Norfolk Superintendent Ingrid Allardisaid most of the children at the shelter are from Haiti and Venezuela.
She said she recognizes that the shelter is a “significant change for this community,” and acknowledged children from the shelter would have an influence on class sizes. Still, she assured parents that programs would “remain strong and rigorous.”
“We anticipate our schools operating as they always have,” she said.
More than 2,800 students were enrolled in district schools serving Norfolk during the 2023-2024 school year. As it stands, new shelter arrivals would represent roughly a one percent increase in the school population. However, as the shelter grows to full capacity, residents worry that the impact of additional enrollment would be amplified.
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Benjamin Sprague, a father of two elementary-aged children, said having children from different cultures at school would have a positive influence on his own children. But he wished that the state would have communicated their plans for the shelter earlier.
“There’s got to be better ways we can do this, instead of putting all the stress on one single town,” Sprague, 42, said before the meeting. “How is one little town supposed to support all these people so they can be successful Americans?”
Some residents were not convinced that an influx of new students would not harm classroom instruction.
“All the time and effort that is needed to properly support our newcomers — that takes a lot of energy,” said Peter Svalbe, a member of the Norfolk School Committee who has two elementary school-age children.“How are we not distracting from our current student needs and preparing for this upcoming school year?”
He was met with applause.
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Dr. Rich Drolet, superintendent of the King Philip Regional School District, spoke at the forum at the district’s middle school. MARK STOCKWELL FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
Rich Drolet, superintendent for the King Philip Regional School District, said that the two districts will be hiring four more English Learner teachers, one who will teach at each of the four schools in the district. School leaders also said they had established a summer planning committee to develop educational plans, and that staff is undergoing specialized professional development training.
Last school year, Drolet said, King Philip enrolled 14 students who were living at a hotel in Plainville. “Itwas a positive experience, although it was challenging at first,” Drolet said. But, he added: “We certainly have concern and trepidation of getting such a large increase in this population of students.”
The situation in Norfolk illustrates the struggle various school systems across Massachusetts, including West Springfield Public Schools and Middleborough Public Schools, have contended with as groups of migrant children living in temporary housing have enrolled in local school districts.Some school officials say their systems lack the necessary means to support the increase in students.
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Opponents of the shelter Todd Labagh and Ron Ober, greeted attendees outside of the entrance to the King Philip Middle School.MARK STOCKWELL FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
In Norfolk, dozens of residents rallied against migrants being placed in their community when the facility reopened as a shelter. But others also showed support for the new arrivals, decorating “welcome banners” and voicing opposition to the housing of children in the former prison.
At the information session, some parents expressedgratitude to school staff for their preparation to welcome new and existing students. “Thank you to the teachers who are also opening their arms to everybody,” said parent Kristen Stacy.
Norfolk, a town of about 11,660 , is located roughly 30 miles southwest of Boston and has a median household income of more than $182,700, US census data shows — approximately $66,700 higher than the median household income in Norfolk County.
A Globe analysis of state data earlier this year found that relatively few wealthy communities host emergency shelters like the one at Bay State. The majority of these facilities are placed in middle-income towns and cities.
As of Wednesday, the Norfolk shelter housed 39 families, 129 individuals in total, according to Noah Bombard, a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities. Eighteen elementary-aged children, eight high school-aged children, and six middle school-aged children were living at the site as of Wednesday, Bombard said. The state is contracting with Heading Home, an emergency shelter provider offering hundreds of family shelter units in the areas of Boston and Lawrence, to run the Norfolk facility.
For the 2023-2024 school year, Norfolk Public Schools had an enrollment of 1,041 students in the district’s two elementaryschools,which serve students in prekindergarten through sixth grade.King Philip Regional School District, which also serves Plainville and Wrentham, enrolled 1,849 students at its middle school and high school during the last school year, according to state data.
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Capacity at the Bay State shelter will expand gradually, Bombard said, and the timeline for reaching the population limit at the site depends on various factors, including demand. The state’s emergency shelter system reached Healey’s cap of 7,500 families months ago, and as of Wednesday, there were 731 families on the waitlist to access emergency shelter, Bombard said. Overflow sites like Bay State are offered as shelter to those on the waitlist, but not all families may choose to utilize them, according to the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
For months, dozens of migrant families, largelyfrom Haiti, had been sleeping overnight at Boston’s Logan International Airport in Terminal E, where scenes of parents cradling their children on air mattresses set out on the floor became commonplace. But as of Tuesday, Healey’s ban on overnight stays at the airport went into effect, and the migrants disappeared from Logan.
Some are now housed at the Bay State facility in Norfolk, Bombard confirmed. Families staying at the Bay State shelter did not have any prior housing.
On Thursday afternoon, about half a dozen young children ran or rode bikes across a playground and soccer field, now set in front of the old correctional center. Still, they played behind a towering chain link fence that made it clear the facility was once a prison, though much of the barbed wire had been removed.
School officials said staff would begin screening and enrolling children from the shelter in August.
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Jim Lehan, the chair of Norfolk’s Select Board, who also chairs the King Philip Regional School Committee, said in an interview on Wednesday that there have been conversations among school leaders about the possibility of enrolling children living at the shelter in schools outside districts serving Norfolk. But the decision would have to be made “out of the kindness of the neighboring community to take some of those students,” Lehan said, emphasizing that the state has made clear that they have no authority to force other districts to enroll children from the Norfolk shelter in their schools.
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio can be reached at giulia.mcdnr@globe.com. Follow her @giulia.mcdnr.
A Holbrook, Massachusetts man who fell critically ill while sailing through the South Pacific has died, his family told WBZ-TV Tuesday evening.
Scott Winslow was in intensive care at a hospital in Fiji for weeks, as his family fought to get him back home so he could be treated for septic shock and a serious infection.
Winslow’s wife and two daughters had made the 8,000-mile trip to be with him and fight for his care when he died.
“We are at the hospital and just said goodbye to our father,” his daughters told WBZ-TV. “We are heartbroken.”
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Winslow was traveling on his nephew’s sailboat in the South Pacific on what was supposed to be a three-month voyage when he noticed what appeared to be a bug bite.
His family isn’t sure exactly what the cause of the illness was, but his condition quickly deteriorated, and he could no longer walk once they diverted the boat to Fiji.
The family provided WBZ medical documents from doctors in Fiji, who said he needed to be evacuated to another hospital.
The family said his insurance company, Aetna, denied the transport and the medical flight to get Winslow home would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Winslow’s family said they had secured medical services with the Mass General Brigham group if he got back to Massachusetts.
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“I don’t understand. My problem is, my parents pay for insurance, this is what insurance is for,” Lisa Babbin, Scott’s daughter told WBZ-TV earlier on Tuesday.
Before Winslow died, WBZ-TV reached out to Aetna. In a statement, a spokesperson said they were continuing to work with Winslow’s family “and his providers in Fiji to identify the best way to get him back safely to the United States for continued treatment.”
The Winslow family had also reached out the U.S. Embassy in Fiji for help securing an emergency loan.
The past month in Massachusetts has been synonymous with World Cup fan festivals, cheering crowds and tourists from Scotland crowning statues with traffic cones.
Amid concerns that the Trump administrations would ramp up immigration enforcement during the tournament, international soccer fans have posted on social media that they’ve felt welcome in the United States. The World Cup has even served as a distraction for many immigrants who’ve spent the past year and half in fear of the Trump administration’s deportation push.
And yet beneath the surface, immigration lawyers and advocates say detentions have not only continued across Massachusetts since the World Cup started in early June — they’ve increased in frequency.
“It’s supposed to be a joyous time for families, for children, and we’re still seeing an increase of arrests,” Eloa Celedon, an immigration attorney based in Marlborough, said. “Prior to the World Cup, it had settled down a bit — but since the World Cup started, it has been very sad to see arrests happening.”
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During May and early June, Celedon said her office received one or two calls a week about potential clients who’ve been recently detained. Over the last month, those calls have increased to four to five a day.
Celedon’s experiences track with a reported nationwide surge in arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Over a recent five-day period, agents across the nation detained more than 10,000 people. The arrests have occurred during routine check-ins with ICE agents as well as during traffic stops.
Todd Pomerleau, an immigration attorney and the president of Mass Deportation Defense Project, called the spike in arrests a “remarkable” contrast to the international goodwill that’s been on display during the World Cup. He pointed to a recent game he was at in California between Belgium and Iran, recounting the way players and fans cordially listened to both teams’ national anthems played before the match.
“Juxtapose that with what I’ve seen as an immigration attorney,” Pomerleau said. ”The government seems like it goes out of its way to basically arrest people without justification a lot and then just throw them in detention facilities.”
No attorneys have heard of any cases of immigrants being detained around the World Cup matches at Gillette Stadium, temporarily renamed Boston Stadium.
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A closer look at recent enforcement numbers
ICE didn’t respond to questions about how many people it has detained in Massachusetts since the start of the World Cup — the agency usually doesn’t provide time-specific enforcement figures.
Still, there are other ways to get rough estimates. Attorneys often file habeas petitions in federal court, asking judges to intervene in alleged unlawful detentions and keep immigrants from being sent to detention centers in other states.
There have been nearly 190 habeas filings in Massachusetts federal district court since the beginning of the World Cup matches, according to Habeas Dockets, a tracker run by the nonprofit Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative. Cases rose by 21% in June overall from the month before, going from 183 in May to 222.
One of those filings was for Malton Lacerda, who was detained June 28 by ICE agents after shopping at a Walmart in Halifax with his son Victor Lacerda, a Navy vet. The elder Lacerda wore a T-shirt saying “Navy Dad” as he put groceries in the car.
“Then we get rushed by a bunch of different ICE agents with guns drawn and threatening us. And we were confused,” Victor Lacerda, the son, said. “I looked back to see what was going on, because at first I couldn’t even believe it was happening to us, because we were just getting groceries. We hadn’t done anything wrong. And that’s when I saw them putting hands on my father and detaining him. But they were still asking me questions about my citizenship and my father’s citizenship.”
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Victor Lacerda, who was born in the United States, served in the Navy after high school and lives in Kingston, Massachusetts. His father, who’s undocumented, is originally from Brazil and has lived in the United States for at least 25 years. He’s currently being held at Plymouth County’s ICE detention facility.
Pomerleau, the Lacerdas’ attorney, says the father was in the process of securing a green card when he was detained. He’s eligible for permanent residency in the United States through a special process for veteran family members.
Pomerleau called the father an exemplary member of his community, noting that he works as a horse trainer and provides horse therapy for disabled veterans. He and his son also march in local parades, and planned on doing so again for the Fourth of July.
“He’s done a lot of work for the community for years. He marched in the 400th Thanksgiving Parade down in Plymouth, Memorial Day parades,” Pomerleau said.
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Malton Laceda in a Massachusetts parade last year.
Courtesy of Victor Laceda
Lacerda has two 20-year-old cases of driving without a license and paying fines, and a misdemeanor assault and battery charge from 2008 that was dismissed, involving his ex-partner who’s now raising funds for his legal expenses. ICE didn’t return requests for comment on the case.
Local immigration advocates say the recent spike in arrests is one more way the Trump administration has cherry-picked which foreigners and immigrants can enjoy the world’s biggest sporting event.
Celedon noted that the federal immigration crackdown has also made it impossible, or very difficult, for people from countries on full or partial travel ban lists to visit the United States to attend World Cup games. Those countries include Haiti and others in Africa.
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“It feels like almost like racial profiling people of certain countries that are allowed to come and those that are not allowed to come and not allowed to stay,” Celedon said.
Carson Erick, Jake Mrva, and Patrick Kilcoyne took a big first step Monday toward reaching match play by sharing the lead at 3-under 68 in the 118th Massachusetts Amateur at Winchester Country Club.
Kilcoyne was the runner-up last year at GreatHorse to Ryan Downes.
Max McColgan posted the only bogey-free round of the day, with a 69. He birdied two of the par 5s, Nos. 2 and 13. He is part of a group of four at 2 under that also includes 2024 champion Matthew Naumec.
Among the six members of the host club in the 144-player field, Joey Monahan led the way with a 70. His cousin, Aidan Monahan, won the club championship on Sunday and turned in a 72. They are nephews of PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan.
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Lucas Dascoli recorded a hole-in-one on the 127-yard ninth hole with a 50-degree wedge. The ace had him make the turn at 1 over, but he dropped five shots over the final four holes and settled for a 77 and is in a tie for 71st.
The average score was 76.83, playing 2.67 over par on the front and 3.15 over on the back. Ten players managed to post a red figure while eight turned in a 71.
The top 32 players following Tuesday’s second round of qualifying will reach match play that begins Wednesday. The 36-hole final is scheduled for Friday.
Keith Pearson can be reached at keith.pearson@globe.com.
