Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2012 - 9

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Seven-year-old Ruby Pacheco plays outside her trailer home in Foley, Ala. Ruby is a 2nd grader at Foley Elementary School, where she tested out of the English-as-a-secondlanguage program. Though she was born in the United States, the rest of her family is undocumented.

houses undocumented immigrants. It also includes a provision requiring school districts to ask new students to show proof of citizenship or lawful immigration status when they enroll; the districts are then to report that information to the state education department. (That mandate was put on hold by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta.) The Alabama law is among a wave of anti-illegal-immigration laws to have emerged in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah—all places that, like Alabama, have seen a surge in their immigrant populations over the past few decades. In Alabama, the law’s supporters say they acted, in part, to push the federal government to enact its own reforms of immigration law. The longevity of those state laws is uncertain because of legal challenges by the Obama administration. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently weighing the Arizona law—which does not share the same school-related provisions as Alabama’s law—and is expected to announce a decision later this month. Whatever the outcome of the legal wrangling, such statutes have had a chilling effect, opponents say, in many immigrant-rich communities—even in Foley, where many of

the families that ﬂed last fall have begun to return. Educators at Foley Elementary School see the impacts play out every day, in the questions that children ask their teachers—such as “Do you have your papers?”— and in troubling trends they’ve noticed in behavior and academic achievement in the past six months or so. For example, educators here expect the rate at which Hispanic students are held back a grade to be as much as four times what it was last year. Though scores on state achievement tests for the 2011-12 school year weren’t available yet, Foley’s staff members were bracing for a drop in academic growth for their Hispanic and English-learner students, who have been outperforming their non-Hispanic white and African-American peers for the past three years. “A child who is in fear cannot learn, and that is what we are dealing with,” says William Lawrence, the longtime principal of Foley Elementary, where 20 percent of the 1,200 students are Latino, most of them American-born. “For the most part, these are American-citizen children whose constitutional rights are under attack by this law,” Lawrence says. “And all children, regardless of their legal status, have the right to come to school free of fear.” The landmark 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe ruled that children are entitled to receive a free public K-12 education in the United States regardless of their immigration status.

Defending the Policy
But advocates for Alabama’s law say that none of its provisions are tantamount to keeping

immigrant children or the children of immigrants out of public schools. “We don’t have these laws to be mean to people,” says Ira Mehlman, the spokesman for the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which supports the Alabama law and other similar state laws. “The issue is: How does this affect the lives of those in Alabama or anywhere else? If your kid is in a classroom where half the kids don’t speak English and you are seeing resources diverted from your children to teach these children English, it’s not fair.” A poll conducted in February and published in March showed that a majority of Alabama residents support the current law, but even among supporters, many believe it needs revising. Roughly 35 percent of state residents oppose the law, according to the poll, conducted by Anzalone Liszt Research, a public opinion and political consulting ﬁrm. Most young Latinos in American public schools are born in the United States. Fewer than 10 percent of them were born in a foreign country, although Alabama has the highest concentration of foreign-born Latinos of any state at 17 percent, according to an EPE Research Center analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Still, the polarizing debates and rhetoric around immigration in Alabama and elsewhere overshadow the lives of many Latino students regardless of their legal status. Carmen Gonzalez, a 28-yearold mother of two schoolchildren in Foley who was born in Texas and raised in southern Alabama,

“It doesn’t matter that my children and I are citizens. People look at us now, see our brown skin and hear us speak Spanish, and treat us like we don’t belong here.”
Carmen Gonzalez
Foley, Ala.

describes it this way: “It doesn’t matter that my children and I are citizens. People look at us now, see our brown skin and hear us speak Spanish, and treat us like we don’t belong here.” “My experience is that students are acutely aware of these anti-immigrant sentiments and the high-profile activities in places like Arizona and Georgia make this feel pervasive,” says Patricia Gándara, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA . “A lot of the kids are born here or otherwise legally here, but if one family member’s status is in doubt, the whole family is affected.” Worry about family members’ status or even wondering what opportunities will be open to

them as adults not only makes focusing on school a challenge, but can lead to poor performance, loss of motivation, and ultimately dropping out, Ms. Gándara says.

The ‘Friendly School’
For more than a decade, Foley Elementary School has been as central to the tight-knit immigrant community here as St. Margaret’s, the local Catholic church, where Mass is celebrated in Spanish every Sunday. The school—known as escuela amistosa, or the “friendly school”— began serving immigrants about 15 years ago in a summer program for the children of migrant workers who came to work the sweet-potato and watermelon harvest. Lawrence was in his ﬁrst year as
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Nicole Frugé/Education Week

Lucy Cunningham, right, an ESL paraeducator at Foley Elementary, helps kindergartner Lizabeth Guerra try on pants to replace the oversized pair she wore to school while volunteer Dora Gutierrez looks on. Foley’s staff collects food and clothing for needy families, teaches adult ESL classes, and helps families translate documents.

DIPLOMAS COUNT 2012 |

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Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2012

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