April 26, 2024 10:30 AM UTC

Educating All Kids Is Still The Right Thing To Do

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• by: Colorado Pols

Last week, Gov. Jared Polis signed legislation appropriating additional funds for public school districts facing an influx of migrant students. Colorado Public Radio reports:

The Colorado Department of Education will distribute approximately $24 million from the state education fund to school districts and charter schools that recently enrolled new immigrant students.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers sponsored the bill, which was signed by Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday. Lawmakers said school districts in Colorado have received about 7,000 unexpected students between October 2023 and March 2024.

“Schools are scrambling to ensure that they have the funds to be able to support both our new students and the needs that they have with paraprofessionals, folks who can help with English language acquisition and all of the wraparound services that they need, as well as supporting all of the students who were already in our schools and as we face some overcrowding of classrooms,” Democratic Rep. Emily Sirota of Denver said during the bill signing ceremony.

The bill may have passed with a bipartisan majority, but at least one influential Colorado Republican operative, former Monument trustee and Moms For Liberty organizer Darcy Shoening, is looking for a school district ready to die on the hill of not funding education for migrant kids:

The problem with what Shoening is proposing, lest anyone think that this bipartisan bill to help fund education for migrant students was discretionary on anyone’s part, is that the state is constitutionally required under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to provide public education to every child in the state regardless of their immigration status. The 1982 U.S. Supreme Court’s Plyler vs. Doe decision struck down a Texas law denying K-12 public school enrollment to undocumented children. It’s the same thinking that applies to hospitals being required to treat anyone who arrives needing care–the humanitarian obligation outweighs the inconvenience. Not to mention that kids, no matter when and how they arrived in our neighborhoods, need to be in school.

Ordinarily we’d dismiss Schoening as an irrelevant crackpot, but her influence in recent months has led to some significant political developments in the Colorado Republican Party including the decision to prematurely endorse Donald Trump in January. We unfortunately can’t say it’s impossible that Shoening will find a sufficiently “liberty-minded” school board willing to add mandatory truancy to the problems migrants and communities receiving them face. As we’re reminded regularly, this is not the same U.S. Supreme Court as the Court that decided Plyler v. Doe.

For now, however, lawmakers on both sides are doing the responsible thing and keeping kids in school. The alternative is something we’d rather not witness in America.