Lynn officials: Illegal immigrant children are stressing city services

Nope not gonna cost anything, not one penny, net positive for the country.

LYNN, Mass. (MyFoxBoston.com) -- Lynn is a municipality on the brink. Key department officials say a recent influx of illegal immigrant children and families in the city is stressing almost every service from trash collection to healthcare.

"We have been aware of the unaccompanied children issue for quite a while, and we were able to absorb a lot of these children early on," said Lynn Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy. "But now it's gotten to the point where the school system is overwhelmed, our health department is overwhelmed, the city's budget is being sustainably altered in order of accommodate all of these admissions in the school department."

Flanagan Kennedy says the first contact for immigrant arrivals in the city is the school system.

The amount of new foreign born student admissions has nearly doubled in the last two years. This school year alone saw more than 600 new admissions. Among those students, 248 were from Guatemala. Flanagan Kennedy says of those 248 children, 126 were illegal, undocumented minors.

"They are not literate in any language, so they do need some skills. And I assume they are enrolling in school to receive those skills," said Catherine Latham, Lynn's superintendent of schools

Latham says me the increase in new students has created overcrowding, forced her to hire more staff, and has impacted state testing scores and drop-out numbers.


Though it's difficult, school administrators do attempt to verify a student's age.

"But we are limited by the law," Latham said.

The law states Lynn schools cannot deny enrollment to anybody solely on the basis of not having paperwork. The law also says students have to be vaccinated.

And if any student doesn't have insurance, the city of Lynn picks up the tab for administering the injections.

"We have line items that we're borrowing from in the health department's budget in order to meet this immediate demand, but somewhere down the line, I'm going to have to deal with finding the money to replace that which has been taken out," Mayor Flanagan Kennedy said.


LINK