A second North Georgia public school system has confirmed it is enrolling new students from Central America amid a surge of immigrant boys and girls illegally crossing the southwest border without their parents.
Hall County’s 26,902-student system has welcomed 28 new students from Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua for this school year, which began Friday. The school system said it did not have comparable statistics for previous years, calling the situation a “recent phenomenon.”
Last month, Dalton school officials said they were planning to spend $253,700 for a special "Newcomer Academy" program to educate the 30 unaccompanied boys and girls from El Salvador and Guatemala who enrolled there last school year, a record number of such children for the 7,695-student system. More enrolled in Dalton over the summer.
These children were the subject of a stinging letter Gov. Nathan Deal sent President Barack Obama last month. Deal, a Republican locked in a tight race for reelection, said he was shocked to learn federal authorities have released 1,154 unaccompanied immigrant children to the care of sponsors living in Georgia, a state with 9.9 million residents. Deal later softened his tone in a State Capitol meeting with Hispanic community leaders.
A Hall County school official said Wednesday it is impossible to determine how the new students got there.
“We have no way to determine the point of entry into our country for the immigrant children coming to our schools,” Gordon Higgins, a Hall County school spokesman, said in an email. “Nothing on their official paperwork indicates the point from which they entered the country. However, it is reasonable to assume some came through [the Southwest] border crossing.”
Ranging in age from 6-17, none of them speak English, Higgins said. The amount of formal education they had before arriving in Hall County varies greatly. One 14-year-old student, Higgins said, had not set foot in a classroom before. Asked how much these additional students will cost taxpayers, Higgins said school officials were still assessing that.
“We have never had the numbers that have shown up this year from Central America,” Higgins said. “In years past, those who have come from Central America to enroll were accompanied by their parents or legal guardians and with some level of formal education, which is very different from the current group that may be represented by a sponsor and with little or, in some cases, no formal education.”
Tens of thousands of Central American children have crossed the border without their parents in recent months, fleeing poverty and gruesome gang violence in their native countries. A 2008 federal anti-human trafficking law prevents the government from immediately deporting them. Instead, federal immigration authorities are transferring them to the care of sponsors in Georgia and other states, where the children may seek relief from deportation in local immigration courts including one in downtown Atlanta.
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