Many of the students in the halls at Wood’s Mill High School seem different this year — at least for those who are familiar with them.

Gay Maehrlein is an English teacher at Wood’s Mill and said she hasn’t seen as much motivation, especially from the Hispanic students, as she has seen so far this year.

“It’s night and day,” she said. “I have kids completing classes when last year we couldn’t even get them to
sit down.”

The catalyst, she said, came over the summer when President Barack Obama announced his plan to bypass Congress and enact parts of the DREAM Act — legislation that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who went to college or served in the military.

The executive order will allow hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants to remain in the nation and have a chance to work, legally.

They will be able to avoid deportation if they can prove they were brought to the United States before they turned 16 and are younger than 30, have been in the country for at least five continuous years, have no criminal history, graduated from a U.S. high school or earned a GED or served in the military. They can also apply for a work permit that will be good for two years with no limits on how many times it can be renewed. The announcement, some who fall under that category said, has given substantial hope to a group of people whose choices may have been limited.

“For me, it gave me a lot more motivation — a lot,” said Edith Lopez, a senior at Wood’s Mill. “Last year I was slacking off and I got to a point where I just wanted to quit school. I was like: ‘What’s the whole point of getting a diploma if I’m not going to be able to drive (or) go to college?’”

Lopez came to the United States from Mexico when she was 4 years old. Dropping out, for her, was almost a given.

“I just got to the point where I was going to quit and go work in the chicken factory, but I didn’t want that,” she said. “Then I heard about (the order) during the summer and I just started crying. I was jumping for joy. I was just really happy.”

But some lawmakers believe the order was a political move in an election year.

“It will certainly allow these people to relax,” said state Rep. Carl Rogers, R-Gainesville, in an interview with The Times in July. “I think Obama is doing whatever he needs to do to get re-elected and he hadn’t been able to get anything together in Congress.

“He could have done it three-and-a-half years ago, he could have done it three years ago, he could have done it a long time ago.”

But why Obama issued the order is of no consequence to the seniors at Wood’s Mill. Maehrlein said that it’s actually given a group of young people a renewed sense of belonging where there once wasn’t.

“They have nowhere to go,” she said. “They’re here and not by their own will — their parents brought them here when they were little and they don’t know anything else. That’s what bothers me the most is they’re constantly told they don’t belong. Where do they belong? How do you expect them to be positive citizens when they’re constantly told they don’t belong?

“They have hope now, where before it was nothing.”

Edith Porrecillas, another senior at Wood’s Mill, has a time scheduled with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services later this month to move forward in the process of getting a driver’s license and a two-year work permit.

“I think it’s really good that they finally decided to do that because there’s a lot of us who want to keep studying, but we don’t have a chance because we can’t pay for college or some won’t take us in because we don’t have papers,” said Porrecillas. “Just because we don’t have papers doesn’t mean we don’t want to get ahead.”

And from a teacher’s perspective, Maehrlein said, it makes it easier to push students toward success.

“(Before,) we’d be pushing them to get ‘A’s,’ but among us we would say: ‘Why even bother to push them? They can’t go anywhere — no college, no job,’” she said. “It was very frustrating. The brightest kids and a lot of them work so hard. Their parents are excited, they go through the graduation and it was all fake, because they’re just done.”

Gainesville City and Hall County schools officials said there also has been a noticeable influx of students requesting transcripts to prove their completion of school.

In the first few weeks after the announcement, Gainesville City’s central office received more than 100 requests. The White House estimates the action will affect as many as 800,000.

But, for the handful of students at Wood’s Mill, the idea of a tangible goal is motivational.

“We really do feel that they’re going to come out of here motivated, educated and have a place to go,” said Maehrlein. “They didn’t even bother before this.”