It could cost taxpayers roughly $500 million to educate the migrant children who have arrived since January.
The kids tend to show up in Garrett Reed’s classroom in shock.
Many have never been to a big city like Houston before. But now they’re here, in the United States, in Reed’s Wisdom High School classroom, with its smart boards and online learning hub. A school administrator hands each kid a laptop. Many haven’t used a computer before.
None of them speak English. Many don’t even speak Spanish, but rather K’iche’ or maybe Mam, indigenous Mayan languages from the Guatemalan hinterlands.
Many of the kids have just made the dangerous journey to the U.S. through Mexico, enduring a gauntlet of crime filled with thugs, thieves, and predators of a variety of stripes – gangbangers who recruit the boys, sex traffickers who prey on the young girls.
“They’re traumatized. I mean, not all of them, but most of them,” Reed said. “A lot of them just put their head on the desk and cry. That’s what happens. That’s fine. Just cry.”
When these “newcomers” arrive at Wisdom High, it is Reed’s job to teach them English. Reed is one of two English as a Second Language teachers at the school. But, he acknowledges, his job is much bigger than just teaching English. He also is a mentor and a protector, keeping an eye out for potential threats to his vulnerable students inside and outside his classroom.
Over the last few months, Reed said, the number of kids in his classes has at least doubled, maybe tripled. He teaches three classes a day, each an hour-and-a-half long. He started the year with about ten kids in each class, he said. He’s up to about 30 now. He’ll likely get more.
During the first three months of the year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported more than 350,000 encounters with illegal immigrants on the Southwest border. More than 34,000 of those encounters have been with unaccompanied minors, predominantly from the Northern Triangle region of Central America – Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
The surge at the Southwest border is the biggest in at least two decades, coming on the heels of President Joe Biden’s executive orders dismantling Trump-era immigration deterrents. Biden is allowing the unaccompanied teens and children to stay in the country, creating a perverse incentive for more kids to make the harrowing journey to the U.S.
While much of the mainstream media reporting this spring was focused on overwhelmed border facilities and so-called “kids in cages,” there has been less focus on what happens when these kids eventually disperse into communities, large and small, across the country.
It’s likely most of them will attend public schools like Wisdom High, increasing financial pressures on school systems that are already struggling through the coronavirus pandemic. In some past cases, influxes of immigrants have caused tension between school leaders who need more building space, teachers, and resources, and local taxpayers who question why they should foot most of the growing bill. Educating just the kids who’ve arrived so far this year will almost assuredly cost hundreds of millions of dollars, with the vast majority of that burden falling on the states and local governments.
Along with the financial pressures, the kids coming from Central America also bring social and academic challenges. Many of them are far behind their American-born peers academically – most have had interrupted educations. A handful have no education at all.
In recent years, some school districts have struggled with placing the immigrant children in schools. In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued a school district in southwest Florida that was sending older immigrant teens to adult-education programs if they were not on a reasonable path to graduate by age 19. The school district eventually settled the suit.
An Associated Press analysis from that same year identified 35 school districts in 14 states that discouraged Central American immigrant students from attending traditional public schools.
The Cost of Educating Unaccompanied Minors
The requirement that U.S. public schools provide a “free” education to all children in the country, regardless of their immigration status, was established in the landmark 1982 Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe. But it turns out “free” public educations are, in fact, quite costly.
Federal, state, and local governments spend over $700 billion annually on kindergarten through 12th-grade education every year, averaging nearly $15,000 per student, according to the website educationdata.org. The bulk of that is paid by state and local governments, which each contribute slightly over 45 percent of the total. The federal government provides 7.7 percent.
At that rate, if each of the 34,000-plus unaccompanied minors who’ve arrived since January attends a U.S. public school next year, it will likely cost American taxpayers about $500 million.
A 2017 analysis by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which promotes policies to curb illegal immigration, found the U.S. spends more than $43 billion every year educating children who are in the country illegally and the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.
“It’s definitely something we need to be concerned about,” said Spencer Raley, director of research for FAIR, “It’s definitely something we need to approach from a position of sympathy, but at the same time being realistic and understanding that we can’t be the welfare system for the entire world.”
Data from the Migration Policy Institute, which studies immigration patterns and impacts, shows that since 2014, unaccompanied minors have overwhelmingly been released to sponsors in Houston (20,787 minors) and Los Angeles (17,596 minors). But tens of thousands more have settled in smaller numbers in other cities, suburbs, and rural communities across the country.
“Every municipality, every area really needs to be prepared to serve English learners,” said Julie Sugarman, a Migration Policy Institute senior policy analyst.
Some worry that enrolling more non-English-speaking students who enter the country illegally will draw resources, and teachers’ attention, away from American-born students.
“I’ve had a number of private conversations with local teachers, and they’re very concerned about it,” said Representative Tom McClintock (R., Calif.).
But that squeeze on resources is a concern “only in the sense that the Congress has decided that they’re only going to spend a certain amount of money on education, and not a penny more,” Sugarman said. “We have a lot of money in this country, and we could spend more money to hire more teachers to have small class sizes, but in a lot of states they choose not to.”
Sugarman acknowledged that a sudden influx of kids in a district or a school can be a “big deal,” particularly in smaller communities or in schools with fewer resources.
“The budgets are based on the anticipated number of kids,” Sugarman said, “and if it’s higher than they expect, then they really have to scramble to hire additional teachers, find more space, all of those sorts of things.”
Geovanny Ponce, an immigrant from Honduras who is now the east area superintendent in the Houston Independent School District, said he expects a large number of the unaccompanied minors who’ve entered the country this year will eventually end up in his district’s schools. He doesn’t know exactly when they’ll arrive or how many to expect. The district received a few thousand of the unaccompanied minors who came in 2019, he said.
With a large and diverse district with about 200,000 students, the new arrivals won’t overwhelm the district overall, Ponce said, but they could overwhelm individual schools, depending on where the kids settle in the community. If that happens, he said, district leaders will send more people and more resources to those schools to help the kids.
“Our policy is to embrace them and support them and help them,” Ponce said of the immigrant students.
‘A Pretty Big Challenge’
Reed, an ESL teacher at Wisdom High in Houston since 1993, knows to expect a rush of new kids every year, usually starting when they return to school in January, he said.
This year’s increase in immigrant students is big, though Reed said he had even more kids in his classes a few years ago. He said working with immigrant children is rewarding.
“I’m on the starting line,” Reed said of his job. “I get to help nurture them and sort of water the garden there, and watch them grow.”
Wisdom High is a traditional public high school, not specifically designated for English language-learners, refugees or immigrants. The surrounding community used to be mostly white, Reed said, but the demographics flipped in the 80s after the Texas oil bust. Now immigrants, many of them from Central America, flock to the oil-boom-era apartments. The immigrant kids from those apartments now make up much of Wisdom’s student body.
Reed acknowledges the challenges his students bring: they don’t speak English, they’re behind – sometimes far behind – academically, they’re homesick, and they often have conflicting priorities. Most of the kids want an education, or at least to learn English, but they also need to work to pay off debts to their smugglers, to send money back home, or to just contribute to the home they’re staying in. It’s a rarity, he said, for his Central American students to be living with both mom and dad. Often they’re living with siblings, or an uncle, or someone who claims to be an “uncle” and “may or may not have good intentions for you,” Reed said.
Some of the kids come already in gangs, but that’s a minority, Reed said. Years ago, there used to be a problem of rival gangs trying to recruit students just outside the school, he said, but that’s mostly gone now. “The gang thing got settled,” Reed said.
Most of the kids don’t want to talk about the trauma in their lives, Reed said. But a couple of times a year, he asks his students to write about their journeys to the U.S., and “they open up totally,” he said. “I keep everything they write. I make photocopies.”
“The majority of the crap they go through is when they go through Mexico,” he said. “Starting at the Guatemalan border, you have to pay a mordida (bribe) to the Mexican police just to get through, like 100 bucks. If you don’t pay it, you have to take the end-around through the jungle, and that’s pretty dangerous. … The girls, some of them get siphoned off for trafficking. And if you can’t pay that fine to some dude standing next to the train, then you get pulled off and you’re (sex trafficked) for a month or two.”
Reed said his school offers a lot of wrap-around programs, clinics, and psychological services to the kids who’ve been traumatized. “We’re really good with that,” he said.
Reed said that one of the hardest parts of his job is trying to keep up with state-mandated teaching objectives. Because his students have such significant challenges, and start off so far behind their American-born peers, he said he’s always playing catch-up. Most of the kids never graduate. Typically, they disappear after a year or two. They either leave to work full time or move on to another community. But Reed said he tries to keep them in school.
“It’s a pretty big challenge,” he said. “I can’t say that I’m always successful with it.”
But he loves what he does, he said. He loves teaching the kids their first words in English. He tries to make it fun, throwing in some schtick and physical comedy to make the kids laugh.
Reed said he went through some tough times as a child, and can relate to his students. He says they are mostly strong kids who want to contribute and help their families. Part of his job is to encourage the kids to succeed in class, and after they’ve left school.
“I say, ‘You’re not alone. There are thousands who have gone through this before, and you’re going to do it. You’re going to make it. You’re not alone,’” Reed said. “I do what I can. It’s not just school that I’m doing.”