Wayland Baptist University receives funding for Hispanic student support

LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) - Wayland Baptist University has been awarded $3 million to enhance its Hispanic student support. The Title V grant is a part of the Department of Education’s Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program.

Joshua Mora is the Joachim-Endowed Professor of Spanish at Wayland Baptist. He said they felt like there was a need to enhance their programming for their Hispanic students.

“We have a large international presence here at this campus, and a lot of them are Latino and Hispanic,” Mora said. “So we wanted to find a way to better serve our Hispanic and Latino students.”

They plan to use the funding for recruitment and retention.

“There’s some money in there for technology; we’re also creating positions; there’s going to be a student success disability coordinator that’s going to help out with the students academically, along with a bilingual academic coach,” Mora said.

The university will be implementing bilingual peer mentors and new faculty training about cultural inclusiveness, too.

“Including possibly teaching some Spanish language to our faculty and staff to help them communicate better with our non-native English speaking students, which we have quite a few,” Mora said.

He said there are many students the school needs to target. Right now, the campus’s population is 38% Hispanic and Latino.

Cecilia Guerrero is a Spanish major at Wayland Baptist, and part of that 38%. She said she knows this grant is going to help her community.

“It’s going to open that wired network of being able to reach out to one another,” Guerrero said.

Guerrero expects a lot of growth for new and existing students from this funding.

“It’s going to expand on the opportunities that we’re going to be given, as the Hispanic Student Association starts coming to play,” Guerrero said. “I think it’s going to do us a lot of good.”

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