Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor, wants high school students to have four years of it:
"…such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the ‘role model’ diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together. Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at Melos)."
He’s right, of course, though I don’t think I’d want to take four years of it. I only had to take one year, in 1960-61, and I still remember how cool it was to translate text so old yet still recognizable in its human concern. My grandmother taught Latin at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in the 1920s. But that was college.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
My wife took HS Latin,in 1959 & 60,she said it probably enriched her education,course she was a much smarter and attentive student than myself. WE both graduated in 1961,she was third in a class of 120,I was 90 something. Do feel like HS diplomas from that era, are close to Jr. College grads of today,however.
There is, in fact, a national shortage of Latin teachers. My son is studying Latin and Arabic at UND, and they are actually both languages in high demand right now….
UND? U. of North Dakota? Arabic I can understand being in demand, but Latin? What for?