Thread: Migrant crisis is ultimate test of NYC schools

Migrant crisis is ultimate test of NYC schools




Madina Touré
Mon, October 24, 2022 at 3:16 PM


NEW YORK — The nation’s largest public school system was already struggling to teach immigrant students, then thousands of young Latin American asylees showed up.

Many were sent by GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott amid a fight with the Biden administration over border policy, but New York has to figure out how to educate them.

Now the city is grappling with an unprecedented challenge: How to best integrate a sudden influx of migrant kids — with varying educational backgrounds, significant language barriers and understandably unstable personal lives — into an education system that’s totally unready for them.

“We need a new plan that goes beyond enrollment and that touches more on the 'What happens now that the kids are in schools?' piece,” Andrea Ortiz of the New York Immigration Coalition said in an interview. “How are the schools supposed to support these students? What expectations are there in terms of what additional monetary supports those schools can expect to be able to meet the needs?”

Schools are hustling to find more bilingual teachers and adapt curricula to accommodate newcomers’ unique needs without disrupting existing students — all as city scores on state math test are dropping, an onerous class-size mandate looms and the DOE’s budget remains tied up in an unrelated legal battle.

Financial strain

Public school officials have enrolled some 6,100 students since announcing a multi-agency push in August called “Project Open Arms.” The city doesn’t ask about immigration status but it is widely believed most of them are asylees. In addition to enrollment, the program also provides resources like supplies and transportation to school.

And meeting the needs of thousands of newcomers is not cheap. Mayor Eric Adams estimates the city will spend $1 billion by the end of the fiscal year on the larger migrant situation.

The DOE couldn’t say how much of that it might need, but city Comptroller Brad Lander said Tuesday the city needed to allocate at least $49 million more to educate the newcomers, when accounting for pre-K and special needs.

“Schools where enrollment exceeded DOE projections this fall are already operating at a deficit of staff, and now face even greater shortfalls as they take in new students who they were not budgeted to support,” he said, adding that the Adams administration and school parents “deserve praise for working hard to welcome them with open arms and rising to this challenge.”

P.S. 124 in Brooklyn, which sits across the street from two homeless shelters and receives Title I federal funds thanks to its sizable low-income population, was budgeted for 215 students this year — then its headcount rose by 35, according to Lander.

He estimates the school should receive an additional $223,000 in additional Fair Student funding from the city to cover its new charges.

Funding for individual schools is determined in part by their enrollment. Normally, that number is settled shortly after the academic year begins, and schools submit their enrollment figures by Oct. 31.

But with more and more migrants coming daily — and no sign of arrivals slowing down — educators and advocates are wondering whether schools will get additional help for new pupils after the October deadline.

"I think given the influx of newly arrived asylum-seeker students who may be arriving after that October 31 deadline, we would hope that the city would allow those schools to receive more funding for every student that enrolls thereafter,” said Rita Rodriguez-Engberg, director of the Immigrant Students Rights Project at Advocates for Children New York.

The DOE said it has provided $25 million directly to schools in response to new students enrolling.

Adams and the City Council also cut the education budget by at least $215 million over the summer, prompting a lawsuit from parents and teachers that caused a state court to briefly freeze the education budget at the very time schools were planning for the upcoming academic year.

With resources spread thin, some schools are more prepared than others. But where students end up is largely out of their hands.

‘Limited’ placement

The DOE has little say as to where it can send children to and must instead move resources to meet individual schools’ needs as they arise, according to schools Chancellor David Banks.

“We’re kind of limited in terms of where we can place them in schools,” he said recently. “But we’re working to ensure that the schools have what they need and if they need more bilingual teachers — bilingual teachers have always been a shortage area for us anyway. So, it’s not like we wave a magic wand and we have all the answers. We’re trying to figure it out.”

Elementary and middle school students are enrolled at the campus nearest to their city-assigned homeless shelter — then given the New York State Identification Test for English Language Learners to determine their English proficiency. High-school-aged migrants are tested first and can choose from a number of schools near their shelter.

But with much of the city’s homeless shelters in economically disadvantaged areas, some of the most strained schools are also shouldering the obligation to teach migrants.

In Queens, the borough with the most asylum-seekers enrolled, many are ending up in District 30, according to Whitney Toussaint, president of the community education council, a local oversight panel for the district.

She pointed to schools like P.S. 111 and P.S. 112 that already serve economically disadvantaged populations from Ravenswood Houses and Queensbridge Houses — the latter is the nation’s largest public housing development.

“They're having to expand these services to the asylum-seeker families as well. They need food, they need clothes,” Toussaint said. “They're working with their communities to try to help these families, and these are families that need help themselves."
It was the partially geographic luck of the draw for the roughly 175 migrants who ended up in New York City schools that are in the Internationals Network of Public Schools, which has schools nationwide that serve recently arrived immigrants and refugees.

“Because of the structure, they’re really supportive of the student population and families,” said Dennis De Guzman Caindec, the network’s director of school support for New York. “I think they’re very much attuned and culturally responsive to the needs of the community who are coming in because this is not a new thing for us. We’ll take any kid who’s coming in because that’s what we do.”

Some schools, like P.S. 145 on the Upper West Side, have experience with asylum-seekers, but still need language resources. Before migrants from South America, the school had taken in Ukrainian refugees and Russian asylees fleeing Russia’s war on Ukraine, according to Naveed Hasan, a P.S. 145 parent who chairs the multilingual committee for the school district’s local education council. The school currently has 10 Russian speakers.

“We had a small early practice of doing exactly what’s needed now for the Spanish-speaking asylum-seekers for the refugees from the Russian-speaking community,” Hasan said, adding the school still needs Spanish-speaking social workers for its 45 South American asylees. “My main concern is the need for the city and Department of Education to put some resources — financial or staffing — behind Project Open Arms.”

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said he’s stressed to Banks that the city must release more information about where students are being sent, so community-based organizations can help fill gaps in counseling and language support.

“I think the chancellor acknowledged that we’re just not there yet, but we want to see a lot more resources,” Richards said in an interview.

Language barrier

The DOE has long suffered a dearth of bilingual teachers, but the problem has escalated, according to City Council Member Rita Joseph, who taught students learning English as a new language as a public school teacher and now chairs the Council’s Committee on Education.

A Manhattan school with only one certified bilingual teacher has reportedly received at least 50 migrant students.

“They have to look within the system they already have to see where can we strategically place these personnel that can meet the needs of the students,” Joseph said in an interview.

While the city offers multilingual instruction, many asylees are in English-only classes and in need of Spanish-speaking teachers. Differences in language comprehension and education level can also create challenges for pre-existing students, according to Lucas Liu, president of the education council covering P.S. 145, which offers two dual language programs in Spanish and Russian.

“P.S. 145 getting 40, 50 asylum students obviously is gonna have an impact on the classroom and space in the school and even what’s happening in the classroom, the curriculum,” he said. “If the teacher needs to spend extra time supporting these students, are the other students getting assistance with what they need in the classroom?”

Banks recently announced a push to recruit educators from the Dominican Republic, but the pilot program isn’t large enough to address the current migrant influx, he said.

The language barrier extends from classrooms to the city’s migrant housing, and the school system must send more Spanish-speakers to shelters to establish a direct line of communication, according to Rodriguez-Engberg of Advocates for Children New York.

“The families that are living in shelter but attending DOE schools have their own unique needs by virtue of the fact that they're living in shelter and that includes different access to basic necessities, space limitations, etc.,” she said. “School staff need to be very aware of those needs and ensure that they're sensitive to the needs of students and parents."

The DOE says its Office of Students in Temporary Housing staffs shelters to assist with enrollment and ensuring migrant children and families have whatever resources they need from schools.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/migrant-c...191636174.html

Not one more dime for these criminal trespassers. They should not be on our soil. Load them on ships with their parents and ship them back home.

This is outrages to allow foreign citizens to take over our schools, our healthcare system, our housing, and communities and we foot the bill for it.

Slam that border shut.

The nation’s largest public school system was already struggling to teach immigrant students, then thousands of young Latin American asylees showed up.

"Asylees"? Yeah, right. What a joke.