Chester County school board member under fire for comments made about immigrant children
OXFORD, Pa. - An Oxford Area School District school board member is facing criticism for several comments she made toward the immigrant community in the Chester County school district during a January 18th school board meeting, addressing a revision to a policy regarding homeless students.
"Our school district is ranked 369 out of 707 and this policy around these illegal immigrants and just talking about accepting these illegal immigrants and allowing this policy to be applied to them," board member Jennifer Kehs stated.
Kehs is a Republican and elected to the board in the past year. Many feel her comments imply that a decline in school performance is a direct relation to an increase in immigrant children attending class in the district.
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"Those people may potentially continue on this downward trend, as we have people coming into our school district who don’t speak any English, who have no schooling in America," Kehs commented during the meeting.
Nelly Jimenez works at ACLAMO, a non-profit that provides social services to the community. She’s speaking on behalf of parents who are too afraid to speak out. She says she takes umbrage with several things Kehs said during the meeting, the first being how students were referred to in her speech.
"By referring to them as illegals and ‘those people’ and the connotation that she made the discriminating against a group of people," Jimenez stated.
An online petition demanding Kehs resign has already reached more than 40,000 signatures.
Deborah Gordon Klehr is the Executive Director at the Education Law Center. She says Kehs’ comments show a severe lack of judgement from an elected official.
"Such xenophobic and racist comments from a board member of a school district are offensive and unacceptable and simply false. Statements blaming immigrant students for bad school outcomes are false and make families feel unwelcome," Klehr explained.
Kehs did not return several requests for comment from Fox 29, nor did the Oxford Area School District.
Jimenez says she will gather with community members over the next few days to figure out a unified message going forward and what if any actions they want the school district to take.
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