Above, Cleveland Independent School District children returning to their homes in a scene played out daily in the rapidly expanding Colony Ridge community of Liberty County, Texas. Photo by Todd Bensman, CIS.org

Heroic reporter Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration recently delivered a frightening report on what the invasion at the southwest border has done to the public schools. Not that parents don’t know. They’re living through what Bensman describes.

“A teacher who worked at CISD told me she realized one-room schoolhouse life was for sure over when, on the eve of a big basketball game between rival schools, the district installed metal detectors at the doors.” https://t.co/oetXeOMdhh

— Todd Bensman (@BensmanTodd) April 3, 2023

Based on his book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, Bensman explained that public schools are under siege because of the Flores settlement that freed illegal-alien children to infest the schools.

Bensman looked at the Cleveland Independent School District in Texas, just northeast of Houston about 400 miles north of border town McAllen. The illegal-alien invasion has doomed the district’s schools to nothing less than a major social, cultural, economic, and budgetary disaster.

Some highlights, or, if you prefer, the lowlights:

“This was always known as a quiet little country town. I mean, it really was,” Superintendent Stephen McCanless told me during a long candid interview at CISD administration headquarters in Cleveland in May 2022. “This was a pass-through on the way north to Livingston to go camping, or on the way north to Lufkin. You stopped here to get gas and eat, but it’s always been a quiet, blue-collar community.”

In the few years since Hurricane Harvey, the quaint country CISD of four K-12 schools has morphed into an almost unrecognizable beast of 12 schools, some of which had to be doubled in size, and plans for 20 more schools and ever-expanding farms of portable classrooms [Emphasis added]. …

Data reflecting those enrollments remove all doubt as to how torrential that growth was.

For the 2011–2012 school year, a year now regarded fondly as the good old days when a local Dairy Queen was sufficient to serve as the main high school hangout, CISD enrolled 3,693 students from kindergarten through 12th grade. About 40 percent were Hispanic, 45 percent white, and 12 percent black. Fast-forward a decade to 2021–2022. Total enrollments had nearly tripled to 10,875, of which 9,275 were Hispanic, pushing 90 percent, district records show [Emphasis added].

[America’s Public Schools: Canaries in the Coal Mine of the Biden Border Crisis, by Todd Bensman, CIS.org., April 3, 2023]

So enrollment increased about 194 percent, and almost the entire K-12th enrollment is Hispanic, most of whom can’t speak English.

Even worse, the students will likely double to 20,000. The cost for 20 new schools: $1.2 billion in the next three years. 

As for the cultural enrichment the illegal-alien students bring, Bensman reported this:

A teacher who used to work in the CISD and now works for another one in East Texas …  told me she realized one-room schoolhouse life was for sure over when, on the eve of a big basketball game between rival schools, the district installed metal detectors at the doors.

“That was totally new to me. I was like, what? What! I’d never seen anything like that,” the teacher told me. “I was like, ‘what are y’all doing? Someone was thinking, there’s this big rivalry, so... guns or knives.’”

New students were pouring in every day through mid-2022: 100, 200, 300 every month. After Christmas break in 2021, school reopened to 1,200 new students.

Many of the newcomers came in not fitting well in a school. One girl told the teacher she had reached a strictly transactional agreement to marry a U.S. citizen boy so she could get permanent immigration status and go to college after graduation. Others were disciplinary cases kicked out of Houston schools.

“We had our entrepreneurs on campus,” the teacher said, explaining that this was a euphemism for drug dealer. “When a kid is coming [at]18 years old and has four or five credits, why would they come back to high school and not just get their GED? The registrar would tell us, ‘This kid’s coming in for business.’ I mean, if your income is school-based, then... you know.”

There’s more, but you get the idea: Hispanic invaders replaced the white and black students.

But those who are disheartened and even terrified must remember one thing: The Great Replacement is just a “white supremacist conspiracy theory.”