UC pushed to break legal ground by hiring immigrant students without work permits.
One teacher even used her social media platform for the cause, posting a status post on Facebook about the class, “I went back to school with the kids I never taught before.”
But in order to get permission to hire these students, the school needed to pay for a separate application and assessment to find out what they could do.
In its request to staff with the Department of Homeland Security, the California school said it had to start preparing a new application and assessment “because of a significant increase in the number of students without work authorization by the State of California.”
It’s not unusual for public schools to require additional assessment as a condition of getting the green light to hire undocumented immigrants.
In other states, such as California, the schools are required to submit a separate application and assessment to find out what students can do in their classrooms.
These new laws require that all state school districts must certify that they are hiring at least 50% of their full-time staff with immigrant backgrounds by Jan. 1, 2020.
The legislation also will require that every school must submit a separate application and assessment for “students from outside the United States,” and that at least half the school staff have immigrant backgrounds by the first day of the new year.
The state law also bans the use of federal funds to pay for “any assessment to evaluate, certify or verify the legal status of an employee.”
But there are some provisions that apply specifically to K-12 schools, including one that requires at least half of staff to have at least a bachelor’s degree.