Speaking for the first time after his conviction in a New York court, Donald Trump highlighted the adverse effect that President Joe Biden’s border crisis is having on America’s K-12 schools.
Speaking from Trump Tower in New York City, the former president blasted Biden’s ongoing border crisis and the dire consequences it is having on our schools.
“Who on earth can want open borders, where people are allowed to pour in from countries unknown, from places unknown, from languages that we don’t even, that we haven’t even heard of,” Trump said. “We have people sitting in schools with languages where very few people have ever even heard of these languages.”
“It’s not like Spanish or French or Russian — languages unknown,” he continued. “We have people coming from corners of the globe, and many of them are not good people. Many terrorists, record levels of terrorism, record levels of terrorists have come into our country, record. They’ve never seen anything like it.”
The comments came toward the end of his appearance, staged symbolically on the same spot he announced his run for president in 2016.
Even as the former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee for president lamented the pressures Biden’s border crisis has put our schools under, even the media have noted that the wave after wave of migrants from every corner of the earth has not only forced states and cities to throw billions at our schools, but that many of the children of these migrants are not well served by the poor attempts of local school districts to educate them.
The untold millions of illegals flooding the country are placing enormous strain on our schools and in many cases placing them in an impossible position, the Wall Street Journal pointed out last week.
The Journal began its May 25 article talking about a child going to a U.S. school in Stoughton, Massachusetts, from Haiti who is a “Haitian Creole speaker” and could not read or speak English and was struggling in school. It discussed that her teachers had to spend an inordinate amount of time to help her learn — time that was necessarily taken away from other children.
The article went on to say that non-English students had more than doubled to over 500 children in Stoughton, forcing the district to devote at least $500,000 in spending, along with the requisite special attention for these students.
Stoughton is hardly a special case, the article noted, and situations like this are compounding all across the country — especially in the nation’s larger cities — with more than one million children flooding into the nation’s schools, many without English-speaking skills, unable to read, and with almost no previous schooling.
That is not even to mention the traumatic lives many led before getting to the U.S. “In some cases, they have lived in two, three or four countries and are not even five years old,” Stoughton school superintendent Joseph Baeta told the paper.
On Thursday, Axios published a map showing where the Biden administration has shipped the estimated 550,000 unaccompanied children that have been caught walking across the U.S. border. The map does not include the hundreds of thousands more that have come here with their parents. And all of these children have ended up flooding U.S. schools:
Where unaccompanied migrant children have gone, mapped… https://t.co/mzemcvED1h
— Steve Ferguson (@lsferguson) May 31, 2024
Still, as Trump noted, Stoughton is a perfect example of the communication chaos schools are suffering with, as the paper noted that “students in schools there today speak more than two dozen languages.”
It is bad enough when young children enter first, second, or third grade without any English skills, but there are also thousands of non-English-speaking teens entering our schools who only end up getting one to four years of schooling before aging out. These kids, Stoughton teacher Thais Payne said, are desperately trying to “defy the odds” and at least pick up some education before being thrown out ill-prepared to serve a useful purpose into our society.
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