The percentage of English language learners attending Hamilton County Schools has nearly doubled since 2015, rising from 5% to 9.9% of the total student population, according to state data.
That increase is concurrent with another trend the district has been seeing: an influx of Hispanic students, whose numbers have risen from 4,683 in 2015 to roughly 9,000.
On any given day, new students may show up at The Howard School seeking to enroll, many of them Hispanic, Board of Education member Rhonda Thurman, R-Hixson, said in a phone interview. The Howard School houses the district's welcome center, which provides international students with the extra support and resources they need.
"The district has tried to focus on this issue for quite a long time, for the last six years," board member Tiffanie Robinson, an independent from Chattanooga, said in a phone interview.
She added that establishing the welcome center in 2021 was part of that effort.
But Thurman said the Hispanic student influx has become overwhelming for teachers.
"When teachers tell me that they have so many coming into their classroom, and they have to test them," Thurman said in a phone interview. "They have to say where to fit them in the class, where they are, what grade level they're reading at. All of this kind of stuff is a daunting task."
Thurman said she attributes the increase in Hispanic students to President Joe Biden's border policies.
"It's not just the (teachers); it's overwhelming our facilities," Thurman said. "We are either going to have to rezone some students or we're going to have to build more facilities if it keeps up at this pace. And I see no end in sight. This is due to the policies of the current president. These are his policies that are allowing these people to come in. So, when is it going to end? We don't know."
According to 2020 census data, the surge in Hispanic residents is happening across the county. There was an 80.6% spike from 2010 to 2020.
Hamilton County Schools was 5.6% Hispanic during the 2009-10 academic year and 17% in 2020-21.
Chief Strategy Officer Shannon Moody said migrants represent less than 1% of the student population, and approximately 5,000 students who come from non-English speaking backgrounds were born in the United States.
Robinson said the district is keeping up with the needs of its Hispanic students.
"The district is doing a great job handling this issue," Robinson said. "This is a student population that we have been working really hard to provide for the last several years. And we know that we're going to continuously need to put a focus on it. But everything that we're doing as a school district is centered around making sure that these students have a great education."
(READ MORE: How Hamilton County Schools is combating racial disparities in literacy)
She also said while teachers are stressed in general, it's not because of Hispanic students.
"And then when it comes to the thought of holding students back or this population creating stress in the classroom, I think that's totally false," Robinson said. "We created these welcome schools to alleviate that. And I talk to students and to parents all the time, and I am not hearing that kind of feedback at all."
Not all Hispanic students are English language learners. For example, in the 2020-21 academic year, there were 4,651 students with limited English proficiency and roughly 9,000 Hispanic students.
Hamilton County's 2021-22 scores on the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, a test that measures English learners' English language proficiency, show Native American, Asian, Black, white and Native Hawaiian students are also among the district's English learners. Hispanic students comprised the majority.
Moody said there are more than 73 languages represented at Hamilton County Schools.
"I think that's a really cool, positive (statistic) for our district," Moody said.
Contact Carmen Nesbitt at cnesbitt@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327. Follow her on Twitter @carmen_nesbitt.