Michele Exner is a senior adviser at Parents Defending Education. She previously served as an active duty Marine officer for seven years and now resides in Virginia with her husband and two children.
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School budgets are being strained. Classrooms are reaching capacity. Teachers are being asked to take on the impossible. School property is being taken over to serve as migrant shelters. This is only a snapshot of the reality many schools across the country are being forced to manage as they continue to deal with the fallout of President Biden’s incompetence at the border.
Last week the House Committee on Education and the Workforce subcommittee on Elementary and Secondary Education chaired by Rep. Aaron Bean held a hearing examining the chaos that has ensued in K-12 schools because of the migrant crisis. Republicans honed in on asking questions on budgetary impact, resources, and solutions. Democratic members, on the other hand, appeared to be uninterested in holding the hearing altogether. They offered variations of excuses from “the border isn’t under our jurisdiction,” to “schools are mandated to take migrants,” so what are we even doing here?
It seems particularly tone deaf to downplay the impact the border crisis has had in schools when you look at the evidence coming out of K-12 classrooms. A thorough review of publicly obtained documents by Parents Defending Education shows the impossible situation facing teachers and administrators in trying to accommodate the massive influx of students. In Washington, D.C., correspondence between school employees exposed the seat shortage and funding issues due to the immigration crisis. Some schools in the nation’s capital have already reached enrollment capacity and budgetary documents show the city’s school district had to allocate almost $1 million to bring on new staff to help accommodate the migrant students. In Springfield, Massachusetts, documents showed the same issues of strained budgets and teachers who were overwhelmed with the additional tasks they were being asked to take on. One teacher said she needed to find so many translators for parent-teacher conferences, it was starting to feel like a full-time job.
Unfortunately, the House Democrats sitting on the House Education Committee weren’t interested in discussing the enormous burden this is placing on schools, teachers, and students. One of the solutions they did offer was to throw more money at the problem. The Ranking Member of the committee, Rep. Bobby Scott, asked the Republican witnesses if these districts needed more money to manage the fallout of the border crisis. As the House Education comms staff correctly noted in their hearing recap, Rep. Scott’s poor attempt at a “gotcha” question inevitably failed. Every one of the witnesses asked, except one who was invited by the Minority staff, said that there was plenty of funding – what their districts lacked was a federal solution that will finally return to the policies of December 2020 when we had a secure border.
The question that Rep. Scott should be forced to answer is how much funding does he think is enough? In Fiscal Year 2023, New York City spent about $1.45 billion to deal with the migrant crisis. City officials are forecasting the migrant financial impact on the budget will be a staggering $12 billion over the FYs 2023, 2024, and 2025. In April of this year, it was estimated that the state of Massachusetts had already spent $584 million of the state’s budget to handle the migrant crisis. In Denver, Colorado, estimates show $180 million – one tenth of the city’s budget – to manage the border crisis. According to estimates by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the national financial impact of the border crisis is already $150 billion and climbing.
Asking federal and state governments to continue to shake down their constituents for more money from their paychecks to put a band-aid on a crisis with no end in sight is not a viable solution. It is an insult to Americans that the federal government continues to knowingly abdicate their responsibilities and are forcing schools, including teachers and students, to suffer the consequences.
Fixing the border is not a partisan issue. Polling shows that Americans across the political spectrum see the border crisis as the most important issue facing our country. They are seeing the consequences playing out in their own communities, including their children’s schools, and they want to see solutions. The Biden administration needs to stop delaying and finally respond to this crisis with the urgency necessary to finally put an end to this national emergency.