Former President Donald Trump’s false statements about immigrants eating pets during Tuesday night’s presidential debate directed more attention to an Ohio city that has grown in recent years with the arrival of newcomers from Haiti.
That growth in Springfield, Ohio, has not only spurred local population growth and economic development, but also enrollment growth for the local school district.
As a result, the Springfield district—where multilingual students, many from immigrant households, now account for close to 13 percent of the more than 7,400 students—finds itself in a scenario many other districts face this school year: the need to meet their legal obligation to enroll and serve immigrant students and multilingual learners, while they’ve also been the subject of heated political rhetoric.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric isn’t new, but it can undermine schools’ efforts to build inclusive, welcoming, and integrated learning environments, said Alejandra Vázquez Baur, co-founder and director of the National Newcomer Network, a coalition of educators, researchers, and advocates pushing for equitable education for newcomer students.
Researchers and educators can point to proven strategies to welcome immigrant and multilingual students who are entitled to a free, public education and serve them effectively.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric affects schools’ work
Political rhetoric that demonizes immigrants can harm the mental and emotional health of students from those communities, especially when adults and classmates echo such statements in school, Vázquez Baur said. This can also hurt their academic success.
In addition to rumors like those repeated by Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, some political leaders have also focused on the cost of educating immigrant students.
In 2022, for instance, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, argued that educating undocumented students was too expensive and expressed interest in revisiting the landmark 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe, which guaranteed these students’ access to a basic education.
Some services for immigrant students can be expensive, such as scaling up dual immersion programs in which students learn academic content in English and another world language. But Vázquez Baur argues that schools need more funding for all students overall.
Texas, for example, is in the bottom 10 states for per-pupil spending, she said. The state hasn’t raised its base amount of per-pupil funding since 2019.
“When we fail to increase funding to meet the needs of any children, even students who are born in the United States, we make it difficult for school districts to meet their obligations to educate all children, including newly arrived immigrant students,” she said.
When districts do invest resources to better serve immigrant students, including implementing enhanced enrollment procedures and building up world language programming, the benefits extend beyond immigrant students’ well-being.
Districts reap rewards when investing in immigrant students
In the St. Paul district in Minnesota, enrollment stabilized in the 2023-24 school year after six years of districtwide declines.
That’s in large part due to students enrolling in the district’s dual-language immersion and language and culture programs, said Megan Budke, the district’s immersion, indigenous, and world languages coordinator.
Such programs, rooted in the concept of valuing immigrant families’ home languages in academic settings, can help create inclusive learning environments for all students. There are also some academic perks to such investments.
Students enrolling in these programs have shown academic growth on state standardized tests and in meeting grade-level benchmarks, Budke said.
While Budke acknowledges that dual-language immersion programs in particular can be costly, the district has reached a point where the benefits outweigh the costs, she said.
Districts without large budgets interested in such culturally responsive language programs can pursue lower-cost language and culture programs, Budke said.
One example is the St. Paul district’s East African magnet school, which teaches core content in English but provides students with access to an East African language course.
Schools can also create welcoming environments for immigrant students by training the employees responsible for enrolling them to better understand their prior educational experiences so they can place them in the most appropriate classes, Vázquez Baur said.
For instance, those officers should do their best to ensure immigrant students aren’t placed in courses they might have already completed in their home countries. They also shouldn’t be placed in courses beyond their experience levels, which can set immigrant students up for failure.
The rewards for such investments go beyond immigrant students’ well-being and simply ensuring they feel welcome.
Some studies have shown that the presence of immigrant students in K-12 classrooms improves academic outcomes for their U.S.-born peers. And U.S.-born students can benefit from exposure to the world cultures and languages of their multilingual peers.
“We have that opportunity to expose students to more cultures, to more languages and to how different people think from different parts of the world,” Pamela Shay, director of state and federal programs for the Springfield, Ohio, schools told the local WYSO radio station. “Now, we have that opportunity to really be able to build upon that, to better prepare our students as they go out into the world.”
Most of the Haitian immigrants moving into Ohio have come from other states—not directly from Haiti—and are in the United States legally under Temporary Protected Status, according to city officials. It’s a designation granted to foreign countries by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. During a designated period, TPS beneficiaries from these countries cannot be deported and they can obtain work permits, according to the federal agency.
Springfield district leaders did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication Wednesday.
Though districts are legally required to enroll all students regardless of their immigration status, and a growing number of English learners are enrolling in regions of the country where these populations have historically been small, there’s a broader question districts should be asking of themselves, especially as anti-immigrant rhetoric persists, said Budke in St. Paul.
“Who do we serve?” Budke said. “That has been such a good question for us to reflect on. We serve our students, and our students in St. Paul are multilingual.”
