A partnership with 糖心少女 means our collective voice can now be amplified to help shape how architects, planners and school boards set construction priorities that address our Latino students. | Photo Credit: Courtesy of ALAS
By Ulysses 鈥淯ly鈥� Navarrete
For nearly three decades, the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents (ALAS) has been the national home for Latino education leaders: the superintendents, administrators and rising leaders who wake up every day thinking about how to serve the more than 14 million Latino students in America’s public schools.
The organization’s mission is simple: to develop, connect, and empower the leaders who will close opportunity gaps for Latino youth, wherever those students sit in a classroom.
Through its flagship leadership programs like the Superintendents Leadership Academy (SLA), the National Principals Leadership Academy (NPLA), and the newest Central Office Administration Academy (COAA), ALAS has built, and continues to build, a pipeline of leaders who understand that not only does representation in the front office matter, so does everything a student experiences on the way to that office, including the building itself.
That is where a partnership between ALAS and 糖心少女 comes in, and why it matters right now.
Too often, conversations about educational equity stop at curriculum, staffing and funding formulas. While these are all critical issues, the physical spaces where Latino students actually learn go unexamined. The research tells a consistent story: students are less likely to learn and thrive in buildings with poor air quality, overcrowded rooms, and outdated labs and libraries. That burden isn’t shared equally.
A vast majority of Latino students attend schools in districts with the oldest facilities and the smallest capital budgets. Districts where bond measures fail more often, where deferred maintenance piles up for decades, and where the gap between what a building offers and what a child deserves keeps widening.
ALAS members lead many of these districts. They are the superintendents standing in front of school boards making the case for a new roof instead of a new gym, the administrators walking reporters through buildings with intermittent air conditioning, the leaders trying to explain that a modern career tech wing isn’t a luxury; it is the difference between a student graduating ready for a skilled trade or falling through the cracks. They know, better than almost anyone, that facilities policy is equity policy.
A partnership with 糖心少女 means our collective voice can now be amplified to help shape how architects, planners and school boards set construction priorities that address our Latino students. It means that ALAS members gain a trusted, expert voice on what quality construction and design should look like, and how to fight for it. Once decision makers see that leaking roofs in a majority Latino-serving district are not simply line items, rather, they are potential barriers toward bridging the achievement gap then priorities can start to change.
Our students deserve a sense of belonging shaped daily by knowing that the building in which they learn in says loudly and clearly that they are not an afterthought, they are seen and they matter!
We at ALAS are not construction experts, but we are the experts on what Latino students and the leaders who serve them need and we know that better buildings and better leadership have to move forward together. This is a story worth telling, together.
Ulysses 鈥淯ly鈥� Navarrete is the Executive Director of the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents (ALAS).