A 17-Year-Old Was Told He Couldn't Attend High School, Even Though He's A US Citizen
Seventeen-year-old Nehemy Antoine and his father, Emile, thought it would be easy to enroll the teen in a US high school. They were US citizens, after all.
The pair, immigrants from Haiti, brought the teenagers passport, his social security card, and a report card to Golden Gate High School one afternoon in March 2016. Nehemy, who loves math and music, had already finished algebra I and geometry in Haiti; someday soon, he hoped to study computer science in college.
The administrator at the front desk handed Nehemy a leaflet that neither he nor his father, who grew up speaking Haitian Creole, understood, according to the family. Golden Gate didnt provide an interpreter, so they left after just a few minutes, feeling confused.
It wasnt until the next day, when a friend translated the document, that Nehemy, now 19, realized the school had essentially told him to go away. The handout declared him no longer eligible to pursue a traditional high school diploma in Collier County because of his age and referred him to online programs, workforce training sessions, and GED prep classes everything, it seemed, except what he was actually looking for: a mainstream high school education.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoekirsch/immigrant-student-denied-access-school-florida-lawsuit?utm_term=.iiWRVd5zJ#.nnMJX4aPV