Kennedy turns to feds for student support

LYNN – A significant jump in the number of so-called unaccompanied minors coming into the school system has Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy calling for recourse from the federal government.”We were at 18, and now we’re up to 54,” Kennedy said Friday of the students, some of whom are as old as 25. “We can’t afford to educate them, and they’re not prepared to be educated.”Kennedy and Superintendent Catherine Latham headed to Boston Friday to meet with Jack Richard, an aide to Sen. Scott Brown, to ask for help. Kennedy said the federal government needs to “give us money or stop sending us people we can’t afford to educate.”The “unaccompanied minors” Kennedy referred to are young Guatemalan men sent to the city under a federal refugee resettlement program who reportedly have little or no education. In mid-September there were 18 in the school system, but Kennedy said the city has reached its tipping point.School Committee member Donna Coppola called 54 students among 15,000 a minuscule number and said the students are coming because they have family here.”It’s not like they’re just filling buses and sending them to Lynn,” she said.Committee members John Ford and Rick Starbard said they aren’t so sure.Ford said he believes the young men are being directed here because Lynn is known as a haven city due to its array of services, relatively low rents and educational opportunities.It has been almost exactly a year since Kennedy reached out to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees to find out why it had deemed Lynn a haven city.She has yet to successfully arrange a meeting with anyone on the issue, however.Starbard said the difference is that the United Nations was sending refugees, whereas the unaccompanied minors are in the country illegally. He said he believes the students are being coached to tell officials they have families in Lynn because once they are here they know exactly where to go to get an advocate and services.”Eighty-five percent of them are coming from one town,” he said.The lack of documentation also worries both Ford and Starbard. They are concerned that they could be seating men as old as 25, whose backgrounds are unknown, next to 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds in high school classrooms.Parents who relocate from even a nearby community such as Peabody are required to have a host of documentation in order to enroll their student in a Lynn school, Starbard noted.”But we just have to accept what these (unaccompanied minors) say,” he said. “There is no way to verify otherwise.”Committee member Charlie Gallo said space, finances and test scores were his largest concerns. Once in the school system the immigrants will take part in the year-long “newcomer program” but by their second year they will be expected to take and pass MCAS the same as every other student, he said.If Kennedy and Latham are successful in getting some federal money to help educate them, Gallo said that could help rent space to alleviate overcrowding. But Ford called the entire situation fiscally unsustainable.Starbard was not confident Kennedy’s meeting would amount to anything.”I hope it’s a positive meeting, but I’m not overly hopeful that it will result in any type of change,” he said.Chris Stevens can be reached at [email protected].