The impact of illegal aliens on our education system can be seen by a small glimpse into one school in a distant Washington DC suburb. Occoquan Elementary School has had to add a new teacher each year, for the 5 past years, just to teach basic English to 1st and 2nd graders. The school's population now includes nearly 40% non English speaking students, a massive increase from just 5 years ago.
Illegal aliens have in general been described as a single guy hopping the border to get a job "that Americans won't do", but that is nowhere near the truth. Whole families are coming and settling down, having more children and flooding the local systems with populations they were not built to support. Education is just one glaringly obvious impact of illegal aliens on our society.
Daily Progress
Sitting on the floor around teacher Angela Naggles, first and second graders watch intently as she prints words on her whiteboard and asks the children to read them.
Cat. Hat. Sat.
A boy does a good job and Naggles praises, "Muy bien."
A visitor asks the class, "De dónde son?" (Where are you from?)
Mexico, pipes up one child. El Salvador. Honduras. Guatemala. Nicaragua. When Naggles proclaims, "Los Estados Unidos," all the kids laugh.
... Nearly 200 of the school's 535 students are not native English speakers, up from 42 five years ago.
I wonder how much of a raise the other teachers have had with the massive increase in their class sizes and having to divert funds to specialized teachers for children of illegal aliens? The article also mentions this alarming fact.
During the 1990s, Hispanics of school age in six states Pew studied - Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee - grew from 55,199 to 232,756, a 322 percent increase.
...
Latino school enrollment in those states is projected to grow by 210 percent between 2001 and 2007 compared to 2 percent for non-Hispanic students. The study predicted that by 2007, Hispanic students will constitute 10 percent of the school-age population, compared to 4 percent in 2000.
...
For Prince William County schools, which include Occoquan, the number of students getting help with English jumped from 108 in 1987 to 9,996 this year -- doubling in the last three years. About 3,000 students spoke little or no English this September.
The article covers a poor illegal alien from Guatemala who snuck in this country with her husband and 3 children. The woman, who barely speaks any English herself, whines that we haven't bowed down to their needs enough by hiring even more bilingual staff members in our schools so that they can teach her kids.
Let me repeat that. She criminally came into our country, where English is the main language, presumably from a country where her kids probably wouldn't even get to go to school and starts complaining that we haven't bent over backwards enough to teach her kids on our dime.
Another school in the article faced massive demoralization of it's staff because nearly half of their students failed the reading test for No Child Left Behind.
For teachers like Angela Naggles and her ESOL colleagues at Occoquan, job security is not a problem. More children of immigrants are expected to show up, many after the Christmas holidays.
And that means Occoquan Elementary will soon be looking to add its sixth ESOL teacher.
The sad part of the story that isn't mentioned is the resources that have been ripped away from the students who are citizens or legally in this country. Instead of hiring additional teachers, reducing class sizes and giving raises to existing teachers the money has to be spent on illegal alien's children. The legal children are the ones who end up suffering in the end. Meanwhile their parents foot the bill.
