Schools encourage parents to fill out census form

The push is on at Newport-Mesa Unified schools to get as many parents as possible to fill out the 2010 Census, the theory being that the more students are counted, the greater the chance of federal money in the absence of state aid.

Although counting everybody is important to the U.S. Census Bureau, traditionally it’s been the Latino population in the district that’s specifically targeted due to the occasional language barriers, said Amparo Ames, a district coordinator who serves as a liaison between the Latino communities and the schools.

Of the 21,000 students in the district, more than 40% are Latino, accounting for 9,112 students, according to 2009-10 district data.

“Some have just arrived here and others have been here for years,” said Ames, adding that Latino students will often interpret the language in the census for their limited English-speaking parents.

In cases where neither the children nor the parents speak English or Spanish, well, the schools have interpreters, Ames said.

“The important thing is that everybody knows that filling out the census has nothing to do with whether they are here illegally or not,” Ames said. “In other words, nobody is afraid of the government — at least as far as the census is concerned.”

That attitude would seem to reflect a study by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington D.C., which was released Thursday.

It said that 7 out of 10 Hispanics are not worried about the census and feel that it is “good” for the Hispanic community. If there was any skepticism among Latinos on filling out the 10 questions on the census, the study said, it was among the native-born Latinos, not the foreign-born.

Eloisa Rangel, a Costa Mesa resident for 19 years who was born in Mexico, seemed to reflect that trend as well.

“I’m filling it out right now,” said a Spanish-speaking Rangel, whose son, 16, attends Costa Mesa High School.

“I think it’s important that everybody be counted: Black, white, Mexicana, [Chinese], Japanese, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that we get it done,” she said.

At St. Joachim Catholic Church on Orange Avenue in Costa Mesa, a sign written in four languages hangs outside the front of the church, stating that filling out the census is “safe, easy and important.”

The languages?

“Spanish, English, Vietnamese and Korean,” said the Rev. Stephen Doktorczyk, noting that nearly 70% of his 2,800-family congregation is Spanish-speaking or Latino.

“I don’t think you’d see these kind of signs in affluent areas, for whatever reasons,” he said. “But you see them everywhere in places like Santa Ana or Garden Grove.”

When the entire U.S. population is tallied in July, the results will be sent to President Obama by the end of the year, said Cynthia Endo, a California spokeswoman for the U.S. Census Bureau.

The census count began in early March, when the questionnaires were sent out. The census bureau asked everyone to return the forms by Thursday. This year’s census was to be the simplest and quickest to fill out in recent memory, census officials said.