The results of our sixth annual NBC6 teacher survey are in.
More than 1,200 Miami-Dade and Broward County public school teachers responded in this non-scientific poll, distributed to teachers by the teacher unions in each county.
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By far the biggest concern of teachers is trying to make a living on their low salaries in South Florida. Today, we’re focusing on how falling enrollment is impacting classrooms.
A few years ago, school overcrowding was the big issue. Now, the opposite is true. More than 75% of teachers in our survey said enrollment has dropped in their school.
“Our school used to be incredibly overcrowded, and now it’s not,” said Yvonne Poldo, a kindergarten teacher at Devon Aire K8.
As we’ve reported many times, both school districts are experiencing enrollment declines caused by a variety of factors, including taxpayer-funded vouchers for private school tuition.
“I think that the vouchers are playing a huge role in that,” said Marlene Lanza, who teaches at Howard Drive Elementary. “They’re handing out money to anybody that wants to put their child in any private school.”
“There’s a lack of immigration,” said Thais Garcia of Henry Filer Middle School.
Garcia has been teaching at the Hialeah school for three decades.
“There’s a lot of rentals in the area, it’s usually an immigrant community, so when there’s a lot of immigrants, our enrollment has gone up. Now our enrollment just keeps on getting lower and lower,” Garcia explained.
In our survey, 71% of teachers said immigration enforcement has directly affected their students, and 60% said students expressed fear or concern about immigration enforcement.
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“One of my kids cried for the first three months because he saw his mom get taken away, and I have to go home, I have to protect my mom. I mean that’s hard when the kid is six years old, that’s really, really hard to deal with and it was every single day,” said Yvonne Poldo, the kindergarten teacher.
Oren Shahar teaches at Comstock Elementary School, located in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood.
“I know we’re in the third week of school right now and we’ve already gotten a student who had to change schools because she’s now living somewhere else because her family’s been deported,” Shahar said.
At Toussaint Louverture Elementary in Little Haiti, they’re noticing an impact from the cancelation of TPS, Temporary Protected Status, for Haitians.
“There’s a fear that happens even before the child enters the building; there’s a fear, I believe, for that guardian or that parent and just bringing their child because of not knowing who will identify them as not belonging,” said Roberta Braxton, a guidance counselor at the school.
Like most of the teachers we spoke to, Braxton believes fear of immigration enforcement is keeping some students at home, away from school.
We should note that both school districts have said repeatedly that schools are safe spaces, and that students have nothing to fear on campus.
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