Cost of Educating Immigrants

The federal government properly has rejected the grandstanding demand of the Anaheim Union High School District to bill foreign governments for educational costs.

The school board says the Justice Department told it several weeks ago Washington had no legal standing to bill other governments for the cost of educating their students in U.S. schools. Nor can it help local districts win reimbursements, the department said.

The news should not have come as a surprise. Last September the school board passed a resolution seeking the Justice Department’s help. Its backers said at the time they knew it would have no practical effect, but they wanted to raise the issue of the cost of educating undocumented immigrants.

However, a major effect of the resolution, predictably, was to increase concern among students and parents about their status and about being hunted down.

Resolution supporters estimated that 5,000 to 6,000 district students are illegal immigrants, most from Mexico. The board wanted the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is part of the Justice Department, to count all the undocumented students in the district. That clearly would have raised fears among the students and parents not here legally. The likely effect would have been for students to duck school, when they should be in class.

Resolution backers also said that if the district were reimbursed for the cost of educating illegal immigrants, they could increase spending per pupil from the current $4,200 per year to more than $5,000.

But school financing experts disagreed, saying under current formulas, which pay for each pupil in school, there would be no increase no matter how many students were found to be illegal immigrants.

California rightly does not ask districts how many students are here legally. It wants to know how many are in class each day when it hands out the funds to educate them.

There’s nothing wrong with reminding the federal government of the financial burden on local government agencies of illegal immigrants. But the most important job of the district is educating the students who show up, not taking actions that divide the community and put fear in the hearts of children and parents.