Starting the school year off right

Saugus Public Schools has revised its admission policy on the legal advice of the state Attorney General’s Office over concerns that some students were being denied an education

By Mark E. Vogler

Saugus Public Schools will begin its new academic year next week with a revised student admission policy that was crafted to comply with state and federal laws upholding the rights of immigrant students living in town to attend local schools. An amended policy approved this spring by the School Committee no longer requires families who move to Saugus to complete the town census form to be able to register their children in the school system.

That provision and other parts of the policy were the subject of legal threats a year ago by two nonprofit advocacy groups that declared it an illegal barrier to immigrant students seeking to obtain an education. Lawyers for Civil Rights and Massachusetts Advocates for Children emailed “a demand letter” to each School Committee member calling for immediate changes prior to the start of the 2024-25 school year “so that no school children will be unlawfully excluded or deterred from enrollment in the Saugus Public Schools.”

The School Committee issued a statement a year ago insisting “This policy states, very clearly, that no child who actually resides in Saugus will be denied access to school due to immigrant status, nor by law would it apply to homeless students who are entitled to an education here.”

This week, however, School Committee Chair Vincent Serino confirmed that the School Committee changed the policy after its lawyer consulted with the state Attorney General’s Office. “We didn’t change because of them [the advocacy groups]. We changed after our discussion with the AG’s Office. We changed to comply with the law,” Serino told The Saugus Advocate.

Meanwhile, the advocacy groups which challenged the Saugus admission policy issued a press release last week which noted Saugus Public Schools revised its policy “under sustained legal pressure,” thus eliminating “provisions that unlawfully limited access to public education for immigrant families and other vulnerable students.”

“This move marks a major victory for families and follows coordinated advocacy by Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) and Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC), strategic litigation by Anderson & Kreiger LLP, and oversight from the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office (AGO),” the press release declared.

Erika Richmond Walton, an attorney with LCR, noted Saugus’ agreement to revise its policy “sends a strong message that discriminatory enrollment policies have no place in Massachusetts schools. We will keep monitoring to ensure every family can enroll without fear or unnecessary hurdles.”

Two families “denied enrollment”

The Saugus Advocate asked Attorney Walton whether she knew how many children were denied an education last year because of the Saugus admission policy. “We first learned about this issue because of two families who were directly denied enrollment,” Walton wrote in an email to The Saugus Advocate.

“After we filed a public records lawsuit, we discovered that additional families were also impacted. And that still does not capture the full scope. Many families may have been turned away without a paper trail or discouraged from even trying to enroll. While we cannot provide an exact number, the impact was broad and profound, affecting immigrant and vulnerable students who had every right to access public education,” Walton said.

But in his interview with the newspaper, Serino said he didn’t agree with the allegations that immigrant students were denied an education in Saugus. “No kids went without an education,” Serino said.

“The number was zero. It was a big to-do about nothing,” he said.

“We only tweaked our current policy to take out some language that our lawyers had told us to. We took out the census piece of the policy. It still remains a strong policy to ensure our students live in Saugus,” he said.

“With our enrollment growing, we need to ensure we are diligent in our policy. This will also help with class sizes. At the end of the day, we have a policy that says if you don’t live in Saugus, you don’t go to school in Saugus,” he said.

Long-range benefits cited

Attorney Walton predicted the revised policy would benefit “every child living in Saugus” and “not just a handful of families.”

“That includes immigrant students as well as children whose families live in non-traditional housing situations, such as shelters or doubled up with relatives or friends. By removing unlawful barriers to enrollment, the district has ensured that all children in the community can attend school, both now and in the future,” she said.

But there’s more Saugus Public Schools can do to improve educational access for all students, according to the attorney. “To build on this, they can ensure clear guidance and training for school staff to prevent families from being turned away at the front desk,” Walton said.

“They can also provide multilingual outreach and enrollment materials so immigrant families understand their rights. In addition, it is crucial to inform Town Hall staff that the school census is no longer required and that the habitability of a home cannot be used to keep children out of school,” she said.

“Finally, the School Committee can commit to ongoing monitoring and reporting to make sure the policy is applied fairly and consistently,” she said.

The advocacy groups didn’t have any dialogue with the School Committee over the past year, according to Walton. “We worked closely with the Attorney General’s Office, sharing documents as we received them through our public records lawsuit,” Walton said. “The Attorney General’s Office then brought our concerns and suggestions to the School Committee, which ultimately led to the policy being changed.”

State agencies offer guidance

In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the Saugus Student Admission Policy, the Office of the Attorney General, the Executive Office of Education and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education issued a guidance memo to clarify for school committees, superintendents and administrators the rights of immigrant families and the information that school districts may and may not require in their enrollment policies. “State and federal law require that school districts enroll all school-aged children who are residents without regard to immigration status,” the memo said.

“Districts should ensure that their enrollment policies do not prevent immigrant families from enrolling their children in school. This includes avoiding requirements that explicitly bar the enrollment of immigrant children, as well as avoiding requirements that have the effect of discouraging immigrant children from enrolling,” it continued.

Generally, school districts may ask families to confirm a student’s age and residence. However, school district enrollment policies may not:

• Limit the ways that families can show their child’s age or residence in the district to a narrow list of documents, such as government-issued photo ID; while a school district may choose to provide a broad list of documents that would be sufficient to show age or residency, school officials also must work with families to find alternatives if they are unable to provide one of the documents on the list.
• Require information or records about the family’s or student’s immigration status
• Require compliance with other city or town requirements, such as completion of a census, survey or other forms that are not necessary for showing age and residence
• Impose other requirements that would prevent, discourage or delay immigrant families from enrolling their children in school