The education budgets for America’s small towns and states are skyrocketing as the huge wave of of the Biden-Harris administration’s migrant children are diverted into American primary schools.
As these migrants flood into public schools, administrators are shifting more budget dollars towards dealing with children who speak a dozen different languages, and some who have had little or no education in their home countries before they came to the U.S., and this shift of budget dollars necessarily takes resources away from native students.
The surge began in 2021 when Biden’s ill-fated border policies kicked into high gear and caused a continually growing influx of English Language Learners (ELL) who have to be taught English before being taught the rest of a school’s curriculum. Swing state Pennsylvania, for instance, saw a 40 percent rise in the number of EEL students, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The huge number of non-English speaking students has caused schools to rush to hire staffers who can speak more than just English and Spanish. And the problem is not merely the huge amount of money these new resources cost, but it has raised the issue of where to actually find the potential employees to fill that role.
Again, looking at Pennsylvania’s experience, in 2020 the state reported that there were 71,766 ELL students. By this year, though, that number had blown up to 99,889 such students, a 40 percent rise.
Another contrast was seen in these numbers, as well, in that the number of native-born American students declined during that same time period.
The situation is redounding negatively for American students, the DNCF noted. One parent said that her daughter lost the opportunity to enroll in Head Start in her small Pennsylvania town of Charleroi because the district had to shift resources to cater to a large increase in Haitian children who had entered school.
The Charleroi school budget is telling. In 2020, the school had spent $105,000 on ELL students. But by this year that cost had skyrocketed to $505,000 as the city’s school district saw a 1,100 percent increase in ELL students, most of who are Haitian.
“The impact of the immigrants has affected our school district tremendously,” Charleroi council member Larry Calaschi told Breitbart News last month, “and so from the borough standpoint, it’s impacted our budget to where and the school districts. We weren’t prepared for any of this. We did not get any help from the federal government or the state government.”
“The school district, it’s going to affect them because families are leaving the borough and then being replaced by the Haitian community, or Liberian, or the immigrants in general, to where they’ve had to hire interpreters. They’ve had to pay for resources that they weren’t prepared for and restructure the way the learning process is in the Charleroi school district,” Calaschi continued.
“All that has an impact on the American student, to where they have to learn how to coexist, right? And that’s a tough thing for the teachers and the school district. And I tell you what, I give them big kudos for the job that they do up there, and we’re not seeing a dime coming in. They have cried for monies from the state and federal government, and they’re not receiving it,” he said.
Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is hardly alone. The Shaler School District suffered a 406 percent increase in ELL students and the nearby Shippensburg schools were hit with an increase of 280 percent. And Philadelphia’s numbers went from 15,530 ELL students to a massive increase to 23,377.
The question is, what good is being done? Is it incremental, negligible, or completely useless? The statistics are not yet clear as this phenomenon is fairly new. But one hint might be seen in California, where students of migrant parents have very low numbers of subject proficiency.
According to the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CASPP), migrant students are not doing well. The agency reported that only 24% of migrant students meet state standards for English Language Arts (down from 24.2% the year prior), a mere 15.8% are in line with math skills (up from 14.8%), and it is just 11.7% for science, which is about flat from last year
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston
