They came by cabs and carpools in the middle of the night, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to register children for the first day of school.
Class starts Monday in DeKalb County, and when school officials arrived at their International Welcome Center Friday morning, they saw a swelling crowd they couldn’t possibly serve in one day. Most had to be turned away.
It takes hours of testing to adequately assess an immigrant child’s English and academic proficiency. With the time for paperwork thrown in on top, DeKalb can only process about 60 per day. Immigrant children must pass through the center before they can register at a school.
The district registers children year round, “but definitely this week, we have noticed a surge in the number of families,” said Sandra Nunez, who oversees the center. “Everyone seems to have come at the same time.”
Nunez didn’t know why but said several families had repeated a rumor they’d heard: that if they didn’t register by Friday, their kids wouldn’t get into school at all. “I don’t know where they’re getting that from,” Nunez said.
Phillipe Alexis expressed the sense of urgency. He and his wife Rozenie and their two teenage children had been in line since Thursday. “We have two kids coming from Haiti and we want them to go to school,” he said. ”Kids have to go to school.”
About a fifth of DeKalb’s more than 100,000 students are “culturally and linguistically diverse” and have been processed through the center over the years. They come from more than 170 countries and speak more than 140 languages, though Spanish is the most common.
Clarkston, in the middle of the county, is a national refugee relocation site. But J.D. McCrary, who runs one of the several groups that help them, said refugees comprise just 3 percent of county enrollment. The rest of the immigrants have come on their own. He said the refugee flow has been steady in recent years but noted “building” pressure on the registration process. McCrary said his group, the International Rescue Committee, is working with DeKalb to address “capacity issues.”
One question no one seems able to answer: Did the rush on Friday have anything to do with the “unaccompanied minors” crisis on the U.S-Mexico border?
Thousands of children have crossed into the United States without their parents this year, fleeing gang violence and poverty in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Pending deportation proceedings, federal authorities have released 1,154 of them into the care of sponsors in Georgia. Last month, after learning about that, Gov. Nathan Deal fired off an angry letter to President Barack Obama complaining of a “surge” of Central American students into Georgia schools.
At the DeKalb center on Friday, Vilma Lopez told Channel 2 Action News that her 7-year-old daughter is one of those children. Lopez said she arrived outside the center at 9:30 p.m. Thursday and spent the night.
“I want the opportunity for my daughter to study here in this county,” she said with the help of an interpreter.
DeKalb traditionally registers about 2,000 students a year at the center, half of them over the summer. Nunez said the district hasn’t tallied registration yet to see if it increased significantly, but she said she hadn’t noticed a spike in the proportion of Spanish speakers. She said she didn’t think the rush was a result of the border crisis.
McCrary said he also doubted such children played a significant roll in the rush on the DeKalb center, since they’re likely sprinkled across the state, which has 1.7 million students.
“It is very unlikely that the limited amount of children feeling persecution in Central America are significantly impacting the school enrollment in DeKalb County,” he said.
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