FOUR OAKS -- Each word is a separate effort for the students furnishing a dollhouse at Four Oaks Elementary School. "The ... chair ... goes ... here," whispers one girl, the last word a throaty breath followed by a drawn-out "eeear."

But teacher Ana Sanders beams when a boy named Jorge picks up a wooden sink and blurts out a confident, "Where is the bathroom?"

Six months earlier, Jorge enrolled at the Johnston County school unable to speak a word of English. Now he is helping classmates who have arrived even more recently and speak only Spanish.

Sanders teaches English to 200 Spanish-speaking students at Four Oaks. She also translates for parents and calms students' fears as they face the daunting prospect of learning English at the same time they learn to read and write.

But if she is a lifeline for her students, taxpayers pay for it.

Thirteen years ago, two tutors traversed Johnston County helping the children of migrant workers. Now, the county employs 50 full-time teachers and teacher assistants to serve more than 2,300 students for whom English is a second language -- at an overall cost of about $2 million of the district's $110 million budget.

Other Triangle districts with large Hispanic enrollments include Wake County, which will spend $9 million this year on 5,200 students in English as a Second Language classes, and Durham, which will spend $5 million on 4,000 ESL students.

Estimates on how many of these students are citizens vary. But by conservative estimates, half of them either entered the country illegally themselves or are citizens born in the United States to illegal parents. Educating them has strained state coffers more than any other expense brought on by immigration to North Carolina.

Educating the children of illegal immigrants cost North Carolina an estimated $210 million yearly, according to figures from a study on the economic impact of the state's Hispanic population by researchers at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-Chapel Hill. Ten years before, that figure was less than $10 million.

Some say that money would be better spent on other students.

"We're overwhelmed in North Carolina trying to pay for the people who are supposed to be here," said Ron Woodard, director of N.C. Listen, a group in Cary that advocates greater restriction of immigration. "Why are we having to spend money on people who are here illegally?"

Others stress that money spent on educating immigrants, both legal and illegal, will pay off in future tax revenue as they earn higher wages. Poorly educated immigrants and their children would require more spending for jail time and programs such as Medicaid.

"It's peanuts in the scheme of things," said James H. Johnson Jr., co-author of the Kenan Institute study. "What would we rather do, leave these people uneducated? It's a form of enlightened self-interest to invest in these kids."

North Carolina had the highest percentage of Hispanic growth of any state in the 1990s. About 395,000 illegal immigrants, the large majority of whom are Hispanic, live in the state, according to a Pew Hispanic Center study.

Hispanics accounted for 57 percent of enrollment growth in North Carolina public schools from 2000 to 2005, according to the Kenan study. From 1990 to 2000, they accounted for 15 percent of enrollment growth.

Growth is a constant challenge for Johnston County schools. The Triangle's steady expansion southward has led to overcrowded school buildings and teacher shortages. But growth by immigration is more expensive.

Costs of education

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