Immigrant Students’ Impact on Schools

* Re “Catholic Bishops Call for Immigration Reform,” Nov. 17: If the Catholic Church is endorsing more lax restrictions on immigrants entering this country, then the church should be willing to pay for the enormous cost of housing, feeding and educating these people. One would believe that the only reason why the Catholic Church would endorse such a move is due to the fact that most immigrants from south of our border are Catholic, who would in turn fill up the church’s coffers. Due to overcrowding, within the next five years every high school in the L.A. Unified will convert to a year-round schedule. Is the Catholic Church willing to build schools and educate these immigrants for free?

NANCY McBETH

Rancho Cucamonga

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“Year-Round Discontent at Hollywood High” (Nov. 20) posits that the school is a casualty “of explosive growth and the district’s failure to build schools,” but it ignores the obvious fact that this problem can only grow worse because it is a result of the out-of-control proliferation of legal and illegal immigration.

In this hopeless and dreary account, I was even more dismayed by a teacher’s reaction to the absence of a needed textbook. Supposedly she said, “You guys, we don’t have our books. We won’t get them until Friday. So sit back and relax. Since we don’t have books, I’m going to show you my slides [of a recent trip to Egypt].”

Any teacher worth her pay could have begun the study of the novel by discussing the genre, the author and the novel itself.

That, to me, is much more frightening than the prospect of more year-round schools.

ROGER E. GOULET

Los Angeles