Education Week - June 12, 2019 - 14

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
Feds Call Off School,
Soccer in Shelters
The Trump administration has
instructed shelters that house undocumented children who crossed the
U.S.-Mexico border that it can no longer pay for English-language instruction, recreational activities, including
soccer, and access to legal aid.
The Department of Health and
Human Services said last week that
a budget crisis caused by a massive
influx of unaccompanied immigrant
minors is forcing the agency to end
paying for services and activities
not directly related to children's
safety.
"Additional resources are urgently
required to meet the humanitarian
needs created by this influx-to both
sustain critical child welfare and release operations and increase capacity," Evelyn Stauffer, a spokeswoman
with the department's administration for children and families, said in
a statement.
Educators and immigration advocates are decrying the decision as a
blow to children already facing the
strain of tremendous trauma.
"It is disappointing to learn that the
few rights that have been extended
to these children are now at risk of
being completely eliminated," said Al-

berto Carvalho, the superintendent of
Florida's Miami-Dade school system.
"This is the lowering of a bar that was
already unacceptably low."

Running Out of Money
Carvalho said federal officials have
all but ignored his district's efforts to
work with shelters to provide educational services to the children.
The nation's largest holding facility for unaccompanied migrant children is in Homestead, Fla., which
sits within the district's boundaries.
The facility already holds upward of
2,000 children.
The Health and Human Services
agency says it currently has 13,200
children in its care. The Border Patrol said that 11,500 children without
a parent crossed the border in May.
HHS said ending the services is
necessary under the Antideficiency
Act, which requires the department
to prioritize safety when faced with
a funding shortfall. The department
has requested an emergency appropriation of nearly $3 billion from
Congress to fund its refugee operations. The program is on pace to run
out of funding in the coming weeks
and will need supplemental funding, according to the agency.
"[I]t's because of the numbers [of

Wilfredo Lee/AP

By Corey Mitchell
& Kavitha Cardoza

children]," said Jessica Vaughn, the
director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which
advocates for more restrictions on
immigration. "Of course, we know
the priorities have to be shelter and
food and clothing and medical care.
And the government is going to continue doing that."
Under current law, migrant children who illegally cross into the
United States must first be sent to a
government shelter, where they stay
until they can be united with relatives or other sponsors while await-

ing immigration court hearings.
Tens of thousands of migrant
children and youth have come from
Central America in recent years-
and many of them have ended up
in public schools across the United
States as they await their final fates
in immigration proceedings.
While migrant children held in
the detention centers are supposed
to receive food, medical care, and
schooling, there have been widely
shared images of them housed inside fenced enclosures. Six migrant

Children play soccer at the
Homestead Temporary
Shelter for Unaccompanied
Children earlier this spring in
Homestead, Fla. The Trump
administration said it will
stop paying for recreation,
schooling, and legal aid
services that are provided to
migrant children being held
in shelters.

PAGE 17 >

New Disaster-Recovery Team Unveiled by Education Department
Five-person unit to offer
help in coordinating aid
By Andrew Ujifusa
The U.S. Department of Education has
formed a five-person team that will be devoted
full time to helping schools recover from hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, one of Secretary
of Education Betsy DeVos' top deputies told a
group of House lawmakers.
Members of the House education subcommittee heard about the new dedicated staff
last week as they listened to testimony
from educators about schools' recovery from
natural disasters in California, Florida, the
Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Two days before the hearing, the
full House sent a $19.1 billion disaster-relief
bill to President Donald Trump, who signed
it late last week, that includes $165 million
for the Education Department to distribute
to schools.
"We need to know what has gone right, what
has gone wrong, and what needs to improve
for the sake of our children and their schools,"
said Del. Gregorio Sablan, a Democrat who
represents the Northern Mariana Islands and
who is the subcommittee chairman. "Because
we do know that it is a question of when, not
if, the next storm will hit."

Oversight of these grants is also an issue: A report last week from the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general's office about a recovery grant to Virgin Islands schools found that the
U.S. territory had work to do to ensure its money
was being used properly. Discussing the Restart
program funds, for example, the office wrote in
the report that, "Without effectively designed internal controls to oversee Restart program funds,
the Virgin Islands [education department] does
not have reasonable assurance that it will use
Restart program funds timely and for the intended purposes of the program."
Absent from the hearing was a representative
from Puerto Rico's education department. However, when questioned by Rep. Donna Shalala,
D-Fla., about the resources made available and
used by the island, Assistant Secretary of Education Frank Brogan noted that under a Restart grant, the U.S. territory had been allocated
$589 million for schools, but had only drawn
down about 5 percent of the funds to date.

Immense Scale
The scale of recovery from these disasters
for schools can be immense. Several months
ago, former Puerto Rico Secretary of Education Julia Keleher said her schools would need
$11 billion to help them recover from Hurricane Maria.
Brogan noted that having such funds appropriated by Congress and actually getting

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 12, 2019 | www.edweek.org

it to education systems in areas impacted
by disaster can be complicated. He used the
discussion to highlight how the office of elementary and secondary education-which he
oversees-has created a new disaster recovery
unit. This round-the-clock team, Brogan said,
will do on-the-ground work with schools in the
immediate aftermath of a disaster, while also
working to improve coordination between the
Education Department and other agencies.
"We're not satisfied that in every one of
those cases, we are as a department where we
want to be," Brogan said.
Brogan added that at one point recently,
the department calculated that disparate elements of its workforce had put 20,000 workhours into supporting schools' recovery efforts
before it stopped counting. The department's
disaster recovery unit will provide technical
support for districts that are applying for aid,
Brogan noted, and also try to help them with
the procurement process so they can access
federal funds more readily.
"They have to be able to take a look at what
they're doing and turn those needs into an application," he said.
There are a few dedicated funding streams
for disaster aid for schools. One of them is the
Project SERV grant program, which is intended to help districts recover from violent
or traumatic events-DeVos has distributed
these grants to districts impacted by school
shootings, for example, as well as by natural

disasters. Brogan highlighted SERV money
during his testimony; California, Puerto Rico,
Texas, and the Virgin Islands have each received $2 million in SERV grants after disasters.
Democrats also pressed Brogan on whether,
and how, the department was considering climate change in its work to help districts prepare for and recover from natural disasters.
Brogan responded that he was not an expert
on the issue and that it was being considered
by many agencies, but stressed the importance of factoring environmental impacts into
everyday decisions.

Planning Struggles
Educators also told the committee about
struggling to ensure districts do a full inventory of their needs, as well as their experiences
working with local, state, and federal officials.
Steve Herrington, the superintendent of Sonoma County schools in California, noted that
when city and county governments seek Federal Emergency Management Agency grants,
"they often forget to bring the school system
into the planning."
Sonoma County schools, which were hit
hard by California's Tubbs Fire in 2017, felt
the impact of the wildfire for a long time.
"We are doing long-term psychological training for teachers on how to deal with trauma in
the classroom," Herrington said.

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - June 12, 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - June 12, 2019