Long Commute

The school system in Del Rio, Texas, is closing its doors to students who don't reside within the district; officials suspect that includes between 5 and 10 percent of students. Schools that are considered more desirable than their neighbors often get overcrowded, so why is this case unusual? The neighbors reside south of the U.S. border with Mexico.

Earlier this school year, administrators at San Felipe Del Rio Consolidated Independent School District noticed hundreds of school-age children walking or riding across a border bridge to attend classes in the United States.

"It looks like a taxicab service from across the border," says Kelt Cooper, superintendent of the school district. "A van pulls up to the school and multiple children jump out."

Residency issues are often fraught in towns along the Mexican border, where U.S. schools offer better facilities than those to the south. "Some of the Mexican schools on the border have admirable instructors, but their facilities are dilapidated," says Cooper. Parents want their children to have an education in which the amenities are modern and healthy and include air conditioning, heating, and drinkable water, he adds.

The district is home to more than 10,000 students from preschool to 12th grade and is within walking distance of Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. In border communities, the distinction between the U.S. and Mexico can get blurry—often children will pay visits on the weekend to family members who reside in Mexico and cross the border again Monday morning to go to class. But students weren't crossing just on occasion; it was happening every day.

Cooper presents the issue as a matter of public health and safety. "What if there is an outbreak of the swine flu or an injury at school? How will we find someone's parents when they live in a different country?" he asks.

In September, school employees waited on the international bridge at 6:30 one morning and issued each student walking to school a letter, asking them to confirm residency within the district. "There was evidence implying these students were not living where they said, so we asked them to meet with our office staff to rectify the issue," Cooper says. If students couldn't verify residency, they were asked to leave the district. A handful of students didn't return to school the next day.

In total, Cooper says, about 195 notices were issued. Civil-rights groups who are critical of the school's actions claim that anywhere from 200 to 500 letters were distributed.

"Talk about trying to intimidate people and draw fear in the community," says David Hinojosa, staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "One might send a letter to the parent asking them to contact the district office, but setting up some checkpoint on the other side of the border is outrageous."

Children in the U.S., even those here illegally, have certain protections under the law. In Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court held that states may not deny to undocumented school-age children the free public education that they provide to children who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants. But students with an undocumented citizenship status still need to reside in the district of the school they are attending. "Many times these [students] are low-income, at-risk youth," says Hinojosa. "If you don't have to educate them, you're not accountable for them. The district might not want to educate [these] Latino children, possibly because their parents may not be as involved."

School officials say that they are not trying to push out less demographically desirable students. "Our population is 90 percent Hispanic," says Cooper. "It's very simple. If you reside in the district, you can go to school." He stresses that the issue is one of residency, not immigration. "Texas has the same residency issues not just with children from Mexico but with children from Louisiana, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Oklahoma."

But civil-rights groups maintain that that claim is misleading. "Why isn't the school district setting up a roadblock on the east side of town to see if students are coming from an adjacent school district?" Hinojosa asks. "They just want to target the Mexican border."

Parents who don't currently reside in the school district may go to extremes to make it appear as though they do. Cooper says that some have been known to enter into a month-to-month lease in order to stave off permanent-residency requirements. To verify residency, school officials have asked to see specific documentation like a water bill, garbage bill, lease, or voter registration. Administrators warn that there are some documents they won't accept. "We can't accept a Verizon cell-phone bill as proof of residency. You can have that bill sent to any address," Cooper says.

The district does understand that some children live with extended-family members. "We don't want to deny a student if they actually live with a relative; we just want the truth," Cooper says. On one occasion a 5-year-old student was documented as living with his grandmother, but when school officials conducted a home visit, there was no bedroom or bedding for the child, no clothes, and no toys. Home visits can be a quick and easy way to determine residency, and more will be conducted this school year, Cooper says.

The San Felipe school district and the legal-defense fund are starting to work together to create new procedures to verify students' residency. But in the meantime, some anti-immigration activists, like Bob Dane, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, see this problem as a manifestation of a broken immigration system. "What's happening in Del Rio is simply a reaction to the inaction in Washington," he says.