McALLEN, Texas—Adrianna Gomez wakes her 14-year-old son before dawn every morning, lays out his coat and tie and drives him across an international boundary just to go to school.

With a full day of classes at Pharr’s Oratory Academy followed by soccer and tennis afterward, he often won’t return to his spacious Reynosa, Mexico, home until nearly 12 hours later.

Angelita Martinez Morales also hoped her children could attend Rio Grande Valley schools. U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested her Aug. 10 as she guided them across the river near Pharr.

She later told a federal magistrate judge she had to get her children—all U.S. citizens—back into the country before the start of the school year.

The two women may be divided by economic status, but ultimately both want the same thing for their children: the best educational opportunities they can provide.

Like hundreds of other families just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, they adjust their schedules, idle in bridge traffic every morning and sometimes break the law—all to send their children to U.S. schools.

“It’s a sacrifice,” said Gomez, 36, in Spanish. “But the river is inconsequential. It’s just a problem of geography.”

Some more affluent families like Gomez’s attend legally by paying tuition to private schools or even buying homes to establish residency in public school districts. Her son, Ernesto, has his student visas in order and has been preparing to enter U.S. schools since his first English classes in kindergarten.

Plenty of others, though, ignore the rules. They provide fake addresses to enroll at public schools or—like Martinez—enter the country illegally in hopes of staying the whole school year.

While cities in the interior United States have only begun to seriously address this increasing immigrant population at their schools, this daily migration has been a way of life in the Valley for decades.

“In so many families, the community is not divided by a border like the land,” said Elaine Hampton, a University of Texas-El Paso professor who has studied educational systems on both sides of the border. “It makes it hard to peg exactly where you live. What constitutes a permanent address?”



IT’S NOT FAIR

While some students know they are breaking the law, small districts like Roma don’t always look at the students as a problem.

They are often more eager to learn and their parents are more involved because of the effort their families have undertaken to secure their education, district spokesman Ricardo Perez said.

“It’s not like they’re dumping their kids over here,” he said. “They’re actively seeking out a better education.”

And the higher the school’s enrollment, the more state and federal money the district receives.

But larger, more affluent districts like the McAllen school system can’t afford to allow students who live outside the district to attend its campuses, said John Wilde, director of student support services for the district.

In addition to straining school resources, students with limited English speaking abilities routinely score lower on standardized tests.

Wilde’s office investigates dozens of cases each year of students suspected of lying on their enrollment papers. Using returned mail, reports from other parents and red flags from campus administrators, his employees drop by the listed addresses in the early morning hours to see who really lives where they say they do.

Lying on a public document is a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a fine of up to $2,000, but the district rarely seeks prosecution against the parents. Expulsion is a more likely response.

A week into the school year, Wilde had already received 30 to 40 red-flag reports that the district will investigate.



GREATER OPPORTUNITIES

Angelita Martinez, the mother arrested for bringing her children across the river, never even got that far. A federal judge sentenced her to 10 days of confinement in a federal detention center. The fate of her children—all of whom she said were U.S. citizens—remains unknown.

Adrianna Gomez, meanwhile, hopes to send her younger children to Oratory’s school in Pharr once they reach seventh grade.

She says she has already seen the payoff for her family’s sacrifices in her teenage son, Ernesto. A confident 14-year-old who can speak eloquently in Spanish and English, he hopes to go to Yale University and become a lawyer after graduation.