Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

How An Immigrants-Only Program Could Bankrupt Your Hometown

Gulbenk/Wikimedia Commons

Somewhere in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a small steel-town school district of about 1,400 kids, a school board member is looking at a budget line that didn’t exist a decade ago. In 2014, the district had approximately seven English Learner or “EL” students. In 2024, that number crossed 200.

Charleroi is a small story with a national plot. Over the past decade, the number of students who require extra support with English or multilingual education has exploded nationwide. From Georgia to Ohio and from Texas to Colorado, we are seeing the same thing: as the share of students needing English language services has gone up, the share of the budget going to core classroom instruction has gone down.

This isn’t a scandal. Nobody’s stealing money. It’s more frustrating than that. It’s math.

When a district has hundreds of students who need specialized language instruction, it must hire English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)  teachers, bilingual aides, and translators. It must add counselors and social workers. It must build a whole program infrastructure that didn’t exist in the district before. And because the federal government funds only seven to ten cents of every dollar those programs cost, the rest comes out of the same budget that pays for reading specialists, science labs, and the things your kid uses every day.

Springfield, Ohio made national news over the rapid influx of Haitian migrants. There’s also a lesser-discussed issue: the school district went from about 200 English learners in 2020 to nearly 900 by 2024. They hired 13 full-time ESOL teachers in four years, starting from almost none. The state government eventually sent them a $1.3 million emergency check, while the school budget’s actual instruction share dropped by 13 points over five years. For Springfield City Schools, which has 7,400 students, that’s a meaningful slice of what goes on in every classroom.

In Fort Worth, a third of students are English learners. The ESL program budget nearly doubled over the past decade, from $42 million to $82 million. It’s become such a strain that even a few years ago, Governor Greg Abbott publicly asked the federal government to cover the costs of educating undocumented students.

As school boards continue to deal with this issue, it’s important to remember that they didn’t make any of these decisions that led to these outcomes. Board members don’t set border policy. They have no authority over refugee programs. They meet regularly to track the district’s progress, keep it financially solvent, and invest in their children’s future. This is becoming increasingly difficult, not just because of the growth in non-English-speaking students, but also because of the decline in public school enrollment and class sizes post-COVID-19, which also affects budgets. Our public schools are being squeezed from both sides here.

In Gwinnett County, Georgia, nearly a third of residents are foreign-born and face ESOL program funding challenges, and in Garden City, Kansas, nearly half of all students are now English learners. These districts have had to essentially rebuild themselves around these new demographics, which often means investing more in translation and basic English skills than rigorous academic programs.

If you want to understand why the art program disappeared, or why your district hasn’t hired a reading specialist in three years, start by asking your school board for a line-by-line breakdown of what ELL services cost you and your community. The gap between those two numbers is being paid by someone. Probably you.

Aiden Buzzetti is the President of the Bull Moose Project, an organization advocating populist conservatism in Washington, D.C.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.