Closed state prison reopened as migrant shelter spurs concern about schooling in a Massachusetts town – The Boston Globe

Norfolk Superintendent Ingrid Allardi said 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.

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.

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. “It was 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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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 expressed gratitude 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 elementary schools, 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.

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, largely from 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.

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.