Letter By The School Supt. for financial help to teach illegals in AZ schools

The Honorable Arne Duncan, Secretary United States Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue SW Washington, DC 20202 Secretary Duncan: Arizona has an obligation to provide its students with the highest quality education possible. Despite tremendous socio-economic and education funding challenges facing our state, Arizonans have resolutely overcome those challenges and met that obligation. Arizona has taken great strides to ensure that its children are protected and educated. But now with too many Arizona families still suffering through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, now with Arizona’s state legislature facing a tremendous future revenue shortfall, and with Arizona schools struggling to cover the costs of students’ needs, Arizona, its schools and its taxpayers are being asked to shoulder the increasing financial burden of illegal immigrants entering our school system. Having to pay for the tremendous educational costs associated with the federal government’s failure to secure the border is not new to Arizona taxpayers or Arizona schools. What is new, though, and what is unprecedented, is the federal government’s ac tions to relocate at least hundreds of unaccompanied minors, mostly school-aged teenagers, who have illegally crossed the border into other states, to Arizona’s cities and towns, where they will attend Arizona schools. It is with this unprecedented action by the federal government in mind that I am asking you and the U.S. Department of Education to provide solid information on the total number of children actually being placed in Arizona and where they are being placed, and to pay for the added educational expense of those school-aged illegal immigrants being relocated to Arizona. It is unreasonable to ask Arizona schools and Arizona taxpayers to pay for these expenses. These unaccompanied minors in question did not illegally cross into Arizona, but rather they were bussed into our state by the federal government.