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New Bedford Public Schools are experiencing a decline in immigrant student enrollment, according to internal data and newly filed reports with the state. Superintendent Andrew O’Leary, however, said that it’s too early to know whether this indicates a significant enrollment trend or a blip in the data.
“I don’t discount that there’s a climate of fear” affecting local immigrant communities, O’Leary said, who has been outspoken about immigrants’ rights in New Bedford. But he said that “it’s not apparent from our data” that the recent enrollment decline is attributable to the ongoing immigration raids that have scooped up more than 60 people in New Bedford.
There are 68 fewer immigrant students in New Bedford, representing a 6% decline since last year, according to a report the district filed in October with the state.
Meanwhile, there are 169 fewer immigrant students in internal reports just this school year (comparing September to December), showing a 13% decline since school began. But O’Leary said that normal seasonal trends, such as data just now capturing families who moved away in the summer, account for a large majority of this apparently steep decline.
“We are not seeing significant impact from the climate of fear and the anti-immigration rules in the data,” O’Leary said. “We can’t attribute any losses right now to the climate of fear.”
Throughout this year, there has been concern about immigrant students’ connection to their school communities during the ongoing threat of federal immigration raids. In New Bedford, more than 60 people have been caught up in these raids, including people on their way to work, people with no criminal history, and people with legal status. Many have been put into detention centers for weeks or months.
Elsewhere in Massachusetts, high schoolers themselves have even been targeted in raids.
In response, the New Bedford School Committee passed a resolution in August that promised to uphold the rights of immigrant students, including not permitting federal agents into buildings without a warrant. However, the resolution took months to pass after it became a hot-topic political debate.
Enrollment data is significant because it is the primary driver of the state aid that New Bedford receives for education. And that aid now makes up more than half of the total city budget.
For years, the arrival of new immigrant students kept New Bedford’s public schools from experiencing enrollment decline, and therefore budget decline. If immigrant students and families are in fact leaving New Bedford, the city itself will be losing a significant economic benefit (in the form of taxes and spending) that has largely kept the state’s economy afloat.
“Immigrant families enrich the district and the city at large,” O’Leary said.
Schools around Massachusetts are facing steep year-over-year enrollment declines, too. Reporting from The Boston Globe found that most of the largest districts in the state have experienced enrollment decline. Some districts are experiencing much larger year-over-year declines than New Bedford, including Brockton, Chelsea, and Boston.
While some leaders in these districts have said they see a direct link between recent immigration raids and the declining enrollment of immigrants, O’Leary is not yet ready to make the connection.
“Students could have moved out of district, out of nation; students could have stopped arriving, or students could age out,” O’Leary said.
Three years after arrival, he explained, students are no longer classified as immigrants in the state’s classification system.
Meanwhile, total enrollment has actually gone up by 14 students this year.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
Great! Now put the money invested in the immigrants into the American born students. You know the ones there parents work and pay taxes for. Legal immigrants only, all others do not pass go do not collect 200 dollars, all others return to place of origin do not burden our legal tax payers with your issues.
Where is his concern for the legal children that have no food, no shoes, no shelter. He assures the immigrants get all. Time for a change! Don’t let him fool you. Watch a school committee meeting. Watch how they try to make themselves look innocent!
Time to cut the staff. Time to stop the supplies. Time to put that money into the classes of the citizen legal residents. Don’t let them absorb the funds for themselves. Have you seen the business office b4 O’Leary went in there in 2015, to now.
If they are undocumented, illegal this is a big “so what”.
This is a bit misleading since the total number of students actually increased. It appears to be a shift taking place out of one classification ( immigrants) within a defined time window, into another outside of the three year time window classification! A decline simply means there are fewer new arrivals than those moving out of the three year immigration classification.
This must be stopped.
If we educate them they could become productive members of society
O’Leary’s COVER UP!
With all the attention focused on the immigrant children, maybe if the same effort was put into our legal children, their learning abilities would increase.
If O’Leary concentrated on the legal citizen students as much as he has interest in the immigrant students, the legal citizen students would not be failing.