Illegal Aliens Education

Leaders of California's urban school districts issued a list of proposed education reforms Wednesday ranging from government-funded preschool to an overhaul of teacher training and full access to schools for illegal immigrants. The unprecedented statement, which represents the urban agenda in school reform, was drawn up in a daylong session in Los Angeles attended by about 100 teachers, administrators, parents and political leaders in the state's large urban school districts.

He's an Anaheim police officer who presides over the city's high school district and crusades against illegal immigrants--though he is an immigrant himself. Harald G. Martin, 44, has repeatedly offended many Latinos over his five years in office by tapping, critics say, into fear of change in Orange County's ethnic makeup. He goes so far as to call himself an ally of the Chiapas-based leftist rebels, who are fighting the Mexican government to keep their land.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said Saturday he did not intend to encourage more immigration with his call for social services and humane treatment of illegal immigrants. "I'm obviously not inviting everyone in the world to come here. I'm talking about the people who are here," Mahony said after an annual multiethnic Mass at St. Vincent's Church near Downtown Los Angeles. The cardinal's remarks to reporters expanded on criticism he leveled against politicians in his homily during the Mass.

An immigration reform group led by two former top INS officials on Tuesday kicked off a petition drive to place on the November state ballot a measure that would virtually bar illegal immigrants from public hospitals and schools. Sponsors of the "Save Our State (SOS)" initiative began dropping off petitions to citizens' groups advocating immigration changes. They need to gather 384,974 valid signatures by June 8 to qualify the measure for the ballot.

About two dozen people gathered at an Anaheim school district meeting Saturday morning to discuss a touchy proposal to seek payment--either from foreign countries or the federal government--for teaching illegal immigrants in Anaheim schools. Laced with nationalistic fervor and emphatic talk about race, the meeting ended with no vote on the proposal but rather with board members stressing to the audience that the proposal was about school overcrowding and adequate funding.

In yet another broadside aimed at Proposition 187, the Clinton Administration released a Justice Department memorandum Thursday saying that there is no difference between the California initiative and a Texas law denying education to illegal immigrants that was struck down as unconstitutional in 1982. The Clinton Administration has made no secret of its distaste for the hotly debated measure, which would bar illegal immigrants from receiving many public services.

Gov. Pete Wilson enlisted his colleagues Sunday in his crusade to compel the federal government to pick up more of the costs for services provided to illegal immigrants. Committees of the National Governors' Assn. approved resolutions calling on the federal government to assume the costs of providing illegal immigrants with emergency medical care and education, as well as the tab for incarcerating those convicted of felonies. The states now bear most or all of those costs.

Under an agreement announced Tuesday, school districts statewide will be guaranteed the money they need to provide English and citizenship classes for undocumented aliens seeking amnesty, ending months of uncertainty over how such classes would be paid for. State Supt.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), breaking his self-imposed silence on the airwaves, predicted Sunday that Congress will send President Clinton an immigration reform package that will permit California to close public school doors to children of illegal immigrants. On a live television interview show for the first time in five months, Gingrich tossed off predictions and opinions on a wide variety of issues.

A San Gabriel Valley school district has become what some educators say is the first in the country to publish and sell instructional material for immigrants seeking residency under the new amnesty law. The Hacienda La Puente Unified School District has so far sold 20,000 of the workbooks and teacher guides to more than 100 other school systems in 22 states. Schools throughout the Southland--including some in the Los Angeles Unified School District--and as far away as Florida, are customers.