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About a quarter of Winston-Salem children speak Spanish at home, census survey finds

Downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Photo courtesy indy beetle, creative commons. shorturl.at/npKV1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

About 11 percent of Winston-Salem adults speak Spanish at home. But the number could be on the rise because it's much higher for children. Census figures indicate about one in four kids in the city are Spanish speakers. That's about double the statewide number.

That presents a unique challenge for educators: providing information in accessible ways for students who come from an increasingly diverse background. 

In 2019, Gov. Roy Cooper established a task force called “Developing a Representative & Inclusive Vision for Education,” or DRIVE. The focus of the group is to develop a diverse educational landscape for students. 

In a report issued earlier this year, DRIVE detailed 10 recommendations to reach that goal.

They include boosting financial support for aspiring minority teachers and creating a network for educators of color.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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