding Schools’ Hispanic Students and Their Parents Born?

      Among schools surveyed, the median percentage of enrolled Hispanic students born in the United States was 80%. The median response ranged from 63% in the Northeast to 86% in the West. By comparison, national-level data for all Hispanic children in the U.S. indicates that 93% of Hispanic children were born in this country.⁴⁶

      While the vast majority of Hispanic children in the study schools were born in the United States, most (53%) have at least one foreign-born parent. For approximately 38%, both parents are foreign born.⁴⁷

FIGURE 5

      HISPANIC ENROLLMENT AMONG ALL RESPONDING SCHOOLS, BY REGION

      The Catholic School and the Hispanic Family

      The term family resonates strongly in the ears, minds, and hearts of Catholic educators and Hispanic Catholics. Our shared Catholic heritage constantly invites us to affirm the communal dimension of our faith as members of one family: God’s family. On the one hand, Hispanic cultures embody a strong sense of family life, expressed through multiple levels of relationships that begin with parents and children and regularly embrace relatives as well as many others through bonds of faith and friendship. On the other hand, Catholic schools are family-supportive environments in which educators birth new life as they share knowledge and faith, care for the whole person, work with children and adults as partners, prepare young people to be active citizens in society, and shape souls to achieve fullness across generations. That Catholic schools and Hispanics coincide in the affirmation of the familial bond is not an accident. It is the starting point of a relationship that deserves to be affirmed.

      Catholic Schools as

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