August 24, 2008 - August 30, 2008 Archives

In the last couple of years, a trend has emerged among states to hike the compulsory age of education to 18 (in some states mandatory attendance was as low as 14), the hope being that the initiative will prevent at-risk students from dropping out.

At the International LEAP Academy in St. Paul, no such scare tactics are needed, as hundreds of non-traditional students relish any opportunity to stay in public school as long as they can.

Opened in 1995, LEAP, one of about a dozen alternative schools in St. Paul, was designed to specifically serve the needs of newly arrived immigrant students. While that alone makes it a unique learning environment, the average age of the students at these alternative schools is something you also won’t find in their mainstream counterpart.

Of the roughly 400 students at LEAP, about half are older than 18, and a third older than 21. It is an unusual situation, and one that affords students the opportunity to earn a diploma.

Three years ago, lawmakers decided that schools would not be reimbursed for their over-21 students – a law that is in force in many other states. Recognizing the special circumstances of many of their students, the LEAP staff and students try to find other options. When I visited the school in the spring, I saw posters plastered in the stairwell and along the hallways, advertising the sale of eggrolls and rakes, the proceeds of which would help enable the older students to continue their instruction.

“Of course they can take Adult Basic Education courses but that is just enough to get them a job,” Principal Rose Santos says of the basic skills instruction that is offered in community centers and agencies. “But if you are 21 and you have your whole life of ahead of you, you don’t want to just get by. We don’t want them to just get by.”

Read my story on St. Paul's immigrant students at www.asbj.com.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor

With its arrows and boxes explaining “Campus Procedure,” the newest flow chart from the Garland Independent School District looks like instructions for handling weather emergencies -- a tornado, perhaps, or a Code Red day.

But this diagram has nothing to do with the weather. It’s called “Parental Deportations,” and it tells staff at the 57,000-student district near Dallas what to do if parents are detained in a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). About 43 percent of Garland students are Hispanic; the number who are illegal immigrants is unknown.

“This is relatively new to a lot of school districts,” Clyde Schilling, principal of South Gate Elementary School in Garland, told the Dallas Morning News. “I don’t think it’s a topic of discussion at the lunch table, but as you imagine, it is very upsetting when it happens to any of your students.”

District offices don’t anticipate any raids, but they don’t want what transpired in places like Postville, Iowa, to happen in Garland. As Senior Editor Del Stover describes in ASBJ’s September Special Report, “Immigration and Diversity,” nearly 200 of Postville’s students -- one-third of its enrollment -- were affected.

“We had kids crying and going crazy,” Chad Wahls, a principal in the town’s combined elementary/middle school, told Stover. “They knew mom or dad was at work [at the nearby meatpacking plant], and they were saying, ‘They’re taking them. They’re taking them.’”

Now, districts like Garland are writing contingency plans for responding to ICE raids, telling staff, for example, not to let students get on buses if their parents are detained and to try instead to have one of six emergency contacts -- provided earlier by all parents -- pick them up.

For more information on the effect of immigration raids on families, see also the Urban Institute report: “Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children.”

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

I’m not happy about illegal immigration. Not that I don’t sympathize with the plights of some of the people who are living amongst us without documentation. But the pragmatic side of me says that, to put it simply, there are just too many economic and social costs associated with an influx of people with limited skills, especially given the current state of our economy.

That said, education is the one area where states should turn a blind eye to immigration status and encourage any student who is capable of going on to college to do so. Not only have several states blocked undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition rates and financial aid, some also have gone so far as to block admissions to their colleges. North Carolina’s State Board of Community Colleges, for instance, has just voted to retain a policy to bar undocumented students from admission and may make that decision a permanent policy.

These decisions seem short-sighted and knee-jerk reactionary when considering the potential of some of these students. Many likely will become law-abiding citizens and have the potential to live prosperously and contribute to our economy in a way that would please any fiscal conservative. In some cases, their life experiences have boosted their work ethics and appreciation for our education system in ways that most of us take for granted. If a foreign-born student can persevere to graduate from high school and gain admission to college, we should nurture that potential.

My opinions on this issue crystallized when I found out a few years ago that two long-time friends whom I met while attending the University of Maryland began school here as illegal immigrants. After attaining citizenship status and graduating college, one became an engineer and the other is pursuing his MBA while working as a computer programmer. Frankly, their lives are more prosperous than most of my native-born high school classmates.

When I visited Norcross High School in Georgia as part of ASBJ’s series on diversity, I met several immigrant students who appeared to have the drive and the grades to not only get into college, but also to prosper. Some have the means to do just that. Others—and I made a point not to inquire about their immigration status—probably will not have the means, financial or otherwise. Georgia recently banned undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition rates, which probably killed the motivation for some who are undocumented.

Unfortunately, the teachers and staff deal with this on a daily basis as they search for students with potential to take college-prep classes and plum work-study assignments. You can read more about the school and its students and faculty in September’s ASBJ.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

In case you haven't noticed by reading the entries here the last two weeks, we're extremely proud of our September issue.

September is always a big month for us -- as the back-to-school issue, it's traditionally one of our largest. Last year, we tackled the subject of 21st century skills. In 2006, we featured award-winning coverage of New Orleans, one year after Katrina.

This September, IMHO, tops them both. If you're not a journalist or writer, the inside business of putting a magazine together may seem a bit like sausage making, so I won't go into the nitty-gritty details. But we decided to cover the topic seven months ago, when it was a hot political topic and was destined to get even hotter and more contentious.

Readers tell us that their schools are struggling with issue of diversity and how to integrate different ethnic and cultural groups. Add to that the increasing rancor around illegal immigrant, and immigration and diversity seemed like a natural subject for us.

We focused on what school leaders needed to know. We are aware that plenty of general consumer newspapers and magazines are covering this topic as well. We chose districts all over the country that were dealing with these issues --some successfully, some not.

September's magazine also is the first ever to feature articles by all of our editors. Our editor-in-chief Glenn Cook even chipped in by kicking off a year-long series following the newly consolidated Twin Rivers Unified School District in Sacramento, Calif.

If you're just coming back from vacation or getting back to work, take some time to check out September.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor