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In Washington, the debate over the child and family migrant crisis has focused on what can be done at the border to expedite the processing of Central American children and families, or what can be done to deter future migrants from making the dangerous journey through Mexico to the US.

Elsewhere in the country, the debate's been about what comes after children are processed at the border. In some towns, activists have tried to stop local facilities from being used as temporary detention centers for migrant families before their deportation. In others, local officials have invited the government to use buildings to house children temporarily, while the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (part of the Department of Health and Human Services) looks for relatives or family friends who can take them in while their immigration cases work through the courts.

Less attention's been paid to what happens after that: where child migrants live when they're released into relatives' custody. But that's where children will be staying for months or years, and where they'll actually be interacting with other members of the community and going to school.

Where children are going — and where they might strain the system

The Office of Refugee Resettlement doesn't provide data on where, exactly, immigrant children are being released. But it does break releases down by state. Unsurprisingly, the states that have taken in the most children since October 2013 are the states with the largest established immigrant populations: Texas, New York, California, Florida. But these places are likely used to new immigrant arrivals, and have the infrastructure in place to integrate children easily.

The places most likely to be overwhelmed by the current influx aren't the ones where the most children are coming, but where the most children are coming relative to the immigrant children already in the state. And those states are in the Deep South — particularly Louisiana.

Louisiana, with 1,071 children having arrived since October of 2013, has a child-migrant intake that is 10 percent of it's population of foreign-born children. No other state's recent child-migrant intake even hits 5 percent. And while, in most states, the number of newly-arrived child migrants isn't even 1 percent of the current Central American population, in Louisiana (and a few other states in the Deep South) it's over 3 percent. So if there's anywhere in America where local communities would be struggling to handle the influx of child migrants, it would probably be Louisiana.

New Orleans schools are racing to accommodate new migrants

According to Martin Gutierrez, the Resettlement Director for Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, "I haven't heard of any group, any school, any institution at all feeling overwhelmed." He says that New Orleans has "seen an increasing Hispanic population overall anyway. So it's nothing new. It's just the numbers are a little bigger."

One New Orleans school has seen its ESL population go from 7 students last year to 70 this year

But New Orleans schools have only started working to catch up to the growth of the Spanish-speaking population — so as the school year begins this week, they're racing to provide enough support to the children who continue to arrive.

One school's seen its English Language Learner population spike from 1 percent of students last year to 10 percent this year, about 70 children. Whitney Wiegand is the school's first ESL teacher; she was hired in May. Her school has already hired a second ESL teacher, she says, "because our numbers of Spanish-speaking students sort of exploded in this past month."

Some of those students have come from other schools, but many are new arrivals in the US. On the first day of school, Wiegand asked her middle-schoolers, "Where were you this time last year?"

"It felt like the majority [said they] had been enrolled in school in Honduras," she says.

But they're welcoming, not overwhelmed

Wiegand doesn't know how many of her students came across the border unaccompanied or are living with relatives other than their parents now. But she's working with her school's social worker to prepare for the emotional difficulties her students might face: the struggle to adjust in the US, and the possible trauma of their journey. They've been looking for resources and organizations in the New Orleans area, and have already partnered up with a local nonprofit, Puentes, that's helping with outreach.

"If the demographic of the city is growing and changing, our job doesn't change at all"

Wiegand was previously an ESL teacher in Chicago, and she admits that New Orleans can be less "user-friendly" to Spanish-speaking families than cities where the Hispanic population is more established. "If I were a parent, I would probably be a little more frustrated or uneasy," she says. She's been spending the last month just helping families with the complicated process of enrolling their children in school.

Some of her school's teachers are a little anxious about "having a third of their classrooms not speak the same language." But she hasn't seen any backlash to the new immigrants themselves. To the contrary, teachers are working to build a "welcoming environment" in their classrooms.

"I think everyone in the building has the mentality that our job is to serve the students in the city, and if the demographic of the city is growing and changing, our job doesn't change at all with that change in demographic."

Gutierrez, of Catholic Charities, also says he hasn't seen any backlash from other community members. While communities elsewhere are fighting to keep children and families from being detained or held in their towns — even though they won't be released into the community there — the people among whom children are actually settling don't seem to mind.