President. I think it is totally inappropriate that this continuing resolution for appropriations turn the authorizing legislation on its head. The Refugee Education Assistance Act was carefully constructed to take into account the unique problems of several refugee communities throughout the Nation. The House Education and Labor Committee held extensive hearings documenting these problems and which formed a sound basis for the authorizing legislation. Based on this careful review of the problem it was decided that any school district with more than 500 refugee students or which has 5 percent of its daily attendance comprised of refugee students should receive special impact assistance. This latter criteria. of 5percent student population. is very important because even fairly small numbers of refugee students can have extremely serious impacts on local school budgets in very small districts. The present language of the continuing resolution eliminates assistance to all of these small districts. Instead. it limits the speciEl impact assistance to only those school districts that have received 1.000 or more CubanHaitian and Indochinese refugees and only in the last 12 months. Mr. President. this is a very severe limitation. At the present. there are only 10 school districts with a total of about 25.000 students that would receive assistance under the continuing resolution. Under the present language. Florida would receive 50 percent of all the special assistance funds and California would receive only 17 percent. despite the fact that California has received more than twice as many refugee students during the last 2 years. Mr. President. my amendment would correct this allocation problem. Under my amendment. the enacted language of the Refugee Education Assistance Act of 1980. at least 60 school districts throughout the country would receive at least some special assistance. allowing us to serve 80.000 refugee students. These added districts include: Chicago. Hawaii.
Keywords matched
Refugee refugee refugees