Dozens of families spent Thursday night and early Friday lined up outside the DeKalb County School District headquarters in Stone Mountain, hoping to get immigrant children tested and enrolled for the new school year, which begins Monday.
The families, whose children mostly speak languages other than English, have been queuing up in an orderly fashion all summer at the district’s International Welcome Center. But the pace picked up last week and got out of control Friday. Officials opened the doors in the morning to find families that had camped out overnight. People had been arriving by cab and carpool in the dark.
“A rumor got out that if they didn’t get registered today, they wouldn’t get into school,” DeKalb Schools spokesman Quinn Hudson said.
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The rumor was false: DeKalb registers students year round, though children who fail to get in by Friday will miss the start of school Monday.
Phillipe Alexis said he, 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.”
Hudson said the process can take time and that the district can only handle about 60 kids a day. At least 150 were in line Friday morning, and most were being sent home.
“We have to check where they came from, we have to check immunization records, health records, family records,” he said. “It’s very time-consuming just to check the records, and once we do that, then we have to test the child. We have to find out what level that they’re at, what would be the best school for them to go to.”
Officials measure English and academic proficiency to determine appropriate placement. It can take several hours to test each child. Processing the paperwork takes additional time.
The center gives numbers to the first arrivals and anyone without one is asked to leave.
“We’ve explained this many, many times to people who contact us,” Hudson said. “It does no good to get here early in the morning or to spend the night. In fact, it actually is a problem for the children because if the child’s been sleeping on asphalt all night, they’re not going to test very well.”
DeKalb historically has accommodated a large number of immigrant students because Clarkston, in the middle of the county, is a national refugee relocation site. Several non-governmental organizations help newcomers settle in. There are also plenty of immigrants who come on their own. The district has students from more than 160 countries, who speak more than 140 languages, though Spanish is the predominant tongue.
Hudson said the district has no way of immediately knowing whether the crush of aspiring students had anything to do with the rush of unaccompanied minors on the nation’s southern border. But he said the children appeared to be with parents.
“There is no indication at all that this has anything to do with the border thing,” Hudson said.
— Staff writer Ty Tagami contributed to this report.
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