This demographic milestone happens as educators increasingly focus their attention on the achievement gap – a persistent disparity in test scores, graduation rates and grades between white students and the Latinos who lag behind them.

Last month, a countywide task force of local superintendents and school board members publicly pledged to reduce the gap in pass rates on the math portion of the high school exit exam. State law says all students starting with this year's 10th-grade class must pass it to earn a diploma. Among last year's sophomores, 40 percent of Latinos passed the math test, compared with 74 percent of whites.

Graphic   Ethnic shift: Latinos now a plurality   Related video Issues in education: From the County Office of Education   Achievement Gap Education spotlight Joint effort on high school exit exam

"It's no longer Latinos or Hispanics entering the mainstream. They are the mainstream," said Ed Brand, superintendent of the Sweetwater Union High School District and chairman of the task force. "And if the mainstream isn't successful, then all of our society is worse off."

A Latino education summit scheduled for tomorrow at the University of California San Diego will include a report on local Latinos' school performance.

Next month, the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans has scheduled a town hall-style meeting in San Diego so that federal officials can hear about local education needs and inform the community about the No Child Left Behind Act.

The federal education law mandates that schools improve test scores or face sanctions that can include replacing the staff or putting the school under the management of a private company. It also gives parents the power to transfer their children out of failing schools.

 The law says educators must show improvement not only in schoolwide average scores, but also in specific groups of students, such as Latinos and non-English speakers.

There are 67.6 percent more Latino students in local public schools than there were 11 years ago, a rate that mirrors the 67.7 percent increase in non-English-speaking students during the same period.

The demographic flip-flop in San Diego County schools is the culmination of a decades-long trend. In the early 1970s, white students outnumbered Latinos by more than 6-to-1. The number of Latinos and their percentage of enrollment has steadily increased since then. Last year, 39.83 percent of the nearly 500,000 kindergarten-through-12th-grade students in local public schools were white and 39.82 percent were Latino.

Although this year's enrollment figures haven't been compiled yet, a report prepared for the County Office of Education states that Latinos will be the largest single ethnic group for the 2003-04 school year.

Statewide, Latinos have outnumbered whites in public schools since 1996. Last school year, 45 percent of the state's 6.2 million public school students were Latino and 34 percent were white.

The surge of Latino students means local schools must improve learning for a historically lagging group in order to avoid state and federal penalties, but at the same time cut programs and employees in response to the state's budget crisis.

The ramifications of the demographic changes and educators' increased attention to Latinos makes this an important moment, said Rosalia Salinas, co-chairwoman of the Latino summit and director of leadership and accountability at the San Diego County Office of Education.

"It's momentous because of the underachievement of our students," Salinas said. "The gap has existed, and I'm afraid that in some cases it might even be widening."

Indeed, local Latinos are scoring lower than they did a decade ago on the verbal portion of the SAT college entrance exam. They have gone from scoring 82 points lower than whites 10 years ago to 93 points lower last year. The test is scored on a scale of 200 to 800.

The report to be released at the summit also highlights further fallout from the achievement gap:

 Fewer than two-thirds of Latinos graduate from high school in four years, compared with 79 percent of whites and 85 percent of Asians.

 Only 6.4 percent of Latinos are in gifted and talented education classes, compared with 16.8 percent of whites and 23 percent of Asians.

 In the graduating class of 2002, 21.7 percent of Latinos had completed the courses necessary for admission into University of California and California State University schools. By contrast, 45.5 percent of whites completed the required courses. The gap between Latinos and whites in this category has shrunk in recent years.

 The rate at which Latinos pass Advanced Placement exams (high school courses for which students can earn college credit) in classes other than Spanish has nearly doubled in four years, but the pass rate among whites is still more than triple that of Latinos.

Salinas said the message she hopes to send to summit attendees is: "These are the statistics. This is the reality. But it doesn't have to be your  reality."

Guillermo Gomez, a sixth-grade teacher at Vista Square Elementary School in Chula Vista, said there should be multiple means of assessing Latinos' academic proficiency. He said the all-or-nothing consequences of the high school exit exam threatens to shut Latinos out of higher education opportunities by denying them diplomas, he said.

At his school, Gomez founded Mi Papá, a night program that invites Latino dads to campus, and he is trying to spread it to other schools in Chula Vista.

"We need more programs that encourage participation in the school setting so parents feel like they're part of the school," Gomez said.