Third Annual Latino Education Conference set for March 2012

The third annual Latino Education and Advocacy Days summit will be held at Cal State San Bernardino on Wednesday, March 28, in the Santos Manuel Student Union Events Center from 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

The annual conference focuses on educational issues affecting Latinos at the national, regional and local levels, said Enrique Murillo, the executive director and founder of the LEAD project, and a professor of education at Cal State San Bernardino.

“Education in the Latino community in the United States continues to be one of the most critical issues we face today and in the future of our country as more and more young Latinos enter school age,” Murillo said. “We want our young Latinos to stay in school, to not only graduate from high school, but attend and graduate from college so that they take their rightful place in the workforce and in society.”

Murillo said this year’s LEAD summit will focus on issues that include: the current state of Latino education; sustaining, replicating and bringing up-to-scale programs that work for Latino youth; creating future student leaders; the use of technological innovations to help increase Latino education and advocacy; and the effectiveness of being a Hispanic Serving Institution with the additional federal grants to Latino college students during and after graduation.

Among the speakers scheduled to present at this year’s LEAD summit is U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Eduardo Ochoa, who will deliver the morning keynote address. Ochoa serves as the secretary of education’s chief adviser on higher-education issues and administers more than 60 programs, totaling nearly $3 billion annually, that are designed to provide financial assistance to eligible students enrolled in postsecondary institutions.

Delivering the welcome and opening remarks will be CSUSB President Albert Karnig and Jay Fiene, the dean of the CSUSB College of Education.

The LEAD 2012 honorary chair, or “el padrino de honor,” is veteran educator Ernie Garcia, who retired after serving 11 years as dean of the CSUSB College of Education. Garcia has also served as a consultant to the California Department of Education and as a board member to the Rialto Unified School District. That school district later honored Garcia by naming an elementary school after him.

This year’s free summit is again hosted by CSUSB’s College of Education. Online registration is now open at the LEAD website.

The LEAD 2012 summit will be webcast live courtesy of LatinoGraduate.net to nearly 1,500 viewing sites in the United States and in 28 countries, including Mexico, Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, England, Guatemala, Iceland, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Spain and South Korea.

Some of the universities that will host town hall viewing sites include George Washington University; University of California, Santa Cruz; Brown University, Providence; Texas Tech University, Lubbock; University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Chicago; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, as well as numerous international universities.

To date, the event has attracted more than 154 sponsors and partners, including the National Education Association-Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute, California Association for Bilingual Education, Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities and the National Institute for Latino Policy.

For more information about Cal State San Bernardino, contact the university’s Office of Public Affairs at (909) 537-5007. Visit its news website at news.csusb.edu.