1985: MCPS Teachers were 9.5% Black, 1.1% Hispanic, .8% Asian

Minutes of September 23, 1985, Montgomery County Board of Education meeting.

Status Report on the Education of Minority Students in MCPS

...Dr. Cody reported that the last area in the report was the employment
situation in MCPS. He said that student enrollment by race was 9.4
percent Asian, 15 percent black, 5.7 percent Hispanic, and 70 percent
white. However, the teaching force was .8 percent Asian, 9.5 percent
black, and 1.1 percent Hispanic. He explained that the problem was
not just that the employment figures did not mirror the enrollment
figures. He thought they needed teachers who were majority/minority
for all students. This year they hired 534 teachers and .6 percent
were Asian, 7.4 percent black, 1.9 percent Hispanic, and 90.1 percent
white. He noted that the employment pool was .1 percent American
Indian, 1.0 percent Asian, 5.2 percent black, .9 percent Hispanic,
and 92.8 percent white.

Dr. Cody said that last year several steps were taken including
recruiting at black colleges, but this did not work. In order to
build up the applicant pool, he had added three people to the
Department of Personnel to set up and carry out recruiting efforts
and seek the help of other people throughout the school system. They
wanted to build networks with college professors and deans and
solicit assistance from citizens in the community. He said they had
a task of not only assigning people to do a job but a task of
thinking through more creative ways of recruiting teachers to that
applicant pool.

Dr. Cody noted that they did have one barrier the Board needed to
know about in terms of Hispanic and Asian candidates. Many of these
people had their education in foreign countries, and the Maryland
State Department of Education would not issue a teaching certificate
to those who received their education in a foreign country and taughtin a foreign language...





http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/boe/meetings/minutes/1985/minutes.092385.pdf