Plyler v. Doe Project Essay

In about 1.5 weeks the second-to-last quarter of high school will end. This past quarter I’ve been in a U.S. Government seminar at Avalon run through the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project (I could probably find a better link if I dug deeper…) by law students at William Mitchell College of Law here in Saint Paul. This seminar has been consistently one of my favorite parts of the block. As a culminating assignment we were put into small groups and assigned a Supreme Court case to learn as much as we can about and then teach to the class in the final two days of the class. My group got assigned Plyler v. Doe, a case on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In simple terms, Texas enacted a law that said they won’t reimburse local school districts for illegal immigrant students taught in their schools. This case was brought against the Supreme Court in 1981 and in 1982 they decided that the law was unconstitutional. As a whole third of our grade on this project we were to write an individual opinion essay. I turned this essay in this morning but doubt that the teachers have read it yet. Nonetheless I felt as if I should put it here for anyone to read. Feel free to add comments on it to the comments of this blog post. Enjoy, Alex.