Lawyers for Civil Rights and Massachusetts Advocates for Children filed Sept. 18 against Saugus Public Schools seeking the release of records around the district’s admissions policy. The legal advocates claim the policy, which mandates that families fill out the town census among other requirements, disproportionately affects immigrant and other vulnerable student groups. Saugus district officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Just weeks after Massachusetts attorneys flagged two school districts for allegedly denying newcomer students their legal right to an education, researchers examining Oregon and Michigan state data found that English learners were less likely than other students to be enrolled in the core classes they need to graduate. 

Both of these issues were called out in a June undercover investigation by The 74 that revealed rampant enrollment discrimination against older immigrant students. These newer findings show many such barriers remain in various parts of the country. 

Boston-based and asked the state attorney general’s office on Aug. 28 to investigate Saugus Public Schools for practices they say single out immigrant children: The school system currently bars entry to students whose families did not complete the annual town census. 

While local census data collection is in Massachusetts, lawyers say it can’t be tied to student enrollment. 

“With school starting in Saugus this week and the School Committee digging in its heels, it is imperative that the Attorney General intervene,” Erika Richmond Walton, an attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights, said in a statement last week. “No child in Massachusetts should be denied the right to an education based on exclusionary policies.” 

In an earlier interview, attorneys said that the district also applies overly-stringent residency and proof-of-identity requirements that make it difficult for children — especially immigrants — to register, violating their rights under federal and state law. 

The attorney general’s office said in a statement that “it is in touch with the Saugus School District regarding their school admissions policy,” noting that “federal and state law gives all students equal access to a public education, regardless of immigration status.”

Saugus Public Schools, 11 miles north of Boston, served , up from 2,297 two years earlier. In the 2023-24 school year, English was not the first language of and 13% of students were   The district was in the 2022-23 school year, slightly higher than the state at 24.2%. 

The 74’s enrollment  investigation also found that some school personnel who were willing to admit an older immigrant student wanted to severely limit his participation, including allowing him to take only ESL classes. Researchers in Oregon looked at the practice they call in their own state and Michigan. 

Analyzing statewide data from the 2013-14 to 2018-19 school years, they found that just 55% of English learners in Oregon were enrolled in all the required core classes compared to 69% of those students who had graduated from the English learner program and 67% who were never enrolled in it.

In Michigan, 66% of English learners were enrolled in all of the core classes compared to 71% of former English learner students and those who were never enrolled in the program, according to the most recently available statewide data from the 2011-12 to 2014-15 school years. Under , public schools must ensure that English learners can “participate meaningfully and equally in educational programs,” including having access to grade-level curricula so they can be promoted and graduate.

Researchers said race and socioeconomics were critical factors in exclusionary tracking, noting that English learners in Oregon were more likely to take standalone English language development classes and live in poverty than those in Michigan. 

“The scope of the problem is pretty large,” said Ilana Umansky, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who co-wrote the report. “It’s so important that kids can get through high school and graduate with a regular diploma.”

Immigrant advocate Adam Strom called the actions in all three states an outrage.

​​”Exclusionary tracking and denial of registration for immigrant students not only violate their legal rights,” he said, “but also rob the entire school community of the rich cultural and intellectual contributions these students offer.”

Unwelcome to America

Senior reporter Jo Napolitano spent nearly a year and a half calling 630 high schools around the country trying to enroll a 19-year-old newcomer whose education had been interrupted after the ninth grade. Napolitano posed as the student’s aunt and told schools “Hector Guerrero” had recently arrived in their district from Venezuela with limited English skills. 

Hector was turned away 330 times, including more than 200 denials in the 35 states and the District of Columbia where he had a legal right to attend based on his age.

Those who refused our test student predicted that he would not graduate, a factor that should not have played a part in such a decision, several state education department officials said. Thirteen states and three major cities have now said they are taking action to bolster newcomer students’ educational rights as a result of The 74’s reporting.

Three schools in Massachusetts, where students have a right to attend until age 21, denied our test student and two more said they were likely to. Education officials there told The 74 last month they would call those districts to discuss the findings, but planned no other statewide corrective measures.

Saugus schools Superintendent Michael Hashem’s secretary, Dianne Vargas, handles enrollment in the North Shore district. She told The 74 last week that are lawful and that she’s in regular contact with the state education department and state attorney general’s office. 

She maintained that the requirement that “(f)amilies who move to Saugus must complete the Town of Saugus census” to be eligible to register their children is waived for incoming immigrant students and that the rules were in place before August 2023, when the attorneys say they were adopted.

But, she said, the district does require other forms of paperwork — all meant to protect these students’ welfare.

“We want to make sure they are with a parent or guardian — that they actually have someone who is caring for them so we don’t have doubling up and people aren’t passing children around,” she said. “We have a good amount of scattered living or sheltered students who are refugees or migrants and they cannot be left without guardianship. We have a translator … we have everything up to date and make sure these people feel welcome.”

She said her office asks for — but does not require — a birth certificate and medical records. But Diana I. Santiago, a senior attorney and director at Massachusetts Advocates for Children, said Saugus’s enrollment policies effectively barred at least two immigrant families from enrolling their children in a timely manner, resulting in “substantial time” out of school. 

The enrollment policy warns that parents, guardians or any others who “violate or assist in violation of this policy by submitting false documentation, aiding, abetting or conspiring to admit a child as a student of Saugus Public Schools, shall be subject to all applicable criminal and civil penalties.” 

It also pledges that if a student’s family moves out of the district during the school year, that student’s “immigration records required by law, shall be transferred immediately to the school in the city or town where they are residing.”

It’s unclear why the district would be in possession of a student’s immigration records. Schools cannot, under federal law, turn away students based on their , although conservative forces are now looking  . At an Aug. 30 Moms for Liberty gathering, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump said the country is “being poisoned” and that immigrant students are

Closing doors

Santiago described the language used throughout Saugus’s enrollment policy — including terms like “legal residents” and “immigration paperwork” — as coded and meant to target the city’s growing immigrant community. 

“It’s just inserted there as another way to try to keep students out, especially immigrant students,” she said. 

Massachusetts is generally considered a national leader in education. The state attorney general’s on its website said it’s critical they “ensure that all children residing in their jurisdictions have equal access to public education” by allowing them to enroll and attend school without regard to race, national origin, or immigration or citizenship status. They must also avoid information requests “that have the purpose or effect of discouraging or denying access to school” based on those factors.  

In another Bay State case that set off alarms in late July, Norfolk Town Administrator said a change in the state’s emergency shelter system meant children temporarily housed at one location “will not be enrolled in Norfolk Public Schools or the King Philip Regional School District.” After pushback from immigrant advocates, he . 

The 74’s investigation revealed a litany of ways that districts make enrollment arduous or unwelcoming for immigrant students. A principal in Green River, Wyoming, said our test student could be admitted but “wouldn’t get to participate in extracurriculars,” while a Caldwell, Idaho, principal said he would “maybe” allow him to enroll in math and science classes, but not English or history.

The Oregon researchers said the practice of keeping English learners out of core classes is significant and undermines , a pivotal 1974 Supreme Court case that requires districts to  

Umansky and co-author Karen D. Thompson, associate professor at Oregon State University, have researching educational inequity for English learners.

Thompson said exclusionary tracking goes against high schools’ mission to graduate students college and career ready. , they said, can boost student access. 

“We want students who are classified as English learners to be able to learn and thrive and have all of the opportunities they can,” she said. “If their access to core content is restricted, some future doors might be closed to them.” 

More now than ever, we, the public, desperately need the facts about our collective challenges. It’s particularly urgent for K–12 schools, which have, of late, simultaneously faced less public oversight and more political pressure, hosting the teaching of history and science. Truth is not in fashion in a country where has become a core feature of mass politics.

That backdrop makes the recent investigation into schools’ enrollment rules for newcomer students by my 74 colleague Jo Napolitano especially valuable. In case you missed it — and if you did, click here — Jo called 630 U.S. schools posing as the aunt of a fictional 19-year-old Venezuelan immigrant student named Hector Guerrero, and asked each how she could enroll him at the campus. Just 209 agreed to register him, even though he had a clear legal right to attend in most states based on his age — and still could have been admitted in the others. 

It’s a valuable, revelatory piece of journalism that ought to prompt soul searching from educators and officials on the other 421 campuses, as well as districts around the country. 

Thanks to Jo’s work, it’s clear that one of our most persistent national misunderstandings around immigration and demographics holds firm sway in U.S. K–12 schools. Namely, too many Americans are stuck viewing immigration through a scarcity lens, as though the arrival of immigrants and their families somehow subtracts from resources and opportunities available to non-immigrants in the U.S. 

Many school officials seemed to be translating that misunderstanding into enrollment decisions for Hector. Admitting him would be too difficult for their school, they warned. Hector might take up scarce resources or might cause their school’s graduation rate to drop, they fretted. And didn’t his family realize how hard English-only school might be for him? When Napolitano pressed, some officials responded with civil rights violations masquerading as deterrents — sure, some said, Hector could maybe enroll, but he wouldn’t be placed in core academic classes or wouldn’t be permitted to participate in extracurriculars. Others were more actively dissuasive, asking about his citizenship status or hinting that he might need to pay tuition (both of these questions are irrelevant, bordering on illegal).

It’s stunning to read the callousness of quotes from officials around the country, including in Rust Belt communities like my hometown, places that are struggling to retain and grow their populations. K–12 education budgets are expected to dwindle in coming years, in part because of widespread enrollment declines. In this moment, against this backdrop, how can these administrators turn down a potential student?

And yet, neither our national immigration misunderstanding nor any of its local iterations have much factual grounding. There is ample evidence that the U.S. economy benefits immensely from the country’s ability to attract immigrants at all socioeconomic and educational levels. Immigrants boost our labor markets and grow the U.S. tax base. This includes all immigrants — regardless of their particular legal status in the U.S. immigration and labor systems. The Congressional Budget Office updated its multi-year fiscal projections for the country last month to reflect higher than anticipated immigrant arrivals in recent years. that increased numbers of immigrants arriving without official legal status or work authorizations since 2021 (and continuing through at least 2026) will increase U.S. GDP by $8.9 trillion in the next decade — and reduce federal deficits by $900 billion. As the CBO put it, nearly all of these economic benefits come from “expanding the labor force and boosting economic output.” 

Today’s immigrants are also filling in , providing the country with students and workers at a time when the country’s birth rates are falling. for some time that “immigrants and their children will shape many aspects of American society and will provide virtually all the growth in the U.S. labor force over the next forty years.” 

Think of it like this: if you are a near-retiree planning to rely on Social Security and Medicare in your golden years, you need enough younger workers to earn enough income and pay enough taxes to keep these programs maximally solvent. If you’re planning on selling your house and downsizing to make your retirement more comfortable, you need enough young workers to accumulate enough wealth to keep the housing market hot and buy it from you at a good price. Today’s immigrant workers help with this now and their children are the workers of tomorrow. 

But you — and we, the country, all of us — don’t just need these children to grow up. To maximize our collective benefits from this burgeoning demographic boon, we need these children to be educated as well as possible so that they can do as well as possible in their careers. The better they do, the better the economy does, the better our public ledgers look, and the better off the United States will be in the long run. 

As one immigration policy expert tells Jo: “There’s nothing that exemplifies the American dream and the American spirit more than a public education — and the right to receive that public education. These kids are here. They’re going to either be productive citizens or they’re not.”

The real narrative around immigrants and immigrant kids is a story of surplus, enrichment, and national abundance. Frustratingly, Jo’s extraordinary reporting shows that too many of our schools aren’t yet recognizing and acting upon these facts. Here’s hoping it breaks through.