New York Times (New York)
By Benjamin Mueller
October 21, 2014
Before
dawn breaks and the morning light spills onto his bedroom floor, Carlos
Garcia Lobo bounces out of bed, his eyes alight with anticipation, and
asks his mother if
he can go to school.
Each time, she replies to her 8-year-old son: Not yet.
Four
months after fleeing Honduras with a 15-year-old cousin, Carlos has
reached what his family said seemed like an impassable frontier. Like
dozens of the roughly 2,500
unaccompanied immigrant children who have been released to relatives or
other sponsors on Long Island so far this year, Carlos has been unable
to register for school.
The
impasse has baffled parents, who say their scant resources have proved
no match for school district bureaucracies. Required by law to attend
school, children are nevertheless
stuck at home, despite unrelenting efforts by their parents and others
to prove that they are eligible. Suffolk and Nassau Counties, on Long
Island, rank third and fifth, respectively, in the United States, after
counties centered on Houston and Los Angeles,
in the number of unaccompanied minors they have absorbed so far this
year; Miami-Dade County is fourth.
Many
of the children are barred because their families cannot gather the
documents that schools require to prove they are residents of the
district or have guardianship
— obstacles that contravene legal guidance on enrollment procedures the
State Education Department issued in September. Concern over similar
deterrents across the country led Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in
May to chide districts for “raising barriers
for undocumented children,” in that way violating a 1982 Supreme Court
decision that guarantees their right to an education.
Driven
from Honduras by gangs that brandished machetes and robbed his
grandmother’s home, Carlos trekked to the border in June with his cousin
and a guide, bumping along
on buses “all day and night,” he recalled.
On
July 10, Carlos joined his mother, Yeinni Lobo, who came to the United
States when he was 11 months old. Since he arrived, Ms. Lobo says she
has visited the local school
office at least 10 times, toting immunization records. She said she
provided her address, and the name of the fellow tenant who collects her
rent, to show that she lived in the district. But the school demanded a
statement from the home’s absentee owner.
So
as Carlos tries to decode the schoolwork his older cousins bring home,
Ms. Lobo gets an education in red tape. She found her homeowner’s Bronx
address on property records
at a courthouse. A letter she sent pleading for help dropped back
through her mail slot, marked “Return to Sender.” Carlos’s official
manila file folder is affixed with a Post-it reading, “Waiting for
owner’s affidavit.” Once, a school secretary suggested
that Ms. Lobo fix the problem by moving to a different home. In the
school parking lot, she says, she and other mothers cry over the lost
weeks.
“They are not giving us a solution,” Ms. Lobo said. “I’m worried because he’s getting behind.”
New
York City has recently built programs to guide undocumented children
through school and health forms and even finance legal representation.
But on Long Island, a small
number of low-cost lawyers say they are overwhelmed with hundreds of
new cases.
Even
children who enrolled in school say they have subsequently been
stymied. According to a school document obtained by the advocacy group
New York Communities for Change,
33 Hispanic students in Hempstead, many of them recent immigrants, have
been signing in for attendance a few times each week, only to be told
by administrators they should return home because there are not enough
classrooms to accommodate them. The delay prompted
the State Education Department last week to order an investigation into
the district’s procedures and affirm its September legal guidance.
School officials said the students would be allowed to start classes at
an alternate location this week.
On
the margins of Long Island’s well-to-do suburbs, where Central American
families have long settled, churches have become sanctuaries for the
newly arrived.
Carmen
Bustillo, who said she left Honduras with her children after a gang
repeatedly threatened to kidnap them, seeks advice at St. Brigid’s
Church in Westbury. Alongside
her 12-year-old son, Gendries, and 11-year-old daughter, Linda, Ms.
Bustillo waded across the Rio Grande in June, carrying her 3-year-old
son over her head. The water lapped at Linda’s chin.
Like
many immigrants on Long Island, where affordable housing is scarce, Ms.
Bustillo rents rooms in a home that illegally lodges several families.
To protect himself
from scrutiny, the landlord declined to notarize district residency
papers. Gendries and Linda were kept out of Westbury schools for about
three weeks before they were allowed to enroll.
“I don’t know who to trust,” Ms. Bustillo said.
Lease
agreements or copies of bills are common prerequisites for school
enrollment, a practice that is allowed under legal guidance the federal
Education and Justice Departments
issued in May. Activists say such requirements, when applied to newly
arrived children, can impede their access to school and undermine
federal law. New York State has asked schools to consider classifying
children in shared or temporary housing as homeless,
which under federal law allows them to attend school without formal
proof of residency.
The
updated federal guidance, Mr. Holder said in May, “emphasizes the need
for flexibility in accepting documents from parents to prove a child’s
age and to show that
a child resides within a school’s attendance areas.”
The
superintendent of the Westbury schools, Mary A. Lagnado, said the
district accommodated new arrivals by making paperwork available in
Spanish and looking for “whatever
alternative we can” when certain information is unobtainable. As a
testament to their success, Dr. Lagnado said, the district has already
enrolled 121 more students this year than last.
But
especially in a town sensitive to its tax burden, she said, certain
residency requirements are rigid. Families like Ms. Lobo’s who are
subleasing rooms in a home must
provide a notarized lease or owner’s affidavit, the homeowner’s
residential deed or mortgage statement, and two home bills.
“We
try to make sure that they are a bona fide resident of the school
district,” she said. “Taxes are very high on Long Island. We have a
responsibility to our community
and homeowners.”
The
strain on already-packed classrooms builds because many immigrant
children do not speak English and have scant experience in school, Dr.
Lagnado said. Integrating
them without extra funding makes the perpetual academic competition
with nearby districts even harder, she said.
“It’s a challenge when you’re surrounded by such wealthy districts,” Dr. Lagnado said.
Public
officials are working to replenish schools’ reserves. Representatives
Steve Israel, a Democrat, and Peter T. King, a Republican, both from
Long Island, recently
introduced legislation that would give districts emergency financing
for new enrollees, an effort that Mr. Israel said was intended to
relieve towns of the burden “to raise taxes or cut other services
because the federal government is pursuing humanitarian
impulses.”
Other
Long Island districts have deployed extra resources to smooth the
transition for new arrivals. Citing schools’ obligation not to “make any
judgment about the living
situation you have,” the superintendent of Hampton Bays Public Schools,
Lars Clemensen, said staff members knocked on children’s doors to
certify their residency when more traditional documentation proved
elusive.
Still,
activists say the obstacles to enrollment on Long Island reflect a
wariness toward new arrivals that prevails in schools across the
country. The federal Education
Department has received at least 17 complaints nationwide since 2011
that led to legal action in school districts, while the Justice
Department has evaluated enrollment procedures for 200 districts in
Georgia alone. The Southern Poverty Law Center and a New
Orleans advocacy group last week sent letters to 55 schools there that
they say were discouraging immigrant children by seeking Social Security
numbers or a parent’s state identification, documents that illegal
immigrants generally would not have.
On
Long Island, where some districts in the mid-1990s tried to expel
undocumented students or required permanent resident visas to enroll,
the re-emergence of “barriers
to kids enrolling” has rocked children’s unsettled lives, said Patrick
Young, legal director for the Central American Refugee Center, based in
Brentwood and Hempstead.
“That
will be traumatic because then children will enter midsemester,” Mr.
Young said of immigrants who are turned away. “It kind of stigmatizes
them. They don’t socialize
the same way.”
Such
restrictions have deepened a cultural cleft in the region between
Hispanic and longtime white residents, immigrants say, putting the
promise of acceptance and economic
opportunity farther out of reach.
Jorge,
16, who fled from El Salvador to Uniondale in 2012 and asked that his
surname not be used because of a continuing immigration case, simmers at
the memory of a gym
teacher’s commanding two Hispanic students who had arrived late to
class to, as he recalled, “go outside to do 50 push-ups and come back
when they were residents.”
“I felt stepped on,” Jorge continued.
Those
feelings resurfaced this month as he and his mother tried to enroll his
brother Jonathan, 17, at Uniondale High School. Jonathan traveled from
El Salvador by himself
in June after a gang attacked him with a tire iron, dislodging his
front teeth and leaving scars on his scalp and right shoulder. Despite
frequent inquiries at the enrollment office, his mother, Vilma, said the
school did not allow him to begin classes until
mid-October. She said the school blamed immigration documents with an
incorrect rendering of his last name.
“They don’t want to see us,” Vilma, who works at a fast-food restaurant, said of her neighbors.
On
a recent afternoon at St. Brigid’s Church, Carlos squirmed on a bench
next to Yanira Chacon, the church’s outreach worker. He smiled and spoke
about going to school
to make friends and learn to play the guitar.
Hoping
to help him prepare, Ms. Chacon gave Carlos a purple backpack adorned
with peace signs that was stuffed with rulers, notebooks and pens.
It lies unused on his bedroom floor.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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