New Mexico School District Opens Doors to Mexican Students

COLUMBUS, N.M. — The sun is just rising over the southern New Mexico desert, gradually banishing the mild chill of the morning, and the Columbus border crossing is already coming alive.

Book-toting children are trickling through the immigration checkpoint. Some stroll, others rush toward the yellow buses lined up just this side of the imaginary boundary dividing the United States and Mexico.

Once the vehicles fill, they roll away amid choking exhaust. The small children will be deposited at the elementary school three miles up the road. The older ones are bound for Deming, about 35 miles to the north.

Felix Lopez, a slim 14-year-old from just across the border in Palomas, Mexico, shrugs off any suggestion that this is something extraordinary.

“I’ve been coming over since kindergarten,” says the dark-haired eighth-grader. “It’s no big thing.”

Perhaps not to him, but anywhere else in a nation now ill at ease with its southern neighbor over immigration, the crossings at Columbus probably would be regarded as curious, if not outright troubling.

It’s hardly uncommon throughout the border region to see kids coming across the boundary to study in U.S. schools. Some are U.S. citizens living in Mexico or Mexican citizens attending private schools.

But because some of them are illegal immigrants, some people have become alarmed, leading to calls in Congress to bar the school door against students who are in the country illegally.

By contrast, the Deming school district continues to openly welcome children from the small Mexican town of Palomas, across the border from the even smaller New Mexico town of Columbus, as it has for more than four decades.

“It’s just always been a state education directive that we educate whoever shows up at the door,” said Janet Barney, principal at Columbus Elementary. “We are not immigration agents. We are educators.”

She said all her Palomas students are here legally anyway. They are either native-born U.S. citizens, have established legal residency or have student visas. The same is true of those who attend secondary schools in Deming, a fact verified annually by school officials.

The practice of educating the Mexican students evolved from a time when the Columbus school found itself with extra room and took in some children from Palomas, which has its own schools.

Now, school administrators estimate that about 400 of the district’s 5,400 students are from Mexico.

New initiatives, including a teacher-exchange program between Palomas and Columbus, and plans for an interactive TV hookup between U.S. and Mexican campuses, continue to strengthen the arrangement.

Parents and students appear pleased, and educators cite many cases of students who undertook the international commute going on to succeed on both sides of the border.

Gloria Estrada of Palomas considers it advantageous for her 16-year-old son, Noel Arroyos, to attend school in the United States, particularly since he is a U.S. citizen.

“The most important thing I see is that he’s learning both languages,” she said. “That’s very important wherever you go.”

Acceptance also seems widespread outside the school system.

“I don’t think if there wasn’t a lot of acceptance, it would have gone on for some 40 years,” said Deming schools Supt. Carlos Viramontes.

There are detractors, however, who echo many of the complaints heard nationwide in debates about immigration.

Critics complain that Mexican students are overcrowding Deming’s schools, or they oppose spending money on children whose parents don’t pay local property taxes because they live outside the district--outside the country, for that matter.

Some critics even sued to end the binational schooling, based on the tax discrepancy. The lawsuit was dismissed after a court determined that the plaintiffs had no standing.

Even among those who support educating the Mexican students, there are people who believe that it eventually may put too great a strain on the schools.

“I think it’s a good practice, but I think at some point we’re going to have to limit who comes across, just because of the financial burden on the school system,” said Deming businessman Luis Montoya, who went to school in the 1960s with students making the cross-border trip.

“We’re at the point where sooner or later the people that are really opposed to teaching these kids are going to have a lot of ground to base their complaints on,” he said.

The school board did enact a policy in June that could potentially affect the Mexican children, voting in favor of restricting students living outside the district if schools exceed set population caps.

Children who establish residency will still be eligible to attend.

The policy, which takes effect with the beginning of the 1996-97 school year this month, was not directed at the Palomas children and could also affect U.S. students from outside the district.

Proponents say negative views of the effect that Palomas children are having on the schools are based on misconceptions. They also suggest that critics don’t understand the benefits of teaching children no matter where they come from.

“How much better is the world going to be if we can educate a few kids down there or bring them over here?” asked Janeen Howard, a fourth-grade teacher in Columbus who crosses the border twice a week to teach English classes in Palomas schools.

Viramontes said it would be disastrous if Columbus and Palomas no longer cooperated because their remoteness from everything else makes them so dependent on one another that the distinction between them often blurs.

“It really is one community down there,” he said.

For now, there aren’t any signs that things will change. In fact, there are many indications that relations will grow stronger.

Officials on both sides of the border continue to view each other with a favorable eye and educators seem determined to continue to teach the kids.

“As far as I’m concerned, children are children,” said Barney, the Columbus principal. “In front of the classroom, I don’t know whether they are from Palomas or Columbus. You just don’t think about it.”

At least around here they don’t.