Students across the country are back in school, and many tax-paying parents are finding that leftist-run state and local governments are once again using a national crisis to put American children last. For four years, COVID was the government’s excuse for failing to educate American students; now—with the COVID emergency having ended and illegal border crossings having reached a record high in 2023—the government’s new excuse is the migrant crisis.

For instance, Massachusetts, which declared a state of emergency earlier this year due to the migrant crisis, mandates that migrant students be able to access school bus services. Massachusetts, however, doesn’t mandate that children of American taxpayers in grades 7-12 be able to access school bus service—just migrant children. This came to a head recently in Stoughton, MA, which, despite a 7.1% budget increase, was citing budget constraints to cut buses for this school year, a move that would have left 150 Stoughton students without any means of getting to and from school. Meanwhile, migrant students attending Stoughton schools were set to receive two additional buses from the state to transport them from their shelters or hotels. While the district reversed course and secured buses for all students (albeit only after coming under media fire) the fact remains that children of taxpayers came last in Stoughton’s calculations.

What happens to public schools that choose to put the children of taxpayers first? Look at Saugus, MA. The district’s official policy states “that all children who are registered and attend Saugus Public Schools, at the expense of the citizens of Saugus, [must] be legal residents whose actual [permanent] residence is in Saugus.” Sounds like common sense to most taxpaying Americans—but not to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, which told the Boston Herald that it is communicating with Saugus Public Schools following a letter sent by Massachusetts migrant advocates that called Saugus’s admission policy “exclusionary.”

Whether they want to or not, school districts around the country are being forced by federal and state authorities to focus on providing aid to migrant children as opposed to educating the children of district taxpayers. In Denver, Colorado, for instance, which has the highest per-capita migrant influx in the nation, some public schools have been extended so far beyond their capacity since 2023 that families are choosing to leave the district altogether, most of them citing overcrowding in classrooms. Of course, only the most engaged families who have the resources to move to a new district or pay for an alternative school can make use of such options, which means vulnerable children from lower-income families will once again be left behind in struggling public schools.

Unsurprisingly, Colorado public school teachers report feeling “overwhelmed,” as they are suddenly receiving high numbers of students from migrant populations who often don’t speak English at all and come with severe mental health issues, behavioral issues, trauma, and other special needs. Expecting teachers to be able to teach a constantly fluctuating number of non-English-speaking students from such difficult backgrounds is a recipe for burnout, because teachers, at the end of the day, are educators, not aid workers. Teacher shortages are already plaguing many districts around the country and, with these policies, expect the problem to get worse.

While the government’s near-total disregard for American children mostly affects students in government-run public schools, students in private schools aren’t safe from governmental recklessness either. Mother-of-three Irina Edelstein told IW Features that she was picking up her children from City Life Academy, a private, classical Christian school in Brooklyn, New York, when she received the news that a 400-bed, male-only migrant shelter was set to open up within a thousand feet of the school. The city did not even inform the school principal, Jeffrey Reed, of its plans. “They knew there would be pushback, and they knew if they had gone through the correct channels…[the migrant shelter] probably never would’ve opened,” Reed told IW Features. “Anytime somebody makes a decision like that in the dark, it’s rarely the correct decision to make.”

Law-abiding, tax-paying citizens deserve better than to be shut out from major decisions about where their money is going, especially when it comes to something as important as the education and safety of their children. Unless we start voting out politicians who have refused time and again to do their jobs, bad actors will continue to abdicate their duty to the most vulnerable Americans: our children.