Thread: Schools bear burden of immigration

Illegal Immigration -- who profits, who pays

Schools bear burden of immigration

By Marti Maguire, Staff Writer
FOUR OAKS -- Each word is a separate effort for the students furnishing a dollhouse at Four Oaks Elementary School. "The ... chair ... goes ... here," whispers one girl, the last word a throaty breath followed by a drawn-out "eeear."

But teacher Ana Sanders beams when a boy named Jorge picks up a wooden sink and blurts out a confident, "Where is the bathroom?"

Six months earlier, Jorge enrolled at the Johnston County school unable to speak a word of English. Now he is helping classmates who have arrived even more recently and speak only Spanish.

Sanders teaches English to 200 Spanish-speaking students at Four Oaks. She also translates for parents and calms students' fears as they face the daunting prospect of learning English at the same time they learn to read and write.

But if she is a lifeline for her students, taxpayers pay for it.

Thirteen years ago, two tutors traversed Johnston County helping the children of migrant workers. Now, the county employs 50 full-time teachers and teacher assistants to serve more than 2,300 students for whom English is a second language -- at an overall cost of about $2 million of the district's $110 million budget.

Other Triangle districts with large Hispanic enrollments include Wake County, which will spend $9 million this year on 5,200 students in English as a Second Language classes, and Durham, which will spend $5 million on 4,000 ESL students.

Estimates on how many of these students are citizens vary. But by conservative estimates, half of them either entered the country illegally themselves or are citizens born in the United States to illegal parents. Educating them has strained state coffers more than any other expense brought on by immigration to North Carolina.

Educating the children of illegal immigrants cost North Carolina an estimated $210 million yearly, according to figures from a study on the economic impact of the state's Hispanic population by researchers at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-Chapel Hill. Ten years before, that figure was less than $10 million.

Some say that money would be better spent on other students.

"We're overwhelmed in North Carolina trying to pay for the people who are supposed to be here," said Ron Woodard, director of N.C. Listen, a group in Cary that advocates greater restriction of immigration. "Why are we having to spend money on people who are here illegally?"

Others stress that money spent on educating immigrants, both legal and illegal, will pay off in future tax revenue as they earn higher wages. Poorly educated immigrants and their children would require more spending for jail time and programs such as Medicaid.

"It's peanuts in the scheme of things," said James H. Johnson Jr., co-author of the Kenan Institute study. "What would we rather do, leave these people uneducated? It's a form of enlightened self-interest to invest in these kids."

North Carolina had the highest percentage of Hispanic growth of any state in the 1990s. About 395,000 illegal immigrants, the large majority of whom are Hispanic, live in the state, according to a Pew Hispanic Center study.

Hispanics accounted for 57 percent of enrollment growth in North Carolina public schools from 2000 to 2005, according to the Kenan study. From 1990 to 2000, they accounted for 15 percent of enrollment growth.

Growth is a constant challenge for Johnston County schools. The Triangle's steady expansion southward has led to overcrowded school buildings and teacher shortages. But growth by immigration is more expensive.

Costs of education

Because the children of immigrants are more likely to be poor and speak little English, educating them costs more than educating middle-class English-speakers.

Programs created specifically to serve students for whom English is a second language account for much of this extra cost.

This year, nearly $45 million of the $6 billion appropriated by the General Assembly for public schools went to English as a Second Language programs.

The bulk of that goes to hiring bilingual teachers. Other costs include translating documents and training teachers how to instruct students who speak little English.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act forced schools to look closely at how immigrant students fare in public schools. Since 2002, the law has required schools to show improvement in the test scores of students who speak English as a second language.

"It's made us much more aware of those students and how well they're performing," said Jim Causby, former Johnston County school superintendent and now director of the N.C. Association of School Administrators.

The federal law also set stricter teacher standards that have made ESL teachers scarce in North Carolina. Johnston offers a $1,500 bonus for new ESL teachers and recruits many of them from other countries through the Visiting International Faculty program.

The international teachers are highly qualified and often speak Spanish. By law, however, they can stay for no more than three years, forcing districts to pay out more bonuses.

Sanders, known to her students as "Miss Ana," came to Four Oaks from Brazil through the international program seven years ago. She married, became a permanent legal resident and stayed on to develop Four Oaks' ESL program -- a central part of a school-reform program that is the pride of the county. The school is a sprawling brick building at the end of Main Street in this town of about 1,600 residents. More than 1,000 students attend, drawn from a wide swath of rural Johnston County.

A banner across its entrance boasts "Honor School of Excellence," the highest designation in the state ABCs program.

The ESL program at Four Oaks exemplifies the preferred instruc-tional method in North Carolina, which puts learning English second to learning grade-level material.

ESL students learn math, science, social studies and language arts in classes taught entirely in English. For an hour of every day, Sanders helps teach these classes, translating and stepping in to help the Spanish-speaking students.

In these "inclusion classes," English-speaking students are hand-picked -- with parents' consent -- to learn alongside the ESL students; ideally, a third of a class will be ESL students, another third academically gifted students and the rest mainstream students.

All ESL students take a separate daily class with Sanders on reading, writing and speaking English. Though these classes are also primarily in English, they are geared to Spanish-speakers.

Sanders holds extra sessions with students whose English is particularly weak, and a teacher's assistant doubles as a translator to work with parents, who often speak little or no English, and students who need extra help.

Most elementary-age students pick up the language quickly -- usually within two years, Sanders said. Once fluent, they no longer take special classes, though she still tracks their progress.

Since there are no classes in Spanish, schools rely heavily on bilingual staff such as Sanders to help immigrant students through the day until they learn English.

"One day we are psychiatrists, one day we're nurses," Sanders said. "If there is some reason the parents need to be involved, we have to step in."

North Carolina's approach to teaching the children of immigrants has critics. Some states, such as Texas and California, provide classes in English and Spanish. Immigrant advocate groups generally prefer this approach.

And while inclusion classes, such as those in Johnston County, are considered ideal, they are not yet widespread. Many ESL students are simply pulled out of their classes for an hour or so a day.

In the past, funding ESL programs at all was a tough sell politically. For four years in the 1990s, the legislature refused requests for money to pay for ESL programs before finally providing $5 million in 1998.

Here to stay

"It took awhile for people to really understand that these children were here to stay, that it was in the best interest of the state to have them educated," said Fran Hoch, the state ESL director.

But debate continues. In recent months, some critics in Wake County have blamed immigrant students for the growth that's causing the district to look at billions of dollars in school construction over the next decade. The district says only 12 percent of its new students are Hispanic. And white and black parents continue to take their students from schools where immigrant populations rise.

"There is an impact on each family who has a kid in school," Wake Commissioner Phil Jeffreys said. "There is overcrowding and time taken away from their kids to try to get the non-English-speaking kids up to speed."

Jeffreys thinks immigrants are lured to the United States to take advantage of an education system that is by law open to everyone.

But immigrants say it is economics that brings them here.

Ricardo Padilla said he and his wife came to Johnston County from Mexico solely because the economy was so poor at home.

Still, education figures into their hopes for the future.

"For me and my wife to go to college would be difficult," he said, "but I hope that my children will do well in school and go to college to advance themselves in life."

Some immigration experts praise North Carolina for responding relatively quickly to the education needs of its immigrants. By doing so, they say, the state is poised to avoid the long-term costs of illegal immigration incurred by states such as New York, which provided few services to the immigrants who streamed into their society generations ago.

While they may be poor, newly immigrated families are upwardly mobile; they tend to have strong work habits and family ties, said Randy Capps, a researcher at the Urban Institute who has studied immigration. Each subsequent generation that remains in poverty is more likely to have single-parent families or depend on government programs such as food stamps.

"It's easier to break the pattern of poverty in a new wave of immigration," Capps said.

Hoch said that on a recent visit to Texas, she caught a glimpse of what the future could be like for North Carolina's immigrant students if the schools fail them. There, she said, some third-generation citizens still don't speak English or have good jobs.

"We don't want that to happen here," she said.

Staff writer Marti Maguire can be reached at 829-4841 or mmaguire@newsobserver.com[/b]

Thirteen years ago, two tutors traversed Johnston County helping the children of migrant workers. Now, the county employs 50 full-time teachers and teacher assistants to serve more than 2,300 students for whom English is a second language -- at an overall cost of about $2 million of the district's $110 million budget.

Other Triangle districts with large Hispanic enrollments include Wake County, which will spend $9 million this year on 5,200 students in English as a Second Language classes, and Durham, which will spend $5 million on 4,000 ESL students.

Estimates on how many of these students are citizens vary. But by conservative estimates, half of them either entered the country illegally themselves or are citizens born in the United States to illegal parents. Educating them has strained state coffers more than any other expense brought on by immigration to North Carolina.

Educating the children of illegal immigrants cost North Carolina an estimated $210 million yearly, according to figures from a study on the economic impact of the state's Hispanic population by researchers at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-Chapel Hill. Ten years before, that figure was less than $10 million.

This is too much. If the kids are registered in school then we know who they are and where they live. When are they going to start deporting them?