By Jack Sheedy in Bristol, Ct

Hosffman Ospino had a question for 300 Catholic educators: “What happened to the million?”

He was referring to a challenge by Notre Dame University in 2007 to increase the Catholic school enrollment of Hispanic and Latino children from 290,000 to 1 million within 10 years.

“Ten years have gone by,” he said at the annual Catholic Educators Faith Conference at St. Paul Catholic High School on March 29. “We went from 290,000 to 317,000, a net gain of 27,000 students. What happened to the million?”

Colombia-born Dr. Ospino is professor of theology and religious education at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, where he was principal investigator for the 2014 “National Study of Catholic Parishes with Hispanic Ministry” and the 2016 “National Survey of Catholic Schools Serving Hispanic Families.” Among his findings was the startling fact that Spanish-speaking Catholic children of school age are vastly underrepresented in Catholic schools.

More than half – about 8 million – of all school-age Catholic children in the United States are Hispanic, he said. The 317,000 who are in Catholic schools represent less than 4 percent of that number. The combined Hispanic and non-Hispanic Catholic school-age population is 15.4 million, and 1.9 million of them (more than 12 percent) are in Catholic schools, he said.

It’s not a language problem, he told the Transcript before addressing the educators. “Eighty-seven percent of Hispanics [in the U.S.] are English-speaking,” he said. “Parishes serving Hispanic Catholics in the country are about 4,500 – in this archdiocese about 25, I am told. So most of the parishes serving Hispanic Catholics are multicultural,” he said.

Only 1,488 Catholic schools – about 25 percent of all of them – identify themselves as serving Hispanic families, he said. He asked the principals of those 1,488 schools how they were serving Hispanics. Answers included offering scholarships, having a bilingual receptionist and having taco nights. Educational programs for Hispanics focused on tutoring, remedial study, in-class assistance and ESL programs. He called this a “deficit approach” to education.

“The educational process is going to go from ‘Let’s work together’ to ‘I’ll do it for you’ or ‘I’ll help you,’” he said. “Diversity is not a problem to be solved. Being Latino is not a problem to be solved. Speaking with the accent of an immigrant is not a problem to be solved.”

He later told the Transcript that staffing is important, “but also simple dynamics like using the language, using Spanish in liturgies, incorporating symbols from the Latino community and the Latino tradition. Signage, for instance; I mean sometimes you arrive in a school and you don’t find one word in Spanish that says where the office is or ‘Welcome, Bienvenido.’”

In his talk, Dr. Ospino said Catholic school administrators have told him they visit parishes to recruit students, but many do not recruit at Hispanic ministries. “Why? Because [they] take it for granted that Hispanics are either not interested or [unable] to afford a Catholic education. And that is not true,” he said.

“A third of Latinos in the United States of America are Latinos who are entering into what’s called the emergent Catholic middle class in the United States,” he said. Most of these college-educated professionals self-identify as Catholics, he added.

Dr. Michael S. Griffin, superintendent of Catholic Schools, said that Dr. Ospino’s message challenged him to ask himself, “How can we make our schools communicate as much of a welcoming spirit as possible?” and “What bridges can we build” connecting other agencies and ministries? He said he wants to open a dialogue with others in positions of leadership within the archdiocese, including those involved in parish work, youth ministry, the Office of Faith and Culture, the diaconate program, the seminary program and others.

Patricia Devanney, principal of St. Anthony School in Winsted, said of Dr. Ospino’s talk, “It teaches us as Catholic educators to be aware of the Latino-Spanish population. He challenged us to be open and welcoming to them and to their presence.”

Maria Maynard, deputy superintendent of Catholic schools, said, “I think it was very encouraging for teachers to hear that there’s possibility to offer Catholic education. Actually, I think it’s their feeling that it’s their responsibility now. It’s like an awakening for them. They’ve heard about the Latino population, but this centered it for them, so I think they’re actually excited about trying to initiate it in their schools.”

Barbara Iorillo, a teacher of Spanish at Northwest Catholic High School, said that it’s important to realize that not all Spanish-speaking people are of the same culture, nor are they all immigrants.

“The Puerto Ricans in our country are U.S. citizens, and so I think as a Catholic Church in the United States we do have an obligation to be bilingual and to welcome the culture of the island of Puerto Rico,” she said.

“I think it’s important in each parish to understand the groups of Hispanics that are making up your parish, because if you have a large number of Puerto Ricans or Nicaraguans or Guatemalans, you’re not going to win many awards if you offer a taco dinner.”

The Catholic Educators Faith Conference gathers yearly at St. Paul Catholic High School and is a ministry of the Archdiocese of Hartford Office of Education, Evangelization and Catechesis. The two-day conference this year drew about 800 teachers and administrators, Ms. Maynard said.

‘Your child is safe’: Schools Address Deportation Fears Among Immigrant Families

By Moriah Balingit and Emma Brown

The schools superintendent in Harrisonburg, Va., was meeting parents this month when a mother broke down in tears, explaining that she was undocumented. What would the school do, she asked, if she became separated from her children?

“I remember walking up to her and putting my arm on her shoulder and saying, ‘Your child is safe at our school,’ ” said Scott Kizner, the city schools chief. But he also advised those at the meeting in the Shenandoah Valley that any parents worried about deportation “need to make plans.”

Across the country, President Trump’s promise to crack down on illegal immigration is leading schools with large immigrant communities to consider how to care for children whose parents could be detained in federal raids. Parents, teachers and administrators have raised questions about how schools should respond if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents come to a school to take away students or obtain records — even though the agency’s policy restricts enforcement actions on school grounds.

Officials in Sacramento, Denver, Chicago and Miami have declared their schools havens, out of reach of ICE agents without special permission or a warrant.

The Los Angeles school board voted days after the November election to resist any Trump administration attempts to use student data against students or families in immigration matters. A Wisconsin school district sent information home advising parents to keep their doors shut, stay silent and refuse to sign anything if ICE agents visit their home.

In Virginia, the state schools chief urged local superintendents this month to ensure schools have current emergency contact information for parents and to prepare for situations in which children are stranded at school. The Maryland State Department of Education has not issued similar guidance, but a spokesman said the state’s long-standing policies mirror Virginia’s. D.C. Public Schools put out a statement in six languages urging advance preparation: “Discuss whether you would wish your children to remain here, in the United States, or whether you would want your children going with you.”

Educators say connecting parents to community resources to help them prepare for family-separation scenarios is part of their job to ensure that children feel as secure as possible in class.

“Our goal is to get children in school and have them engage in learning,” said Steven R. Staples, superintendent of public instruction for Virginia. “A frightened child doesn’t learn much.” He also said the state doesn’t want children “to be missing days of school because of concerns about immigration status.”

Millions of U.S. children face growing uncertainty at home because of shifts in immigration policy. The Pew Research Center estimates 3.9 million schoolchildren had an unauthorized immigrant parent in 2014 — or 7.3 percent of all schoolchildren. About 725,000 of those children were unauthorized immigrants themselves.

Trump has pledged to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants and erect a wall on the southern border to stop more from entering the country. Since taking office, he has expanded the pool of immigrants prioritized for deportation, sped up some deportation proceedings and called for hiring more border patrol and immigration enforcement officers. ICE arrests of undocumented immigrants in recent weeks have drawn widespread publicity.

All of these developments have spread fear among immigrants. Some have retreated to their homes and stopped going to work.

Historically, ICE agents have avoided schools. A 2011 memo says they are barred from arresting or interviewing people at schools, churches, hospitals and other “sensitive locations,” unless there is an imminent threat or they seek approval. Carissa Cuttrell, a spokeswoman for ICE, said the Department of Homeland Security “is committed to ensuring that people seeking to participate in activities or utilize services provided at any sensitive location are free to do so without fear or hesitation.”

[Read the ICE memo that describes the agency’s “sensitive locations” policy]

There has been scrutiny in recent weeks of ICE actions near sensitive locations. In Alexandria, Va., agents arrested men after they left a church homeless shelter. Another man was detained in Los Angeles about a half-mile from a charter school after he dropped off his daughter. The local teachers union called the arrest “a deliberate tactic being deployed by the Trump administration to spread fear.”

ICE said the man in Los Angeles, Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez, had “multiple prior criminal convictions” and an outstanding order for removal that dated back to 2014.

In his memo to Virginia schools, Staples reminded superintendents that ICE agents are barred from school grounds unless they have a warrant and that student records should not be released without a subpoena.

“Several superintendents who happened to have fairly large immigrant populations were mindful that it was a possibility, and given the national conversation I think their inclination was to seek advice before they had an incident rather than afterward,” Staples said.

Not everyone agrees that schools should be off-limits for immigration enforcement.

Corey Stewart, chair of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors in Virginia and a Republican candidate for governor, said immigration agents need to be in schools to combat violence, some of which has been linked to gangs that recruit in schools and have members who are unauthorized immigrants.

“It’s not the school’s role to interpose between and to try to stop ICE from doing its job,” Stewart said. He added that he was not concerned that the presence of immigration agents could deter other undocumented students from coming to school. “Rooting out gangs, especially those who are preying on children, is a much higher priority than not offending a couple of illegal aliens.”

Many school officials say they want to allay the fears of families. They have hosted educational and legal seminars for immigrants, and in some cases assigned staff to support them. In Harrisonburg, Kizner assembled a crisis response team for immigrant students and their families. He also sent home forms to parents, asking in English and Spanish: “In the event of family separation (accident, arrest, emergency hospitalization, etc.) who will take care of your child temporarily?”

The Prince George’s County school system in Maryland has worked with the county government to place bilingual “community resource officers” in schools to support students dealing with immigration-related problems.

Parent-teacher associations in Alexandria have organized “know your rights” seminars, with the first held this month in an elementary school auditorium. At that event, an attorney from the Tahirih Justice Center urged undocumented parents to think about who would care for their children and what would happen to their property if they are detained.

“Folks are very, very fearful and very uncertain, but I think also wanting to be as proactive as they can be,” Kathryn Finley, the attorney, said.

Despite the words of reassurance, many immigrant parents — even those with legal status — are anxious.

“Our families, and quite frankly, our staff are terrified,” Allegra “Happy” Haynes, a member of Denver’s school board, said at a recent conference of the Council of the Great City Schools. “And despite the resolution we passed that you don’t get into our schools without a court order, they remain fearful.” Staff are scared that they might somehow violate the law, she said, even as they focus on “protecting their kids.”

Catherine E. Lhamon, a former assistant education secretary for civil rights in the Obama administration, said at the conference that schools can take many steps to help families. But ultimately, she said, they must also acknowledge that they can’t guarantee anything about the direction of federal immigration policy.

“That’s just a chilling reality,” Lhamon said.

Your Editor Asks: Is it the parents or the policy that is wrong?.

By Joe Giordano

Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication has launched Cronkite Noticias/Mixed Voces, a new digital Spanish-language platform for reporting on issues critical to Arizonans.

The new multiplatform website — cronkitenoticias.org — focuses on the economy, education, sustainability, immigration and other issues important to the region’s Latino communities. It is made possible by the Raza Development Fund, the largest Latino community development financial institution dedicated to generating economic growth and opportunities for Latino families across the country.

Cronkite Noticias/Mixed Voces is the successor of Mixed Voces, a pilot project established by RDF in 2014 to provide news and information to Arizona’s Spanish-speaking community. The project succeeded in bringing 35,000 monthly visitors to MixedVoces.com. RDF then gifted the Mixed Voces website and seed money to the Cronkite School to hire a professional editor to support the website and mentor students.

“Cronkite Noticias/Mixed Voces will provide a very important service to Spanish-speaking Arizonans as well as our bilingual journalism students,” said Christopher Callahan, dean of the Cronkite School. “We greatly appreciate the support of the Raza Development Fund in helping us make this initiative a reality.”

Cronkite Noticias is the latest addition to Cronkite News, the news division of Arizona PBS where students get real-world journalism experience working under the guidance of Cronkite School faculty members with extensive professional experience.

Veteran bilingual multimedia journalist Valeria Fernández took over leadership of Cronkite Noticias earlier this month on an interim basis. She is working with a team of six bilingual Cronkite students to produce a variety of in-depth, Spanish-language news content for the website.

Fernández also works as a freelance journalist, having reported for CNN Español, CNN International, Radio Bilingue, PRI’s The World, Al Jazeera English, New America Media and The Associated Press. She was named Latina Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Hispanic Publications in 2004.

“I’m honored to be part of a pioneering team of brave ‘reporteros’ who are undertaking the challenge of not only producing news in Spanish, but creating bilingual and multimedia enterprise reports that will serve our community,” Fernández said. “Cronkite Noticias will follow a tradition of community journalism that comes from our predecessor Mixed Voces. Both our website and our Spanish newscast will go beyond the breaking news to deliver shoe leather, in-depth journalism to Latino and Spanish-speaking audiences.”

The Cronkite Noticias team also will collaborate with Cronkite News – Borderlands, in which students cover immigration and border issues under the direction of veteran journalists Angela Kocherga and Alfredo Corchado, both Southwest Borderlands Initiative professors at the Cronkite School.

Cronkite senior Johana Restrepo, who was born in Colombia and moved to the U.S. at the age of 9, said she grew up with Spanish-language media. “I grew up watching Telemundo and Univision, and I always looked up to those reporters,” Restrepo said. “I wanted to be like them when I was a little girl.”

Now, as a member of the inaugural Cronkite Noticias team, she is reporting stories such as one on the city of Phoenix’s move to issue ID cards to undocumented immigrants.

“The Spanish-speaking community is very big, and it’s an honor to be a part of this,” she said.

Cronkite Noticias/Mixed Voces is one of 13 professional immersion programs at the Cronkite School. The others are a nightly television news broadcast that airs on Arizona PBS, digital news bureaus in Washington and Phoenix, sports bureaus in Los Angeles and Phoenix, a strategic public relations agency, an entrepreneurial digital innovation lab, a business reporting bureau, a borderlands bureau, a digital production bureau, an audience engagement and civic journalism bureau and a national investigative reporting program.

Established in 1999, the Raza Development Fund is a nonprofit corporation and a registered community development financial institution under the U.S. Department of the Treasury. It provides National Council of La Raza affiliates and other Latino-serving organizations access to capital.

With more than $250 million in total assets under management, RDF is the largest Latino community development financial institution in the country. Since its inception, it has provided capital to Latino- serving organizations nationwide. These organizations have received technical assistance and loans that have helped leverage nearly $2.5 billion in private capital for education, childcare, affordable housing and health care projects serving low-income families and individuals.

Your Editor Instigates: Joining forces is the real name of the game

By Julia Preston, New York Times

Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California, knows exactly what’s at stake if President Trump shuts down an Obama administration program that has given work permits and protection from deportation to some 752,000 young undocumented immigrants. In 2012, in her previous job as secretary of Homeland Security, she signed the document — nothing more than a policy memo — that created the program.

So when alarm spread among immigrants on college campuses following Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Napolitano moved quickly to determine what the California system could do to shelter its students if he carried through on his pledges to cancel the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The university estimates that almost 3,800 among its 190,000 students are undocumented, many but not all with DACA.

Ms. Napolitano, retaining her law enforcement instincts, does not mention the word “sanctuary” when describing what the university could offer. “Sanctuary is such a vague term, we don’t use it,” she said crisply.

Instead, the university has published detailed principles of support for undocumented students, including assurances that campus police would not question students solely about their immigration status or join any cooperation agreements with federal immigration authorities under the Trump administration. Through the Davis campus law school, the university is organizing legal help for students detained for deportation.

Another worrisome prospect, Ms. Napolitano said, is that students could lose the permits that allow them to work. Undocumented students, including any losing DACA, will continue to pay in-state tuition and be eligible for state financial aid and for a revolving loan program funded, in part, by the university.

“We want to do everything we can so students are safe on our campuses,” Ms. Napolitano said, “so they can focus on what they are there to do, which is to study.”

Students at dozens of college campuses, galvanized by Mr. Trump’s depictions of immigrants as criminals or potential terrorists, have pressed administrators to provide sanctuary for those without legal papers. But universities have had differing ideas about what that would mean in practice, and most leaders have been careful to say they would not defy the law.

Some institutions have flatly rejected sanctuary plans as encouraging lawbreaking. At New Mexico State University, the president, Garrey Carruthers, said that banning federal agents from campus might imperil its federal funding.

One of the first presidents to declare a sanctuary campus explicitly was Michael S. Roth of Wesleyan, who announced in November that it “will not voluntarily assist” any efforts by federal authorities to deport students (a policy he reaffirmed on Jan. 29). Soon after, John Coatsworth, the provost of Columbia University, said that it would not allow immigration agents on campus without a warrant.

Some administrators point out that student information, including their immigration status, is already protected under long-existing privacy laws requiring the authorities to show a warrant or court order before any data can be released without students’ consent.

In Georgia, Emory, which is a private university, considered but ultimately decided against protective measures. “Emory is not seeking to establish itself as a sanctuary campus, for which there is no legal definition,” the university said in a Jan. 4 statement. Taking a tougher line, the University System of Georgia said that any call for sanctuary was “unacceptable” and added, “We expect our institutions to follow the law.”

In his first formal briefing, on Jan. 23, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, suggested that canceling DACA would not be a priority for the new administration, but he did not provide any explicit reassurance that the program would continue.

Ms. Napolitano is still contemplating the bitter possibility that Mr. Trump will sweep away her most significant immigration accomplishment. She hopes to persuade him that the program is a good use of executive power, emphasizing that DACA immigrants pose little security risk because they pass background checks to get into the program.

Her message for Mr. Trump: “Why waste resources trying to deport good students who’ve done everything right?”

Your Editor Redoubles: Argue and, ultimately, resist