Here’s a back-to-school idea that’s kind of back to the future.

The census bureau reports that the country is currently one-third minority. But take a look inside the classrooms of Schoolhouse America this fall. You’ll see an even browner world that is a harbinger of what is to come.

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Minorities accounted for 42 percent of the nation's elementary, middle and high school students when schools opened two years ago.  That percentage should be even higher as the nation's nearly 50 million students return this month. Among pre-kindergarteners, those 5 years old and younger, minorities number 45 percent. 

And Latinos are undercounted by the census, because many of them are immigrants. They are transient. They don't speak the language.  (Local governments would like census takers to find all these folks because census numbers translate into dollars and power for the jurisdiction.)

The increasing velocity of the country’s historic racial change -- from white to brown -- is unfurling in classrooms across the U.S. When journalists report the existing population numbers, they offer a snapshot of the present. But a look at the school numbers provides a snapshot of the future.

Admittedly, public school enrollment figures can be a tad misleading. More affluent children are more likely to go to private schools. White communities generally are more affluent than communities of color.

Yet, who could deny what is generally in store for Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi, and Nevada?  In each of those states, non-hispanic whites make up the majority of the general population, but minorities make up the majority of the public school population.

Suburban school districts occupy ground zero for this changing student body. For example, look at Montgomery County, Md. It is one of the richest counties in the country. Latino and Asian students now represent the majority.

Next door is Prince George's County, Md. It is the wealthiest black suburb in the U.S. Minorities represent 92 percent of the public school population there.

Schools in Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas, and schools in Cobb County, Ga., just north of Atlanta, are now majority minority, according to 2005 enrollment numbers from the U.S. Department of Education.

Even in Kansas, where 82 percent of residents are non-Hispanic whites, there are three counties in the southwestern portion of the state -- Finney, Ford and Seward -- where minority students are now the majority.  In fact, according to the latest U.S. Census figures, Seward is the first county in Kansas to become officially more than 50 percent Hispanic.

This changing school population is attracting a lot of attention from colleges and businesses. Why? Because these increasingly brown students are the future classes in colleges and universities. Human resources planners for private companies look to these numbers and see their next wave of workers.

Colleges, including those serving the news business, are increasingly trying to grapple with increasingly diverse students bodies.

"Collectively, the people running our journalism and mass-comm programs don’t look much like America, and they don’t even look a lot like their own student bodies, which are now pretty much two-to-one female," Tom Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, wrote in a report last month. "Like the media industries, we’ve got to work harder and smarter on this problem. That means everything from better mentoring of female and minority faculty to cultivating media interest among students of color when they’re still in our elementary and secondary schools. We simply need more talent in the pipeline."

Steve Doig, a demographics expert who is a professor at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, agrees with Kunkel.

"Here among the border states, we're wrestling daily with the population changes that must be addressed in the schools and in the profession," said Doig. "We're chasing a moving target that is accelerating. Programs and newsrooms that aren't aggressive about nurturing and recruiting talented students of color are going to see the gap get wider and wider."

Visit a local elementary school.

Better still, visit your old elementary school and stare at the future.


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