The influx of poor immigrant families brought a flood of resources as the school’s official poverty rate rose above 90%: an after-school program, three interpreters and a steady infusion of federal funding.
But in recent years, as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown began to reverberate through the nation’s public schools, the students who had been such a fiscal asset have turned into a budgetary liability.
Education leaders in Baltimore say White House policy proposals are prompting immigrant families to forgo services they fear could land them on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s radar or jeopardize their path to citizenship. And because the school district here uses families’ participation in government assistance programs to measure poverty rates, John Ruhrah, at least on paper, suddenly looks rich.
The southeast Baltimore school lost more than $240,000 for the next school year after it was dropped from a federal anti-poverty program, called Title I, which doles out billions of dollars to the country’s poorest schools. That loss is a fraction of its $4.8 million budget for next year, but the money covered three staff positions and kept class sizes in the 30s. The Title I status also attracted teachers, who were eligible for tuition grants from the federal government for teaching poor children.
Across the country, education leaders have warned that Trump administration immigration policies could send school budgets into tailspins.
Under one proposal, the administration would broaden the range of public assistance programs — such as Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers — used to determine whether immigrants seeking to become legal residents would be “public charges” on the country. That would effectively expand the programs that some immigrants might seek to avoid as they erase themselves from government assistance.
Another rule would evict immigrants in the country illegally and their families — even family members in the country legally — from public housing. And the administration’s decision to ask on the 2020 census whether respondents are citizens stands to skew official poverty rates, the single most important data point for federal education funding, by depressing the response of immigrants — documented and undocumented.
Trump administration officials say these proposals will give policymakers a better sense of the country’s population while preserving scarce resources for people living here legally. But schools are in a squeeze: By Supreme Court decree, they have no choice but to educate children, regardless of their immigration status.