Burlington, Massachusetts schools are touting the district’s student diversity as a major strength in a new “We Are Burlington” campaign, one of many joint union-school projects spawned by a statewide District Capacity Project.
“The most recent initiative derived from the District Capacity Project in Burlington is the ‘We Are Burlington’ initiative, which focuses on cultural competence and letting everyone know who the Burlington Public Schools are,” the Daily Times Chronicle reports.
“A lot of the dialogue during the brief presentation to the School Committee revolved around student enrollment and demographics in Burlington, include the percentage of students disabled, students born outside of the United States, and racial diversity. School Supt. Dr. Eric Conti detailed that about a quarter of students in Burlington schools are ‘of color.’”
Conti also dropped another interesting statistic: One fifth of students in the district don’t speak English as their primary language, which is an increase of 2 percent over the prior year. In total, students in the district speak 56 different languages, he said.
“That diversity is a strength,” Conti said, according to the news site. “It allows our students to experience the global world that they are going to be growing and living in.”
Burlington schools also reflect the real world with “more complicated children” dealing with mental and health issues, he said.
The “diversity” is a point of pride for many school officials, and Burlington certainly isn’t the first school district to tout its statistics as an accomplishment. The Kingston pre-kindergarten center at the Meagher School in New York is working to expand its program from 72 students to 108 through grant funding, and superintendent Paul Padalino points to student “diversity” in the current program as a positive for securing more taxpayer money.
Hudson Valley One reports:
The pre-K program at Meagher is currently four classes serving a total of 72 students. It counts among its languages spoken English, Spanish, Arabic, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Kiche, a Mayan language spoken largely in the central highlands of Guatemala. …
“We have to show that, in fact, that there are still four-year-olds out there that need to be served, which we do have,” Padalino said. “We have the facility, we have the capacity, we have the need. We have a pretty strong application to have this expanded.”
What school officials don’t typically discuss is how the “diversity” is tied in part to rampant illegal immigration, or any of the negative impacts the issue is imposing on schools, traditional students, and the taxpayers who support the system.
Lou Di Leonadro, a Virginia resident involved in launching the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, points out in an editorial for the Washington Examiner that U.S. Border Patrol reports illegal immigration increased 140 percent in 2019 compared to last year. Those flooding into the U.S. illegally includes 30,000 unaccompanied minors, tens of thousands of other children who came across the border with their parents or human smugglers, and countless others who entered undetected.
“That has placed an enormous burden on public schools which already spend $60 billion each year to feed and educate immigrants’ children. Our schools are already underfunded and overcrowded – they can’t handle the flood of foreign pupils,” Di Leonardo argued.
“Today, 25% of public school students come from immigrant households. That’s up from just 7% in 1980,” he wrote.
“This rapid increase has strained America’s beleaguered schools, which literally don’t have room for all these students. One in three public schools currently utilizes trailers and other portable classrooms to manage student overflow. Enrollment is expected to increase another 4.5% over the next five years, as America lets in millions more legal and illegal immigrants.”
Di Leonardo explains the simple fact that it’s more expensive to teach students with limited English – currently one in six kindergartners and one in 10 public school students overall – and diverting limited tax dollars to English language programs comes with a direct negative impact on taxpayers and their children.
He points to the direct correlation in large school districts in Nashville, Tennessee, Montgomery County, Maryland, Boston, Massachusetts and elsewhere between increased spending on English-as-a-second-language programs and budget cuts to textbooks, science equipment, arts funding, classroom technology, and after-school, music and extracurricular activities.
Di Leonardo’s synopsis:
These trends are only set to worsen. If Congress fails to tighten legal immigration limits and enforce our existing laws to protect legal aliens, immigration will drive 96% of U.S. school-age population growth over the next fifty years.
Scaling back legal migration and cracking down on illegal immigration would ensure that every child can access a high-quality public education.
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