Lynn Officials: Illegal Immigrant Children are Stressing City Services
Photo Credit: Fox NewsBy Crystal Haynes.
Lynn is a municipality on the brink. Key department officials say a recent influx of illegal immigrant children and families in the city is stressing almost every service from trash collection to healthcare.
“We have been aware of the unaccompanied children issue for quite a while, and we were able to absorb a lot of these children early on,” said Lynn Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy. “But now it’s gotten to the point where the school system is overwhelmed, our health department is overwhelmed, the city’s budget is being sustainably altered in order of accommodate all of these admissions in the school department.”
Flanagan Kennedy says the first contact for immigrant arrivals in the city is the school system.
The amount of new foreign born student admissions has nearly doubled in the last two years. This school year alone saw more than 600 new admissions. Among those students, 248 were from Guatemala. Flanagan Kennedy says of those 248 children, 126 were illegal, undocumented minors.
“They are not literate in any language, so they do need some skills. And I assume they are enrolling in school to receive those skills,” said Catherine Latham, Lynn’s superintendent of schools
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Hundreds in Lynn Tested for Tuberculosis
By AP.
More than 30 Lynn Community Health Center employees and 800 patients are being tested to determine if they were exposed to tuberculosis after center doctors confirmed a case.
Center Director Lori Berry says after confirming the single positive test for tuberculosis in a male health care worker around Labor Day, center medical workers contacted and tested employees as well as patients ‘‘having sufficient exposure to warrant testing.’’
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