For decades, adult education providers in Texas have served all eligible students who walk through the door, regardless of immigration status. That’s about to change.
New guidance from the Trump administration directs adult education programs that receive federal funding to only admit students who are lawfully present in the U.S. Similar guidance was also issued by other federal departments about programs including Head Start and Title X family planning.
These policy changes are currently the subject of a lawsuit filed by a coalition of 21 attorneys general in Democratic-led states.
Staff at adult education programs in Texas say there is a lot they still don’t know about how they will be expected to comply with the new policy.
Fredia Thomas, the director of adult education at Northeast Texas Community College, said she is waiting to get more information.
“At this time, we do not have any concrete guidance in terms of what we’re going to do in terms of putting this in place,” she said.
The Texas Workforce Commission is currently working on state-level guidance, according to staff.
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Northeast Texas Community College is located about an hour from Texarkana and serves around 350 adult education students a year. They receive roughly $200,000 in grant funding to do so, and the majority of that money is federal dollars.
Thomas doesn’t know the immigration status of the students in her program. But like many other program directors, she is worried about what this will mean for attendance in English language classes.
About 70% of adult ed students at Northeast Texas Community College are ESL students, she said.
Angi Mudd is the English Language and Civics Program Manager at Community Action, Inc. of Central Texas. She said adult ed students already have to show ID to register for classes, but her team is discussing what updates they need to make to that process to comply with the new law.
She said this change will have a wider impact on the economy, as well as on families with immigrant parents.
“We believe that helping people get an education, learn the language, get a GED… That benefits our community and our economy,” she said. “We teach parents how to be active citizens and participate in their community. And so we are doing their children and our school districts and our community a disservice by not serving these individuals that live in our community and have the potential to be participating in our communities.”
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Jeff Hutcheson said he expects this ruling will cause a chilling effect on attendance in ESL courses. Hutchenson is the director of advocacy and public policy at TESOL, a group that supports English language teachers. He also anticipates some ongoing confusion among program leaders about how to verify immigration status in an adult ed setting.
“There’s so many different categories of lawful presence, and they all come with different requirements and limitations,” he said. “So that is a puzzle in and of itself.”
Sharon Bonney, CEO of the national advocacy organization Coalition on Adult Basic Education, said she is advising local programs to include a check box on application forms about immigration status, rather than asking students to show documents.
“We think that in order to show compliance with the federal government, programs should have on their intake form a checkbox that says ‘I am here lawfully and legally,’” she said. “And then (you have) an affidavit that can be signed by everybody that comes in the program.”
A similar system is already in place in Arizona, and has been for the last five years.
Arizona’s state director of adult education Beverly Wilson said local programs were required to check student’s documents for about a decade, but the state changed the policy after local program staff said the process was expensive and time-consuming.
Bonney said even if compliance with this policy ends up being logistically simple, it’s still a big ideological shift for a lot of adult educators.
“We actually really took pride in being a field that served anybody who needed help,” she said. “My hope is that there will be organizations that are not federally funded that will be able to support that immigrant population.”
As states wait for more federal guidance, the Department of Education has stated it will not enforce this policy before Aug. 9.
