The Broward County superintendent said Tuesday the termination of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for thousands of Haitian immigrants could significantly affect the school district's budget because of projected lower enrollment.
“One of my biggest or largest concerns right now is what's going on with the TPS status for our Haitian families,” superintendent Howard Hepburn said at a budget hearing before the Broward School Board. “From just listening, from asking questions, I have a fear that it's going to impact enrollment in the Tri-County area for sure.”
Florida is home to 113,000 Haitian TPS holders — the most of any state. South Florida has the nation's largest concentration of Haitians in the country.
Broward school officials predict that by the 2030-31 school year, the district will have 25,700 fewer students than the current enrollment. The school district is the nation's sixth-largest with 187,800 students.
The enrollment decline, which has been playing out for two decades, comes at a staggering financial cost to the district as state funds depend on student head-count. BCPS faces a current shortfall of nearly $100 million.
In two years, the district projects a loss of 20,000 students.
TPS for Haitians ended on Monday — just two weeks before the start of the new school year.
TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife and other instability. It allows people already in the country to stay with work permits in increments of up to 18 months, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.
READ MORE: Is it a human rights violation to deport Haitian TPS holders to a cauldron of gang violence?
Haitians were first granted TPS in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and extended them multiple times amid ongoing gang violence that has displaced more than a million people, according to court documents.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision last month, allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria through TPS, exposing hundreds of thousands of immigrants to potential deportation.
Every year, districts predict how many students they expect to leave the district. Multiple factors are considered, including rising cost of living pushing families out and birth rate declines.
In Broward and Miami-Dade counties, this school year’s enrollment calculation was off by thousands. In Miami-Dade, the superintendent attributed it to fewer immigrant families moving to South Florida.
Though Hepburn didn’t present data on how many Haitian families might be affected in Broward with the end of TPS, he said the district will prepare.
Data collected at the beginning of the year will be used “to kind of predict what that impact may be if there's no changes to the expiration of TPS status for these families,” he said “because it's certainly going to impact student enrollment at the beginning of the school year.”
