It was just another day at Sopori Elementary School—until a U.S. Border Patrol agent walked into the principal’s office in full riot gear. Agents were about to conduct a raid at a nearby house, he announced, and it might be best to “lock down” the school as a precaution.
When your school is only a half-hour’s drive from the Arizona-Mexican border, issues of campus security take on an extra nuance.
Security wasn’t an issue on my mind when I visited Sahuarita, Ariz., last spring to conduct research for the September ASBJ’s special report on immigration and diversity. I naively assumed my talk with school officials would focus solely on educating illegal immigrants.
How wrong I was.
The lock-down at Sopori occurred the day I arrived. And district officials mentioned that there’d been another incident the previous year at another school campus.
“Illegal aliens were being tracked from the air by the Border Patrol,” said Superintendent Jay St. John." There were eight of them in a small vehicle, and they abandoned it right outside our campus. They took off across the playground, and one helicopter came down low enough for agents to jump out ad give chase. It was a little scary.”
Just days after my visit, I got an e-mail from the district concerning yet another incident. During a routine traffic stop by the Border Patrol, two men fled in a vehicle that was later found near a school. One of the suspects was found lying in the road just off campus. It appeared he’d fallen or been pushed from the vehicle.
They vehicle had been left in a dry wash, the Nogales International newspaper reported, along with eight bundles of marijuana.
Such incidents shouldn’t come as a surprise—at least, not once you recall that untold thousands of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers attempt to cross our border every year. Incidents occur near the border every day, and we have to accept that some will take place near a school. No one wants that to happen. But it does. And school officials have to be ready.
Yet there's a lesson to draw from all of this. We forget sometimes that diversity isn’t just about differences in the color of our skin or our cultural heritage. Our nation owes its diversity also to the varied life experiences of our citizens.
In a rural, desert community, just a few miles from the border, school officials face issues that simply aren't that common to their peers living amidst the cornfields of Iowa.
Del Stover, Senior Editor