https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2024/04/22/colorado-turns-schools-into-welfare-agencies-as-thousands-of-needy-migrant-children-enroll/Denver and other Colorado communities have transformed schools into welfare agencies as tens of thousands of children of illegal border crossers flood into the state’s schools, where they get free food, clothing, shoes, healthcare, and education at taxpayers’ expense.
The Washington Post reported the transformation of the Centennial State’s schools from educational facilities to full-on welfare agencies where kids of all ages — many of whom have never gone to school in their entire lives — are enrolled by the thousands.
The paper began its story by talking about eleven-year-old Alberto, who was enrolled in a school in Aurora, Colorado. At eleven, Alberto had never attended school and spoke no English. Despite this, Alberto has been shoehorned into fourth grade even though his presence brings down everyone in the classroom because he has no educational basis to be in fourth grade.
The Post adds that more than 2,800 children of illegals have flooded the Aurora school system. Aurora is far from alone. Denver, the state’s largest school system, has been inundated with more than 3,700 children of illegals just over the course of the 2023-2024 school year.
Denver, the paper adds, usually welcomes about 500 children of illegals a year, but, in the past year, that number has skyrocketed to 250 every week, as President Joe Biden’s border crisis continues.
The influx is a serious burden on teachers.
“When you have 17 kids in your classroom, and then the next day you have 35, you’re basically starting over,” said Janine Dillabaugh, the principal of Eagleton Elementary in Denver, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Beyond academic support, she says, “We also have to attend to their social and emotional needs.”
“Emotional needs” means discipline issues, violence, and acting out by frustrated students who have never been required to go to school in their home countries, the Post added.
The schools have been overburdened with children far below age-appropriate educational levels and who speak very little or no English, forcing schools to search for bilingual teachers.
It is not just Spanish-speaking teachers they need, either. The current bilingual curriculum Colorado’s schools have instituted is generally Spanish-English, but, thanks to Biden’s wide-open border, the schools are finding more than a dozen languages being spoken by the children of illegals flooding Colorado, including Afghan, Chinese, various African dialects, languages from East Asia, and many more.
Even as the schools scramble to create bilingual programs to serve the many languages, many of these children are also arriving at schools with a dearth of appropriate clothing and even with untreated medical issues. These issues have turned the schools into miniature welfare agencies where kids — and sometimes even their parents — are handed a full service that takes care of all their needs in life.
One woman from Venezuela happily told the paper that she gets “everything” from the Aurora school her son attends.
“This is the only place I feel supported,” she chirped. “Clothes, WiFi, food, shoes — they help with everything.”
She even got free dental care thanks to efforts by school staffers, the Post reported.
Another alarming trend the Post reported is that Colorado schools are so desperate for bilingual teachers that they are working to hire immigrants who may have been teachers in their home countries. That means teachers who were trained in foreign teaching practices — many in communist, socialist, or other decidedly anti-American countries — will now be put in American classrooms to teach children who will later be disgorged into American society.
School budgets have also snapped from the strain, and many districts are demanding more money as illegals flood their classrooms. Some feel the federal government should step up, but this burden mostly falls on local taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill at the local level with higher taxes and cuts in services to legal residents.
Certainly, the issue is only getting worse month by month, not better, and American schools are being dragged under as Biden’s tidal wave of illegals grows.
