"Migrants coming here as been a godsend" for New York City schools threatened with closure because of declining enrollment, Schools Chancellor David C. Banks told the New York Times. City schools have thousands of bilingual and English as a New Language teachers, he said, but need more.
In Denver and nearby Aurora, the migrant influx is straining schools' capacity, writes Neal Morton on the Hechinger Report.
The districts already had "resource hubs for migrant and refugee families, offering wraparound supports, integration services and dual-language programs," but the surge of newcomers is hard to handle, writes Morton. Immigrant students have "all but reversed years of declining enrollment, staving off budget cuts and layoffs, but the costs associated with addressing the new arrivals’ basic needs are steep."
Denver Public Schools used to enroll about 500 newcomer students per year. In 2023-24, that soared to an average of 250 each week, according to Adrienne Endres, the district’s executive director of multilingual education. Classrooms are full, and teachers feel overwhelmed.
In addition to not speaking English, some of the new students had little or no schooling in their home countries and suffered significant trauma in their journeys to the U.S.
Jo Napolitano called 630 high schools across the U.S. to ask if they'd enroll a fictional nephew, a 19-year-old newcomer from Venezuela. Most said "no," despite laws guaranteeing an education in their state up to age 20 or 21, she writes on The 74. Schools in progressive states were not more welcoming than those in conservative states. Some said "Hector" inevitably would drop out, lowering the school's graduation rate. finding is that the mobility advantage of the children of immigrants is just as strong today as it was in the past.