Hundreds of migrant teens will soon get in-person schooling in San Diego, California, after having recently arrived at the United States-Mexico border even as American schoolchildren in the state are still shut out of the classroom.
President Joe Biden’s administration has sent nearly 700 migrant teenage girls to the San Diego Convention Center to house them and where about 13 San Diego public school teachers will provide them with in-person learning.
While at the convention center, the migrant teens will get in-person English, performing arts, and visual arts educational courses.
“We definitely want to introduce them to the arts, the visual arts, and the performing arts,” San Diego County Office of Education official Roberto Carrillo told KPBS. “We’ll give them the opportunity to start expressing themselves through written formats, giving them a basic understanding of the English language.”
The in-person learning for newly arrived border crossers comes as millions of American students, particularly in the state of California, remain shut out of the classroom — forced to take online-only courses.
For example, the San Diego Unified School District plans to only partially reopen in-person learning for its students beginning in the second week of April. The reopening will allow students to go to school four days a week for six hours each day while continuing partially-online courses.
“For more than a year, parents and students in San Diego County have waited for educators to answer one question: When will our schools reopen with in-person instruction only? And for a year, they’ve been told to wait,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said in a statement. “The decision to provide in-person instruction to illegal migrants is outrageous and parents have every right to be angry.”
Similarly, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said schools for American students should be open and the U.S.-Mexico border ought to be closed:
Many schools are closed to Americans, but teachers are being sent to teach those who crossed the border illegally.
This is wrong.
We need to open our schools and close the border. https://t.co/F3AKQ0xM1k
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) March 30, 2021
Since taking office, Biden has prioritized in-person learning for migrant youth while American students in a number of states have been forced into online-only programs as a result of immense lobbying pressure from public teacher unions to keep schools closed during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
Earlier this month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it was a priority of the Biden administration to provide Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) with “educational services” and “health services.”
The policy is just the latest instance in which the Biden administration has advocated and implemented restrictions, guidelines, and mandates for Americans while forgoing the same initiatives for border crossers.
At the southern border, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released border crossers into the U.S. interior without first requiring they take a coronavirus test. Even after border crossers take a test and learn they are positive for the virus, they are not required to quarantine and many have continued traveling into the U.S. interior.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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