Student Demographic
The home life of many of my students today is something that our generation could never comprehend. I have students in my classroom that are already working to help their parents pay bills due to the extremes of our current economy. I have students that are only in attendance for the threat that if they aren’t, then they along with their entire family of illegal immigrants gets deported (true story by the way.) I have students that want nothing more than to just go to work, start making money, and doing adult things with no regards that their current reading levels are not even close to being on par with the reading levels that are actually needed to perform their future jobs or even some careers well. I will get to that here shortly.
Almost 80% of the students at Rudder high school are classified as economically disadvantaged. By definition, we know that it means that over 80% of our students belong to families who face significant financial hardship. These hardships could impact their educational success. Students may not be able to attend school because they have to help parents pay bills. Maybe they live too close to the school to take a bus, but they don’t want to risk the walk to school because of the dangers of the neighborhood they live in.
The neighborhood across the bridge closest to us is where a large portion of our students live, and according to my school resource officers, it reflects a higher crime rate with many of the students in our school being involved in crime-related activity. In 2023, I had a student in my class that was involved in a high-conflict shooting with a peace officer, and he is still suffering the consequences of those actions. He was 14 years old. Last year I had a student also from my class that shut the entire school down after posting on a public forum how someone can call in a shooting threat to our school by giving all of the information that they needed to say. Here is the kicker, it was happening while we were all in class. She was not in my class directly at the time as this happened not in my class period with her, but yes, she was actively telling someone the words to say while they called in a school shooting which caused our whole school to go into a secure lock down. Talk about nerve wracking, and then heartbreaking to hear that it was one of my kids that made that choice, and now there is no telling what her future will look like.
Although disadvantaged, many of our students' identities and worldviews are shaped by their families' strong cultural traditions and ties to the community. Rudder High School, a 5A high school, has a strong attendance population of approximately 1700 children across all four grades of the secondary level. The Hispanic community makes up approximately 65% of the population. Of that population, you have a vast number of students who are a growing majority of emergent bilingual students that are trying to take command of the English language within the four domains of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The Black/African American population makes up approximately 18% of our students. 14% of the population falls under the white/Caucasian race, mixed races come in at approximately 1.5%, and the remaining 1% is seen in the Asian and Native American community. We have a fairly even gender ratio of 51% Male and 49% female, with an approximate student-teacher ratio of 24:1.
Comments: