Loma Prieta Elementary School. (Photo by Tim Pearce via Flickr)

Nearly 50.4 percent of students identified themselves as either Hispanic or Latino during the 2009-2010 school year, marking a 1.36 percent increase from the 2008-2009 school year.

This comes as no surprise to many, because the state's Latino population has steadily increased over the last few decades. In 2009, the California Department of Finance reported the state's Latino population as 37 percent.

The state's public school system has 6.2 million students. Twenty-seven percent of those students identified themselves as white, 9 percent as Asian, 7 percent as black, and nearly 7 percent as Filipino, Pacific Islander, Native American or other.

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