Thread: Border crossing students go to U.S schools

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... ome-center

Schools call roll at a border crossing

Part truant officer, part detective, Robert Villareal has the job of verifying that students attending in Arizona don't live in Mexico.
By Nicholas Riccardi, Times Staff Writer
7:57 PM PDT, June 24, 2007


SAN LUIS, Ariz. -- Robert Villarreal, standing at his post behind the customs officers at the border crossing station, knew he was being watched. A slim teenage boy wearing a green T-shirt was furtively peering at him from behind a pillar on the Mexican side.

"I know who it is before he even comes in," Villarreal said, ducking into an alcove.

Minutes later, perhaps thinking Villarreal had left, the boy and another teen breezed through customs. Villareal sprang out of hiding and called the teens by name. "If you hide like that," he said, "you're just going to make things worse." Villarreal is not a border agent. He is a school attendance officer whose assignment is to catch students who live in Mexico but attend public school in the U.S.

Children who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants but live in Mexico cross every morning to get a better education for free in Arizona, breaking the law that requires them to live within the boundaries of the district. To many of their parents, who have ties in both countries, not living in the district is the educational equivalent of jaywalking.

"I pay taxes. I work over here," said a 31-year-old corrections officer who would not give his name as he walked his son from Mexico to elementary school in San Luis. "What's the difference?"

There are no hard statistics on the number of children who break the residency requirement, but some people opposed to U.S. immigration policy have seized on the issue as another example of how they say migrants exploit the U.S. They contend that most school districts do not enforce the law because they risk losing state funding, which is based on the number of enrolled students.

"The whole thing's outrageous. We're not the school district for northern Mexico," said state Rep. Russell K. Pearce.

Two years ago, the state superintendent, fed up with the practice, hired a private investigator to videotape schoolchildren coming from Mexico. At an Arizona border town with a population of 65, a school bus regularly picked up 85 students at the crossing.

Amid the resulting publicity, that school district stopped the pickups, but it's unclear whether any other districts changed their policies.

In nearby Calexico, Calif., taxpayers' complaints about building schools within walking distance of Mexico led the local district last year to hire someone to watch border crossings and check student addresses.

But in Arizona, no district appears to have taken as aggressive a stance as Yuma Union High School District, which serves San Luis. In the early 1990s, it hired a full-time attendance officer to verify residency for students at its six schools.

Part truant officer, part detective, Villarreal spends his mornings noting names of high school students arriving from Mexico and listening to explanations for why they crossed: They were visiting a sick relative. They were staying with a friend. Their parents divorced and one lives in Mexico, the other in the U.S.

He lets the children, including the teens he spotted hiding from him, continue to school, then checks their stories.

A soft-spoken man with a full face and the hint of a mustache, Villarreal, 37, is a San Luis native and the son of Mexican immigrant farmworkers. But he has little sympathy for parents who avoid paying the property taxes that support the district by living in Mexico, where the cost of living is lower and houses sell for about $30,000, compared with the median price of $179,000 in San Luis.

"They want the American services," he said, "but they don't want to be part of the American system."

San Luis, 20 miles south of Yuma, lies in Arizona's far southwestern corner, bordered by Mexico to the south and west. For decades it was a sleepy agricultural town where workers in the surrounding lettuce and broccoli fields entered from Mexico and occasionally settled down in mobile homes or modest stucco houses.

Cesar Chavez was born in this region and sometimes returned to San Luis to support strikes by local agricultural workers. He died in a crumbling apartment complex here with a dirt courtyard a stone's throw from the border.

In the 1990s, the population began to boom, as migrants from other parts of the U.S. were lured by cheap real estate and persistent sunshine. Illegal immigrants from Mexico began dashing across the border, bringing an influx of border patrol and National Guard posts to town. Now, with 15,000 people and growing, the town is spilling into the desert. New subdivisions abut farmland that exudes the bracing odor of fresh cabbage.

Villarreal keeps a rolled-up map of the town in the trunk of his district-issued white Ford Escort. After scanning it one recent evening, he cut through a subdivision onto a modest residential street.

"OK," Villarreal said, "we're looking for Manuel and Blanca Carranza."

An hour earlier, Villarreal had spotted their 16-year-old son walking after school on Main Street, past the bargain clothing stores and toward the crossing. Where are you going? Villarreal asked. Home, the student answered.

Months earlier the family had been added to Villarreal's list after he spotted the son walking across the border. Villarreal had been unable to find the parents home on prior visits to the U.S. address the school had on file.

The boy's offhand remark on his way to Mexico wasn't enough to take official action — Villarreal had to find his parents. He drove to a rundown, single-story, white clapboard house. Children's clothes dangled from a clothesline stretched along the rutted driveway and cardboard covered a cracked front window. He knocked on the door three times before a male voice answered.

Villarreal asked for the Carranzas. They're not in, the voice said. When are they coming back? "Later." After 8 p.m.? "Later."

Shaking his head, Villarreal returned to his car. "This is the same person I've talked to before and the same answer," he said. (The district later sent a letter to expel the teenager; families have the right to appeal.)

San Luis is a small town, and Villarreal has run into uncomfortable situations. Once, an elected official — whom Villarreal wouldn't identify — covered for a parent from behind a closed door. Other times, employees at nearby school districts were involved in deceptions.

Villarreal tries to keep a low profile because, between early-morning patrols and evening door-knocks, he's a teacher's assistant at a middle school in another local district. Mindful of how some in town may view his work, he asks his family not to discuss his attendance officer job with anyone.

The Yuma Union High School District was forced to confront the residency issue after a bond measure to build a high school in San Luis was rejected in 1992. Voters believed the school would serve mostly students who lived in Mexico. The district decided it needed to prove to voters that its students were attending legally, and created the position of attendance officer a couple of years later.

Villarreal is the second person to hold the job. When he started eight years ago, he intercepted hundreds of high school students entering every day from Mexico. Parents were accustomed to sending their children to U.S. schools without a hassle. Now word is out that the six Yuma Union high schools check residency, and the numbers crossing have dropped significantly.

In contrast, about 100 younger children were seen one recent day coming from Mexico to attend elementary and middle schools. Villarreal does not check on these students. Some were going to Catholic schools that can educate students from any locale, but dozens were headed to the eight elementary and middle schools run by the Gadsden Elementary School District. That district does not patrol the border. Instead, it requests utility bills to prove residency and sends staffers to check if a student's parents don't return calls on routine school issues such as repeated absences, said spokeswoman Rosy Ballesteros.

Villarreal prides himself on knowing the names and histories of the high school students who cross; most attend the high school in San Luis.

"This kid is OK; his legal guardian lives here," Villarreal said as one boy trudged past him. "That girl's up for withdrawal," he said, nodding at one who passed a moment later.

He stopped another girl, who showed her U.S. passport and said she'd spent the night with an aunt in Mexico while her father, who lives in San Luis, worked late. Villarreal made a note and let her pass. He'd already seen the father at a house in San Luis but would check again. "You never know," he said.

Villarreal usually gathers several dozen cases after a few days of patrolling. He typically finds about 150 students each year who should be withdrawn, out of a district of 10,000. He and his boss, Assistant Supt. Gerrick Monroe, advise those students' parents to either move across the border or make a U.S. resident the legal guardian for the child. Most make the adjustment.

The district allows parents who live outside its boundaries to pay $5,300 annually for their children to stay in school, but only eight families do so.

Villarreal's investigation of the two teens who tried to dodge him at the border forced one of them to pay tuition to continue in school; the other withdrew.

By enforcing the law, Monroe said, the district loses money — it receives $5,000 in state funds for every pupil enrolled. He said he understood why parents thought they could send their children to U.S. schools. "To people who live along the international border, it's similar to a county line," he said. "People don't think much about [crossing] it."

Certainly not Carla Molina, who walked her two children, 11 and 8, to school in San Luis one recent morning.

"We're planning to move back here anyway," Molina said. She lived in San Luis years ago, and her children, born in Yuma, are U.S. citizens. She wants them to learn English. "It's important they learn it when they're young," Molina said.

Villarreal said it was also important to follow the law. The people who pay U.S. rents and taxes, he said, are the ones who deserve the benefits of the school system.

A couple of nights earlier, he had knocked on the door of the address one student crossing from Mexico had given him. The child's mother, Marta Andrade, answered, confirmed her residency and told Villarreal she was glad he had checked.

"I like that you do this," she told him.

Andrade, 47, described how she rose at 3 a.m. to take the two-hour trip to a remote field, where she worked all day to pay rent and ensure a legal education for her 16-year-old daughter. It would have been easier to stay in Mexico, work less and cheat, but Andrade only has contempt for people who do that.

"Coming here is a sacrifice," she said. "They should have to do what I do."

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com

"They want the American services," he said, "but they don't want to be part of the American system."

This applies to all of the illegal aliens in thd U.S.

Its a start for the NAU, children from Mexico have no borders. We must stop this!

There are no hard statistics on the number of children who break the residency requirement, but some people opposed to U.S. immigration policy have seized on the issue as another example of how they say migrants exploit the U.S. They contend that most school districts do not enforce the law because they risk losing state funding, which is based on the number of enrolled students.

Ive seen video on television where they show hundreds of children get off of buses/walking from Mexico to American schools daily. The powers are fully aware that this has been occurring for years possibly decades. They also receive FREE MEALS at our expense.

What ticks me off is just last month there was a Black woman ON TRIAL because she sent her kids to school in the district where members of her family live. She was thankfully found NOT GUILTY.

Susan Carroll
State slow to investigate border-hopping students
Sun May 1, 2005 05:36
64.140.158.75


State slow to investigate border-hopping students

Susan Carroll
Republic Tucson Bureau
Apr. 30, 2005 12:00 AM

LUKEVILLE - More than a year after ordering an investigation into students crossing the U.S.-Mexican border to attend school in Arizona, state schools chief Tom Horne acknowledged Friday that officials still haven't checked to see where the kids actually live.

"The investigation is proceeding," Horne said. "If there is abuse of taxpayer money, we will seek disciplinary action. This is still a serious matter."

Horne said in March 2004 that he planned to ask Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard to investigate reports by The Arizona Republic and CNN that an estimated 90 students living in Sonoyta, Mexico, were enrolled in school in Ajo.



Attorneys in Goddard's office prepared a detailed legal analysis and sent it to Horne last year, but the state still has not requested public records from the local school district or county to verify students' residency claims.

The controversy has put the small school district in Ajo, an old copper mining town southwest of Tucson, in turmoil. Already facing declining enrollment, the district stands to lose more than $425,000 in funding if the estimated 80 to 85 students who now catch the bus at the U.S.-Mexican border are culled from its rolls.

"It would be a major blow," said Robert Dooley, superintendent of the Ajo School District. "It would mean layoffs of staff."

U.S. immigration officials said most of the students who cross the border each day for school were born in the United States and have citizenship, even though their parents are from Mexico. Still, even though they are citizens, state law requires that they live in the United States in order to go to American schools.

Although some local residents have supported educating the students, others expressed growing frustration with the state's stalled investigation into what they call a poorly kept secret.

"These kids don't live in Arizona. Not if they have to cross that border every morning," said Bud Ballard, a 73-year-old retiree who has lived in Ajo for 15 years. "All you have to do is stand (at the port of entry) with a video camera."

Each school day, the routine is the same. By 6:30 a.m., two empty school buses, sent by Pima County, pull into the tiny town of Lukeville and park within a few hundred yards of the border crossing.

Dozens of boys and girls walk from the Mexican town of Sonoyta into the United States through the port of entry, some chatting, dribbling basketballs and toting backpacks. A line of roughly 15 to 20 trucks, cars and minivans forms at the border as parents wait to drop their children at the bus stop and then head back into Mexico.

According to Ajo School District records, 85 children ride the buses that run from Lukeville 43 miles north to school. But Lukeville, little more than a strip mall, gas station, motel, RV park and general store, has a total population of 65.

County and school officials are at a loss to explain the discrepancy. But they haven't asked Al Gay, who has owned the town of Lukeville, a popular stop on the way to Rocky Point, Mexico, for 40 years. He said he rents trailers to Mexican families at a reduced rate, as a gesture of "goodwill."

"They rent a trailer space from me at $50 a month. My regular rate is $200 a month," Gay said, sitting behind a desk in an aging office, chomping on an unlit Mexican cigar. "I do that simply because those kids need the education, and it creates goodwill between Mexicans and Americans, and it will in the future."

"They are poor children, poor kids," he said, spitting out a chunk of cigar.

Gay said he doesn't know how many Mexican families pay him rent or how many families, if any, actually live in the trailers on his property.

Because Lukeville does not have a school, Pima County officials are responsible for verifying the students' Lukeville residency claims before busing them to Ajo. Linda Arzoumanian, Pima County schools superintendent, insisted that each of the children has provided proof but denied a request by The Republic for the list of student addresses.

"We have rent receipt verification for all those children," she said.

Children are required to prove they live within a school district's boundaries to attend school in Arizona. But since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1982, officials have been prohibited from asking their citizenship. The children bused from Lukeville pass through the port of entry and are allowed into the country by U.S. immigration inspectors.

Once the children are bused by Pima County to Ajo, the school district is required by law to provide an education, said Dooley, the Ajo superintendent.

"There's no law . . . that allows us to turn students away if we have room, which we do," he said. "The benefit, in my opinion, is that these (students) are citizens of the United States, and the better their education, the more they are going to contribute to our culture."

Susan Segal, chief of the attorney general's public advocacy division, said her office was told to analyze the state residency law but not to verify the students' addresses. The results of the legal analysis, which are protected by attorney-client privilege, were forwarded to Horne, Segal said.

Horne, whose department is responsible for distributing state taxpayer dollars to schools based on enrollment figures, said he has no timeline for the investigation. He said the department plans to file a public records request with the county to verify student addresses and may have more information "within a few weeks."



Reach the reporter at susan.carroll@arizonarepublic.com or 1-(520)-207-6007.


"mad as hell and not going to take it anymore"
closebordersgroup@yahoogroups.com

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... hools.html

Friday, May 18. 2007

Mother acquitted of felony charges for lying to get kids in Marietta school
Posted by Edrea at 16:04
Jeanine Echols, a Georgia parent accused of lying on official school documents, was found not guilty of the 16 felony charges filed against her by the DA.


Echols was arrested a few days after attending award ceremonies for her children, who excelled in school. Echols said she only placed her three kids in city schools because her family lived in the area and could meet the children at the bus stop when her and her husband worked late. Although the children’s grandparents lived in the area, the prosecutor argued that Echols committed a crime every time she signed school papers listing the address of family. Echols was facing up to 80 years in prison for the 16 felony counts. She did live in the same county, but her children would have gone to a different school based on her address. Their grandparents pay taxes in that district.


Any grandparent owning property and paying taxes in an area should have a right to put their grandchildren in school in that district. Until they start giving me a discount on taxes because I no longer have school aged children, I think I should have that right.


The prosecutor should find something worthwhile to do and I hope the citizens in Marietta make some noise about the waste of taxpayer’s money to prosecuted. Can the AJC tell us approximately how much the trial cost?


This is just one more example of a criminal justice system gone mad. Here we have a working woman raising honor students with a supportive family and she’s arrested, jailed, and forced to go through a trial because of an overzealous prosecutor.


This prosecutor and the one in the case of the Duke Lacrosse players, and all the rest of the DA’s gone mad, should be forced to reimburse these defendants for their legal fees. It’s the least they should do for their ridiculous behavior. I hope the citizens in Marietta make a little noise about such a waste of tax payers hard-earned dollars.
Read the Atlanta Journal Constitution story here
WNBC
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