KOLD News 13 live, local and late breaking-Horne, TUSD at Odds Over Ethnic Studies

Horne, TUSD at Odds Over Ethnic Studies

By J.D. Wallace, KOLD News 13 Reporter

A course in the cash-strapped Tucson Unified School District is one that the state superintendent of public schools has said divides students.  Tom Horne's statements have caused a rift between himself and TUSD over whether the course should continue.

"Very topical," Curtis Acosta told his students.  "Same stuff that Mr. Urrea was writing about in 2002, 2003 is right now."

Thirty four students in Acosta's Latino Literature class Thursday were on Devil's Highway, just part of an Ethnic Studies course at Tucson High.

"It made me want to learn more," said senior Arturo Rodriguez.

"He really put hope in me," said senior Vanessa Valencia.

"All my students, I want them to be critical.  Critical of me, critical of what we read in here," Acosta said.

They aren't the only ones.

"I've recommended that TUSD abolish its Ethnic Studies department.  In administrative costs alone, it would save over two million dollars," state school superintendent Tom Horne said on Wednesday.

He was in Tucson to promote Healhty Bodies/Healthy Minds, and weighed in on TUSD's ailing budget.

"We haven't found another district in the state that has ethnic studies," Horne said.

"It's the only district in the nation that has something like this," said Augustine Romero, senior academic director for TUSD's Ethnic Studies.

He said that desegregation money pays for the program, which is available at four TUSD high schools-Tucson, Rincon, Cholla, and Pueblo-- to any student there who's interested.

"They outperform all other students at those four sites in our eleventh and twelfth grades on the AIMS test," Romero said.

"Ethnic Studies divides kids up by their own ethnicity.  I think that's contrary to the philosophy of what American public schools should be doing," Horne said.

Acosta said that getting students interested in their own heritage can help them develop a critical mind that will then help them to explore outside their own culture.

"They're beginning to form an academic identity that they might not have had before," Acosta said.

"It has helped me a lot because I didn't think that because I didn't think that we, Hispanics, really had a lot of luck with that, going to college," Valencia said.

"They teach you it's not that much about the grades, it's that you actually learn something," Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said that he's written to Horne's office and asked him to visit.  Horne said that he's willing to do so sometime that he's in Tucson, but he also said that desegregation money is still tax money.  He said that he's not taking action against the program, but he wants people in Tucson to decide about the course on their own.