Education Week - April 5, 2017 - 14

Rape Suspects' Immigration Status Roils School Community
18-year-old Henry Sanchez Milian
and 17-year-old Jose Montano, were
enrolled in a program designed for
newly arrived students who do not
speak English.
"Some individuals are using this
horrific event to cast a negative
light over an entire population,"
said Diego Uriburu, the executive
director of Identity Inc., which
works with Hispanic youth and
families in Montgomery County.
"The population feels more scared
now. It is very difficult for these
young people and for Latinos, in
general, even for those born in the
United States."
A former schools police chief in
Georgia, Michael Dorn, said the divisive politics of immigration should
not subsume the horrific nature
of the alleged crime and the bigger issue of sexual assault in K-12
schools, which he argues receives too
little attention.
"Unfortunately, the problems of
sexual assault in K-12 schools is not
at the forefront of our national discussion on school safety ... and it's a
pretty significant issue," said Dorn,
who runs the Atlanta-based Safe Havens International Inc., a nonprofit
school-safety organization. "We don't
really have an opinion on whether
the status of students is legal or illegal. Our focus is 'How did the event
occur?' "
The alleged Rockville assault happened in a restroom that's in a "sort
of secluded area of the school," early
in the morning on a regular school
day, Montgomery County police Capt.
James Humphries told parents during a public forum at the high school
earlier this week. The two male students allegedly dragged the victim
into a bathroom and took turns assaulting her while she cried out in
pain, begging them to stop.
Along with unlocked classrooms
and unmonitored stairwells, restroom stalls are often trouble spots
for schools-so much so that some
schools now use security devices
posted outside that can detect unusual activity, Dorn said.
Last year, the U.S. Department of
Education reported that its office
for civil rights had Title IX sexual
violence investigations pending in
nearly 100 school districts. But statistics that detail how frequently
sexual assaults occur in K-12 schools
are hard to come by, though their
reported incidence is relatively rare,
according to federal data.
In 2013, 3 percent of students
ages 12-18 reported being victimized at school during the previous
six months, according to the most
recent edition of a federal report
known as Indicators of School Crime
and Safety. Two percent of students
reported theft, 1 percent reported
violent victimization, and less than
one-half of 1 percent reported serious
violent victimization, a category that
includes rape and sexual assault.
A 2013 study by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention
found that 10 percent of high school
girls say they have been forced to
have sex. A 2009 Justice Department

Brian Witte/AP

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Plastic cups spell out a message
of support for Rockville High
School in Rockville, Md., last
month. The school was thrust into
the national immigration debate
after a 14-year-old student said
she was raped in a bathroom,
allegedly by two students who are
undocumented immigrants from
Central America.

survey found that 18.7 percent of 14to 17-year-old girls have experienced
an attempted or completed sexual
assault. But neither of the reports
reveals how often the assaults or coerced sex happen on school campuses.
"We only really know the half of it,
because all our information, all of the
data that we have is based on self-reporting, and that obviously only tells
us so much," said Alexandra Brodsky,
a fellow with the Washington-based
National Women's Law Center.
Brodsky argues that the Trump
administration-which has taken
an aggressive stance on immigrants
who are living illegally in the Unites
States-wants to use the Rockville
High incident to broadly indict immigrants, as part of a coordinated effort
to manipulate public fears and rally
support for ramped-up enforcement.
"This isn't a new thing," she said.
"We know that violence against
women has been used as a justification for attacks on undocumented
people and on black people for over
a century."

Schools' Legal Duty
A 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe, prohibits public
schools from asking about immigration status and denying access to eligible students, whether they or their
parents have legal status or not.
Montgomery County police said
neither suspect in the rape case had
a prior criminal history in the United
States, or known gang ties. Both remain jailed without bond.
As President Donald Trump has
sought to drum up popular support
for his efforts to ramp-up immigration enforcement, he has highlighted

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 5, 2017 | www.edweek.org

some of the most sensational crimes
committed by immigrants. His administration and anti-immigration
activists have seized on the Rockville
High incident, pointing to it as the
latest hard proof that undocumented
immigrants pose a serious threat to
safety and that stricter enforcement
is necessary.
"School should be a safe place for
children," White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said earlier this
week when asked about the case.
"Part of the reason that the president
has made illegal immigration and
crackdown such a big deal is because
of tragedies like this. Immigration
[takes] its toll on our people if it's not
done legally."
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy
DeVos weighed in as well, ahead of
a short visit to another Montgomery
County school, though she made no
mention of the immigration status
of the suspects or the legal duty of
schools to enroll all students.
"As a mother of two daughters and
grandmother of four young girls, my
heart aches for the young woman and
her family at the center of these terrible circumstances," she said in the
statement. "We all have a common responsibility to ensure every student
has access to a safe and nurturing
learning environment."
Two studies released this month,
one from the Sentencing Project,
which advocates for changes to sentencing policies, and the other from
the libertarian think tank Cato
Institute, confirmed past reports
that immigrants, including undocumented residents, commit crimes
at lower rates than do native-born
Americans. The reports don't offer
breakdowns of crimes rates of
school-age children.
The Trump administration now
publishes a weekly list of crimes
committed by immigrants through
its recently created office of VOICE,
Victims of Immigration Crime Enforcement Office.
School districts around the country
have been dealing with the fallout
from the radical change in immigration policy from the Obama administration to the Trump White House.

"Any time that we react politically
through superlatives or through
generalizations, at the very least, we
hurt people," said Alberto Carvalho,
the superintendent of the MiamiDade school district in Florida, and
a former undocumented immigrant
who came to the United States from
Portugal.

...[I]t is disturbing that
we would elevate
what stands as
exceptions as a
national narrative that
paints it as the rule."
ALBERTO CARVALHO
Superintendent, Miami-Dade school
district

"We should actually be incensed
and take action against anyone who
does wrong, but [to] generalize and
put everyone under the same umbrella just on a basis of country of
origin, immigration status... it is disturbing that we would elevate what
stands as exceptions as a national
narrative that paints it as the rule."

Existing Tensions
President Trump signed an executive order in January halting a
government program that allows
Central American children to seek
refugee status in the United States.
The order also allows federal agents
to immediately turn away asylum
seekers caught trying to cross the
U.S.-Mexico border. (Since the end of
2013, more than 150,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America
have entered the United States, according to data from the federal immigration authorities.)
With that policy in place, more de-

portations and other actions taken by
the Trump administration, schools
should see a decrease in the number of undocumented students arriving at their doorsteps, said Mark
Krikorian, the executive director of
the Center for Immigration Studies,
which advocates for lower immigration levels.
"Schools are going to be dealing
with the fallout of Obama's Central
American policy for quite a while,
but it's probably not going to get
much bigger," Krikorian said. "It's
going to be gang issues, and then
they're going to have to just keep
dealing with the so-called unaccompanied minors that have already
been dumped on them."
Educators argue that language
used to stoke fear over immigrant
students only inflames existing tensions. Rockville High and its immigrant students have been the targets
of racist and xenophobic phone and
email threats in the days since the
alleged assault occurred, including a
caller who threatened to "come shoot
all of the 'illegals' in the school," according to Derek Turner, the spokesman for Montgomery County's school
district.

'Tumultuous Times'
"There's these language barriers.
There's these stereotypes of these
people as criminals, that they are
bringing crime," said Ernesto Castenada-Tinoco, an assistant sociology
professor at American University.
"People assume they are here taking advantage of opportunities, that
they are here and that means that
the other kids are going to get less of
something."
In 2000, the federal government
rejected a request by the Anaheim Union High School District
in Southern California for help in
billing foreign countries for the
cost of educating undocumented
immigrant children. The district's
school board at the time had asked
the federal government to reimburse the school district for the
cost of educating the children and
negotiate with the countries to recover the funds.
The district's approach to educating immigrant students has
changed markedly in the time since,
Superintendent Michael Matsuda
said. The school system is among
dozens across the country that have
adopted so-called safe zone policies,
reaffirming their commitment to
serve students regardless of their
immigration status.
Matsuda's parents were Japanese-Americans who were forced
into internment camps in World
War II. His mother was a freshman
at Anaheim High, a school in the
district he now oversees, when the
federal government ordered her and
her family to relocate to a camp in
Arizona.
"The sort of scapegoating that
went against an entire ethnic
group, there's some of that going on
right now," Matsuda said. "We really
need to reflect on the role of public
schools in a democracy, in very tumultuous times."

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Education Week - April 5, 2017

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