Photo courtesy of Stockvault
Will your schools be working to maximize participation in the 2010 census?
That’s not, of course, the job of local school boards and senior school administrators. The U.S. Census Bureau is responsible for conducting the constitutionally mandated, once-a-decade tally of American residents.
Yet, given the results will influence the distribution of $4 trillion in federal funds over the next decade, local school officials have a vested interested in seeing accurate census results.
That’s why the Census Bureau launched its Census in Schools project, which encourages educators to use their schools’ communications pipeline to students’ homes to “get the word out” about the importance of the census in ensuring schools get their fair share of federal dollars.
Census officials are particularly hopeful that schools—and children newly educated about the census—can reach out to poor, minority, and non-English-speaking families, who traditionally have been undercounted in past censuses.
“Our hope is that material will find their way home in backpacks,” says Jennifer Smits, a spokesperson for the U.S. Census Bureau. “It is important that children are the messengers, especially when talking about communities where children are the ones who speak English. There’s a lot of fear and hesitancy among people who don’t speak English about what the census is. Our hope is that these children will go back home and say, “Oh, we learned about this in school. It’s okay to fill out.”
School systems certainly don’t have to add yet another task to their endless to-do list. But local school leaders might want to see if their municipalities or chambers of commerce are organizing a public service campaign to encourage public participation in the census. If so, school officials might want to jump on the bandwagon.
Because, in the end, the census results are “critically important for school districts,” says Mary Kusler, assistant director of policy and advocacy at the American Association of School Administrators. “As long as we continue to receive so much funding from the federal government, and the eligibility of so many grants is based on what the census counts, it’s going to impact school funding.”
To learn more, read about the Census in Schools project on the Census Bureau’s website.
Del Stover, Senior Editor
