[quote=bearishgurl]We’re paying to operate at least 25% more public schools than we need to in South County and paying the (unnecessary) salaries of 25% more teachers and administrators so we can spread all the non-resident students around and provide an (expensive) K-12 education to students actually living in another country! This practice has the effect of completely filling up all these schools in older areas which would otherwise be closed due to lack of a sufficient student body actually residing within their attendance boundaries.[/quote]
BG – I, too, would really like to see your data supporting this 25% claim. And since the vast majority of CA public education is funded at the state and federal level, not local level, we’re all paying for it, not just South County residents. Of course I believe there should be accurate accounting for residency and school attendance, but if these kids who live on both sides of the border are getting – egads! – an education, sorry, but that isn’t going to upset me too much.
It’s already been proven that their parents who travel across the border to work contribute more to our CA economy than they take. There was a big study done at USC a few years ago that stated undocumented Latino immigrants are underpaid by about 9.5% compared to similar documented Latino workers. This amount contributes $2.2 billion in cheap labor to the CA economy and of course, if they were legal, they’d contribute even more by way of taxes. That same study showed that about 13% of California’s children are those of undocumented Latino immigrants. 13% is a far cry from 25%, even if many of them are living in South County. http://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/731/docs/chirla_v10_small.pdf
