Mexican children cross border to go to school... your tax dollars at work

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By SARAH VIREN

Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
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For the past two years, Rachel Ortiz's commute to her El Paso school has begun each morning in Mexico.
As the sun rises over that side of the Rio Grande, the first-grader follows her father from their cinder-block home through the streets of Ciudad Juarez.
Aaron Ortiz holds his 6-year-old's pink backpack and later her hand. At the border they funnel onto the pedestrian bridge alongside dozens of other children with backpacks holding parents' hands. Then they are on the other side, saying goodbye at the gates of Vilas Elementary, where breakfast is served free and special classes are offered for English-language learners.
At that school, Rachel has made friends with American students. She writes reports on butterflies and decides she wants to be a doctor — for dogs — when she grows up. And when the school bell rings at the end of the day, her father is waiting outside, ready to walk her back home to Mexico.
This daily cycle is repeated up and down the borderland, where a history of cross-border friendships, families and marriages has eroded the lines between what is Mexican and what is American. In El Paso, the Mexico-to-United-States trek to school is so commonplace that border officials opened a special lane just for students at one of the crossings this month. More than 1,200 passed through that lane from Mexico on a recent morning. Some are college or private school students, but many, including Rachel, attend public schools.
In El Paso, most folks see this as part of the flux inherent to border life. But there has been some grumbling about spending U.S. tax dollars to educate students living in Mexico, especially this spring as the city's biggest school district prepares for a bond election. The El Paso Independent School District, which expects to take in 10,000 new students in the next five to eight years, will ask voters next month for permission to borrow $230 million for new schools.
"With this always comes the argument, 'Stop educating illegal aliens,' " said El Paso ISD spokesman Luis Villalobos, who blames the growth on families moving to the area for the planned Fort Bliss expansion.

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