MALDEN EDUCATION CENTER ATTRACTS FEW BLACK STUDENTS

Only a handful of black students have enrolled in the Bootheel Education Center at Malden, despite Southeast Missouri State University administrators attempt to imrove minority enrollment.

But, Southeast administrators say doing so will take time.

Only a dozen of the 464 students enrolled last fall at the center were black, and two were men.

The center typically has appealed to mothers, between the ages of 24 and 37, who work part-time. Last fall, 75 percent of the students were women.

Sheila Caskey, Southeast's dean of graduate studies, told a board of regents meeting Wednesday that blacks in the Bootheel aren't enrolling in college.

Part of the problem, she said, is that many blacks don't even make it through high school.

"The dropout rate, particularly of African-American youth in the Bootheel is dismal," she said. "It is awful."

Besides, the lack of public transportation also poses a problem, making it difficult for minority students to get to the center.

And, she said, many blacks in the Bootheel don't have a history of college in their families.

Regent Ann Dombrowski said students have to see a correlation between a college education and jobs.

"You have to have industry coming in so you can get a job," she said. In many parts of the Bootheel jobs are scarce.

Regent Pat Washington wondered how the Bootheel center can sell the benefits of a college education to those who lost interest in school by the sixth grade.

Caskey said Southeast, through federal grants, has been working with minority children, encouraging them to finish high school and go on to college.

"We have established some minority scholarships," she said. "We are just going to try everything we can."

The goal, she said, is to have a "seamless thread" of education from grade school through college.

The Malden center opened in 1988 in a former Pepsi Cola bottling plant. It is run by a consortium involving Southeast, Three Rivers Community College at Poplar Bluff, the University of Missouri Extension and four vocational-technical schools.