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 teenager’s 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 didn’t provide an interpreter, so they left after just a few minutes, feeling confused.

It wasn’t 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