Feb 222010

Legislative Alert for 02/23/10

The Enemies of our Constitutional Republic are on the Move!

An email sent out by the Arizona office of the ACLU:

From: Alessandra Soler Meetze <grassroots@acluaz.org>

To:

Sent: Mon, February 22, 2010 3:51:10 PM

Subject: HB 2382 and SB 1097 (Student Data Collection)

Arizona Legislators will meet during two separate committee meetings this week to vote on bills mandating that all school districts gather information on the citizenship status of students, including the number of students who cannot prove lawful status. This information will then be given to the Department of Education. Any school district that fails to comply may have their state funding withheld.

HB 2382 will be heard at 2 p.m. Tuesday, February 23, 2010 in Government (HHR 4)
http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2382p.htm

SB 1097 will be heard at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, February 24, 2010 in Education (SHR1)
http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/sb1097p.htm

Please take action to prevent the passage of these bills by submitting your comments via ALIS
http://alistrack.azleg.gov/AlisTrack.asp

or by contacting the members of the House Government
http://www.azleg.gov/CommitteeInfo.asp?Committee_ID=22

and Senate Education
http://www.azleg.gov/CommitteeInfo.asp?Committee_ID=13

committees.

If you email your comments directly to the committee members, you can copy/paste the talking points given below.

HB 2382 and SB 1097 requiring data collection on students (OPPOSE)

These bills are bad for Arizona because:

Any state or local policy requiring schools to collect information related to immigration status would go against an Arizona Attorney General legal opinion from 1978 that prohibits school officials from asking about immigration status and would contradict the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision, Plyler v. Doe, which struck down a Texas law that permitted schools to refuse enrollment to a class of Mexican-American children who could not prove legal status.

The sponsors of the bill would like the Department of Education to gather this information so that they can know ‘theoretically’ how much it is costing Arizona taxpayers to educate immigrant children. However, Plyler v. Doe specifically addressed the issue of cost, ruling that a state “may not reduce expenditures by barring some arbitrarily chosen class of children from its schools,” including undocumented children. In terms of educational cost and need, the court found that “undocumented children are basically indistinguishable from legally resident [noncitizen] children.” Therefore, gathering this information will not save any money down the road because it will be unlawful to exclude them on that basis.

Gathering this information would result in the loss of sorely needed federal dollars. Collecting this information has the effect of discouraging an entire group of students from enrolling in the public schools based on their national origin; as a result, schools would risk violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. State agencies that are found to be in violation of Title VI would forfeit their federal funding.

This type of policy fuels xenophobia and underscores some politicians’ willingness to pursue an anti-immigrant agenda at the expense of school districts and taxpayers, who would ultimately have to foot the legal bill for defending such policies in court.

Teachers and school districts should not be in the business of determining immigration status, which, as we all know, can be an extremely complex inquiry. There is no mechanism for school officials to receive the specialized training that federal officers receive to make these determinations, not to mention the serious privacy concerns that this practice should raise for families with school-aged children and the substantial legal liability that school districts would face for erroneous determinations.