New York Compels 20 School Districts to Lower Barriers to Immigrants.

[elleng]

Twenty New York school districts found to be blocking access for undocumented immigrant children will be forced to modify their enrollment policies to break down illegal barriers to education, the state attorney general’s office said on Wednesday.

A joint review by the State Education Department and the attorney general’s office found a broad pattern of intransigence on the part of districts that, despite repeated instructions from federal and state law enforcement agencies, continued to bar children based on their immigration status, said Kristen Clarke, the chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the attorney general’s office.

The resulting reforms, under agreements between the attorney general’s office and the 20 districts, would compel them to stop asking for documents such as Social Security cards that effectively exclude undocumented children from school.

The state compliance review followed an article in The New York Times in October, which found that several suburban districts had contravened federal guidance by requiring immigrant families to provide proof of district residency before their children were enrolled. Families were stymied by school bureaucracies, and children, who are required by law to attend school, could not. . .

Some districts have continued to resist the state’s reform efforts, the authorities said. The acting commissioner of the Education Department, Elizabeth Berlin, sent an order to the Hempstead Union Free School District on Long Island on Wednesday that threatened to remove school officials if the district did not comply.

Among the department’s demands were to “immediately ensure that the district’s enrollment office is open, with doors unlocked, during its hours of operation.”

Hempstead schools have been under scrutiny since an advocacy group in October obtained a document showing that 33 students had been excluded from classes. The students, many of whom are newly arrived immigrants, were instructed to sign in for attendance a few mornings each week, and then return home because the school could not accommodate them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/nyregion/new-york-compels-20-school-districts-to-lower-barriers-to-immigrants.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

[Xipe Totec]

1. Good! They could have been blocking the next Dr. Q

Quiñones, the oldest of five children, was born in a small village outside of Mexicali.[2] In 1987, at the age of 19, Quiñones-Hinojosa crossed the border fence between Mexico and the United States.[3][4][5] Once arriving in the United States, Quiñones could not speak English and worked on farms outside of Fresno, California.[1][6] As a farm hand, he saved enough money to take English classes.[7]

Quiñones-Hinojosa started his education at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California, and completed his bachelor's degree in psychology with the highest honors at University of California, Berkeley.[4] He then went on to receive his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, where he graduated with honors. He also became a US citizen during this time.[7] He then completed his residency in neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental and stem cell biology at the laboratory of Professor Arturo Álvarez-Buylla.

Quiñones is currently a professor of neurosurgery and oncology at Johns Hopkins, where he serves as the director of the brain tumor program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. He focuses on the surgical treatment of primary and metastatic brain tumors, with an emphasis on motor and speech mapping during surgery. He is expert in treating intradural spinal tumors as well as brainstem and eloquent brain tumors in adults with the use of neurophysiological monitoring during surgery. He further specializes in the treatment of patients with pituitary tumors using a transphenoidal endonasal approach with surgical navigation and/or endoscopic techniques. He has a strong interest in treating patients with skull base tumors and the use of radiosurgery as an adjunct to the treatment of these lesions.

Quiñones conducts both clinical and basic science research. From 2005-2011, his team published 113 scientific articles and received 13 funding grants.[8] Quiñones conducts numerous research efforts on elucidating the role of stem cells in the origin of brain tumors and the potential role stem cells can play in fighting brain cancer and regaining neurological function.[9] He has been actively involved in fund raisers for brain cancer research. In 2011, he ran the Baltimore half-marathon with his research team and some of his own patients to raise money for cancer research. He finished the race in 1 hr 57 min.[10]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Quinones-Hinojosa