Schools after the surge: How they’ve dealt with 2014’s flood of undocumented minors

*There was so much speculation at the time of the unaccompanied minor surge along the border. How much would it cost to house the children, to educate them, should they be in U.S. schools? Ther was no way of knowing a cost at the time, it would have to be left to an after-the-fact calculation. So here we are now, trying to figure out a number. The next question that some folks will ask, after we put a dollar sign on it, is to ask if it was worth the expense. VL

By Soni Sangha, Fox News Latino

This is the first of a four-part series.

Early in the 2014-15 school year, when it was clear that a surprising number of immigrant children would enroll in U.S. schools due to the surge of unaccompanied minors who crossed the southern border over the summer, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that advocates a hard line on illegal immigration, estimated that the cost of educating these students could be around $761 million nationally.

As that information filtered into the media, it prompted the question: Could our school districts handle the cost and the needs associated with this population segment?

Fox News Latino reached out to schools nationwide seeking an answer. In the following series, we take a look at how a few districts have handled the influx. Turns out, it’s complicated. Each district varies enough that their experiences are individual. Not all had large prior Latino populations, or similar infrastructure – including space, teachers for English-language learners and sizable budgets from large tax bases.

Some districts experienced concentrated enrollment at select schools, others experienced broader distribution. Some schools were located in districts with politicians who were openly supportive of immigration; others were not.

Click HERE to read the full story.