Much to the chagrin of Big Left and the vast school-based graft it operates, hordes of high-needs foreign students are vanishing from public school enrollment.
Here in the Northeast, the story is the same from state to state and town to town. The author of an article called “Enrollment decline in Worcester schools: Where have the students gone?” in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette is baffled. “For the first time since the pandemic, the Worcester Public Schools have seen a decline in student enrollment,” frets the paper, adding ominously, “which could have ramifications for the school budget and other services.”
The Massachusetts city has seen a 0.41% decline in enrollment this year, a loss of 101 students. “The decrease comes from elementary school and preschool children. Elementary enrollment is down 96 students from last year and preschool enrollment is down by another 72,” says the report. And what’s more:
Of particular concern is that the enrollment decline is disproportionally among low-income students and multilingual learners. Across the district, low-income students are down 595 from the previous year, while multilingual learning students are down 243 students. Both of those figures represent a decrease of about 3%.
Chapter 70 state funding, which provides a bulk of the Worcester Public Schools' foundation budget, awards greater funds for pupils who are low-income or multilingual learners, with the understanding that those students will likely require more resources to succeed. As those populations decline, the district will see less financial support from the state.
In other words, native-born U.S. citizens will stop getting fleeced by teachers' unions and public officials who profit off trafficking needy, dependent, future public services addicts — aka Democrat voters.
(As an aside, I want to assure readers that I am not a monster. I never want to see any child's life in upheaval. But neither am I willing to ignore the law and destroy my own home to accommodate grasping, power-hungry Democrats. I used to love watching the police reality series Cops, but I had to stop watching it after seeing too many small children sobbing as their parents got cuffed and their world turned upside-down. Likewise, it breaks my heart when children are caught up in the left's illegal-immigration America-destroying political chicanery. There is a special place in hell for Democrats who place so many kids in this wretched position.)
Connecticut is seeing dramatic losses in its headcount of young, high-needs students as well. See if you can spot a recurring theme in this report from the Stamford Advocate:
The city’s public school system has experienced a dramatic decrease in student enrollment this year, including a 60% drop in the number of students in the district’s program for newly arrived immigrants, according to school data.
Overall, Stamford schools saw a decrease of 891 students compared with the previous year. The total enrollment of about 15,350 students marks the lowest student population since 2009, according to school data.
The New Arrivals program, which is for immigrant students who have a limited understanding of the English language, typically has a waiting list of interested students, school officials said. That hasn’t been the case this year, however.
Enrollment data from the school district shows that the number of students in the program dropped from 132 a year ago to 52 this year.
Juan Pazmino, the school district’s coordinator of family and community engagement and head of the district’s Welcome Center, said that fewer students are coming to Stamford from countries in Central and South America.
That's right: Special programs that exist specifically to provide services to these new arrivals are in peril. The horror!
Whatever could be the reason for the decrease in foreign students? Conjecture among officials quoted in the article runs something along the lines of this theory from Lucas Romero, a bilingual paraprofessional in the school system: “The main factor is fear.”
For an educational professional, you’d think he’d be able to pronounce “enforcement of the law” correctly.
At any rate, the story is the same in most of the larger towns and cities — the blue districts. Smaller, high-end towns with solid law enforcement — both Republican and Democrat-led — don’t seem to be having the same pronounced plummet in young ESL students, for some reason.
It’s not just the Northeast, of course; the decreasing enrollment is happening nationwide. At the indispensable PowerLine Blog, Bill Glahn notes the freakout on the left at the loss of funding to its massive profit structure:
Public schools depend on the children of illegal aliens to keep up enrollment levels and extract more money from state taxpayers.
More students means more teachers, which means more public school teacher union members, which means more union dues, which means bigger donations to the Democratic party.
[…]
Democrats in Minnesota have gone all-in on an illegal-immigrant-based economy. The more people (legal or otherwise) present in the state who are dependent on government benefits means bigger budgets for governments and more power to the Democrats who control those budgets.
If you own a home or any property, you've noticed that the lion's share of the taxes you pay on it goes to your municipality's Department of Education. It's already a lot of money, but now, think about how Democrats have subverted the will of the people (as manifested in our democratically enacted immigration laws) by importing millions of illegal aliens to bolster their own power and funding. It's enough to boil the blood in your veins.
Don't listen to the howling mobs: Trump 2.0 is a marvelously focused and effective administration, and it is achieving magnificent results. It's important to support it in every way you can, and to assist the effort to hold onto Congress in the midterms, too, so that this crucial work can go on unabated.
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