EDUCATION : Immigrant Pupils Put Squeeze on Schools in Miami’s County

New students, most of them born in Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti, have been streaming into the public schools here recently at a rate of 120 a day.

“We need a new elementary school every week,” says Alan Olkes, chief of staff of the Dade County Public Schools. Of course, new elementary schools do not get built every week. Instead, school board and county officials are trying to cope with a crisis in crowding by hauling in portable classrooms, stretching the school day and proposing a tax on new home construction.

They are also counting on a little cooperation.

No firm decisions were reached when community leaders, parents and developers got together at a public meeting last week, but a consensus did emerge: School overcrowding poses an emergency. “Most schools are at 150% or more of capacity,” says Dade County Commissioner Katy Sorenson. “It’s unbelievable, really. We have come to the point where schools are so overcrowded that it’s a quality-of-life issue for the students and the surrounding neighborhoods.”

With enrollment of 320,000, Dade’s school system is the fourth largest in the United States, behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. But no other major system is growing faster.

Continued infusions from Cuba, Haiti and Central America account for most of the 16,000 foreign-born students who have started school in Dade since July.

By the year 2005, Olkes says, Dade’s enrollment will reach 450,000, surpassing Chicago’s.

The question of what to do about the wall-busting boom has been contentious. “We’ve had years of finger-pointing and blaming,” Sorenson says.

This month, one local builder sued the county over its rejection of a planned 320-home development at the edge of the Everglades. County commissioners said no to the development because there were no classrooms ready to take in new school-age residents. Days earlier, citing a fear of such lawsuits, the school board voted to support the project.

And a school board proposal to levy an impact fee on new homes, based on size, drew opposition from developers.

Truly Burton, a governmental affairs officer of the Builders Assn. of South Florida, says member firms will support an impact fee, “but we think the fee suggested by the school board is too high. We want to make it fair.

“An impact fee is going to help, but that’s a small part. Immigration has swamped us, so we have a huge backlog (of demand for classrooms) that the entire community must face and figure out how to pay for.”

One short-term response that draws near-unanimous support is for primary learning centers, classrooms solely for kindergarten and first-grade students, that would operate as satellites of elementary schools.

“This is a new concept,” Olkes says. “We get developers to give us a couple of acres of land and build the center, worth about $2 million. We can have 10 classrooms for 250 kids. The normal elementary school, for 850 students, takes 1 1/2 to two years to build. These we can do in six months.

“We save on operating costs because, as a satellite of an existing school, we don’t need to hire a new principal. We bring in the food.

“If we can get 20 or 30 of these built in the next three to four years, we can relieve some overcrowding.”

In the meantime, many of Dade’s schoolchildren face elbow-to-elbow days, with classes held in hallways and behind the curtain on the auditorium stage. Lunch periods begin at 9 a.m. One southwest Dade high school that was opened five years ago to house 3,000 students has an enrollment that now tops 5,000. Thirty-two portable classrooms have been hauled onto campus to take in the overflow.

Seventeen schools are under construction in Dade County, and even developers seem to agree that an ordinance mandating an impact fee is not far off. But perhaps equally important is a new spirit of cooperation among builders, legislators, the school board and parents.

“It’s not a simple problem,” Burton says. “But I think we’ve all had enough talking. Now we want to see some action.”