I normally don’t go for sappy romance movies.  Being a middle school educator, I experience drama on a daily basis, so paying $10 to see a movie full of it on Friday night is not usually something I enjoy doing.  However, I am somewhat of a Julia Roberts fan, so back in the late 90s when “Notting Hill” came out, I agreed to go with some friends to watch it.  Turns out, I really enjoyed it.   I was a single lady at the time, in my late 20s, and although I had not yet experienced a desire to yoke myself to another human being for the rest of my life, I was beginning to hear the faint ticking of my biological clock and was starting to experience fleeting moments of doubt about that choice.  Maybe that’s why, when Julia Roberts’s stared into Hugh Grant’s eyes and muttered, “I’m just a girl, standing before a boy, asking him to love her,” those profound but simple words would linger in my memory.

Fast-forward about 15 years.  It was the night before our students registered for this new school year, and the big topic on the news was the “border children.”  We all know the story…children, many unaccompanied by an adult, from Central America have been streaming, for the past several years, over the American border for whatever reasons, some too horrible to think about.   The big news in Tennessee was that 790 of those children had been sent by the federal government to our state and were expected to enroll in public schools that fall.  People reacted to this news, predictably, in two ways, both equally as passionate.  Some supported the re-location of these children to Tennessee, naming them refugees and demanding that the government grant them equal rights and monetary support.  Some were of the opposite train of thought.  To this faction, these children were illegal aliens who would place a drain on our society and should be deported immediately.  The public outcry on both sides was voluminous.

As I was driving to school on registration day, I wondered how many of those children would land on our doorstep.  We do have a growing Hispanic population in our community, and it just made sense that some of our families would act as sponsors for the so-called “border children.”  And I worried, too, because the issue had become so polarized even in our little corner of the world, about how our students and families would react if we did, indeed, have some of these kids enroll.  Sure, enough, around nine that morning, my Student Services Coordinator came to get me.  She explained that we had a family in the office who wanted to enroll a child from Honduras.  I really don’t know quite what I was expecting when I walked through the conference room door, but what greeted me when I entered was beyond my wildest imagination.  It was…..a child.

Not an immigrant, not an illegal alien, not a refugee, not a political pawn.  A child.  A scared little girl with long black hair and beautiful intelligent eyes caught up in a whirlwind of strange words.  At that moment, looking into her frightened face, I could hear the words play in my memory…”I’m just a girl…”  At that moment, she became one of “my kids.”   It didn’t matter one bit to me what the politicians and the public outcriers were screaming in the streets.  At that moment, she was OUR girl, part of our school family.  And I knew that, as every other child that walked through our doors, she would be educated and protected, and most of all, loved. 

I don’t know about the status of other “border children” who have entered Tennessee schools that year, but I can happily report, several years later, that “mine” is doing well.  We hooked her up with a couple of our Spanish-speaking students, and became creative in finding ways to communicate with her.  She added new sight words to her English vocabulary daily, and our math teacher soon excitedly reported that she could solve one-step equations!  Shortly after she timidly walked down our halls for the first time, she began to giggle when I greeted her in my limited but heavily Southern-accented Spanish, “Que pasa?”  But most importantly, she made friends and the frightened look left her eyes.  I think she knew she was home.