With even locked down Democrat states talking about resuming in-person classroom instruction next fall, school is looking pretty dreadful for many American kids, who will likely
find themselves in portable classrooms or overcrowded classrooms as resources are stretched to the limit because of the over 20,000 and counting young illegal aliens being dumped around the country by Joe Biden.
When the new school year starts, just how many illegal alien children will taxpayers in your community be required to educate free of charge?
The answer isn’t as simple as you might think.
Numbers are hard to come by, but back in 2014 when Obama allowed a similar wave of illegal alien children to enter the country, Houston, Texas radio station KTRH reported that 4,200 of the kids that crossed into the country illegally stayed in Texas. Debbie Ratcliffe of the Texas Education Agency said taxpayers footed the $9,200 bill per kid.
We could see some increased class sizes, especially in border districts,” Ratcliffe stated.
And will this slow down the learning process, with teachers devoting time to children that don’t have command of English?
“Mexican immigrants come to us with some level of education. But Central American children often come with no education whatsoever,” Ratcliffe told KTRH’s Cliff Saunders.
Lewis Loflin of Sullivan-County.com reported that in Virginia in 2014, because of the continuing influx of low-achieving Hispanics, Fairfax County, a self-proclaimed illegal alien sanctuary community, forced its school system to drop honors classes in an attempt to narrow the achievement gap.
While Texas, New York, Florida and California have received the most illegal alien children, many end up in states far from the southern border.
As our friend Allen West observed back in 2014, “Illegal immigrant children are being quietly dumped in states without the states’ knowledge or consent.”
Elected officials far from the U.S.-Mexico border claimed that the government resettled hundreds of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children without adequate notice and even refused to detail the exact locations where the children are being kept.
Fox News reported “748 unaccompanied minors have been transferred from areas near the border to the Chicago area. Of the original group of 748 kids, 319 have been placed with family members or sponsors while they await an immigration hearing. The other 429 have been placed in facilities run by the Heartland Alliance, a nonprofit organization that receives grants from the Department of Health and Human Services.”
Federal data (2014) from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families showed Tennessee received 760 illegal alien children – this is well over the average population of a primary school in Tennessee, meaning the state must build more schools or create larger classes for citizen students to accommodate the illegals.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the numbers of illegal alien children being released into localities across American are substantial.
More than 37,000 children who crossed the border unaccompanied by parents were placed with sponsors in just six months according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports the WSJ. The states that received the most children were Texas, with 5,280; New York, 4,244; and California, 3,909.
Such students often require a variety of services, including subsidized meals, English-language instruction, tutoring and psychological counseling, Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools told The Wall Street Journal.
While some districts claimed they could handle the 2014 wave with existing resources, others expressed concern about a potential financial hit. "I don't think we can handle it without hiring additional personnel," James Meza Jr., superintendent of Louisiana's Jefferson Parish Public School System, which has a sizeable Honduran population told the WSJ. "It will be somewhat of a stress point."
In Miami-Dade, the additional services required in the 2014 wave cost the district an estimated $2,000 more per pupil, Mr. Carvalho said. As a result, the county school board passed a resolution to request additional federal funding.
Back in 2014 the federal government spent about $250 to $1,000 per child, and the cost eventually ran past $2 billion – and that doesn’t include the costs passed on to local school districts when the Obama administration told them they had no choice but to accept any illegal immigrants the feds choose to send to the community.
That is $2,000 extra per illegal alien student school administrators, such as Miami-Dade’s Carvalho estimate, but that $2,000 doesn’t include the cost of new construction necessary to accommodate them, which could run in excess of $33 million (2014 dollars) for each new school that must be built. An average elementary school accommodates 600 students, meaning locals taxpayers are potentially on the hook for the construction of some 67 new schools at a cost of at least $2.2 billion.
But that $2.2billion (2014 dollars) in local school construction costs is just year one. As the illegal alien children move through your local school pipeline the bulge in the school population will require a new junior high school in a few years and a new high school after that. At 500 or more unaccompanied minor illegal aliens being detained on the southern border every day that’s the equivalent of one elementary school added to the tax burden of American taxpayers every day.
The toll-free Capitol Switchboard (1-866-220-0044), call and urge your Senators and Representative to co-sponsor Senator Mike Lee’s (R-UT) "Stopping Border Surges Act," which tightens the asylum process and rules around the release of migrant children into the U.S. His office says the bill will close loopholes that encourage "vulnerable immigrant populations to take dangerous, illegal paths of entry into the United States."
Lee's office said the "simple, common-sense adjustments" the bill proposes to current immigration laws will help ensure the "integrity of our borders" and remove perverse incentives for parents to "entrust their children to coyotes and cartels."
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Stopping Border Surges Act