Shelters become makeshift schools

By law, migrant children are entitled to an education

Felicia Baez teaches English as a second language at a shelter in South Florida where anywhere from 30 to 100 migrant children in federal custody live at one time. Most stay about two months, but some leave after only a few days.

“It’s always like the first day of school,” Baez said of the turnover at the shelter, His House Children’s Home, in the suburb of Miami Gardens. And the wide range of academic ability among her students

— some haven’t been in a classroom in years, while others graduated from high school in their home countries — means she is constantly making adjustments.

These are just some of the challenges of educating the thousands of migrant children now housed in youth shelters and family detention centers across the country.

Federal law requires that all children on U.S. soil receive a free public education, regardless of their immigration status. As the Trump administration expands the number of people detained at the border, shelters and detention facilities are ramping up their roles as makeshift schools, teaching English and civics classes, offering cooking lessons and setting up field trips to art museums.

But according to lawyers and educators with firsthand knowledge of the child detention system, the education offered inside the facilities is uneven and, for some children, starkly inadequate.

Teachers at the schools are sometimes not state-certified as teachers, according to these accounts. Some shelter instructors cannot communicate effectively in Spanish, and in other cases the curriculum is so limited and classes are so wide-ranging in age groups that students seem bored and disengaged.

Daniela Marisol, a 16-year-old migrant from Honduras, has been held at a series of shelters since August. She has not been able to fully participate in classes because she is partly deaf and has not received hearing aids, said Holly Cooper, a lawyer representing Daniela

“The impression is that they are not really taught much of anything.”

Eleanor Acer, of the nonprofit Human Rights First