With an estimated 20,000 migrant children and counting enrolled in city schools — many of them in the same school districts — advocates are concerned about whether the kids will have enough teachers and classroom space this school year.
Schools Chancellor David Banks said Tuesday the system is trying to match demand with capacity, but it’s a challenge because of the locations and sizes of the shelters where the migrants are living.
“The problem that we have is that because of where they are in these temporary shelters, they’re limited to the number of schools that we’re really able to send them,” he said on CBS New York.
“So some schools have seen a little bit more overcrowding. We’re working really hard to alleviate that.”
“We’ve got room across our system. The problem has been that we’ve concentrated a lot of the kids into a smaller subset of schools.”
Roughly 20,000 migrant children have enrolled so far in city schools, including 1,000 students who signed up this summer, Banks said — a near doubling of the 500 asylum-seeking children local officials announced had registered so far less than a week ago.
It was not immediately known which areas are seeing more migrant students than others.
Still, Diana Aragundi, assistant director of the Immigrant Students’ Rights Project at Advocates for Children noted, “we’re seeing some schools have a huge population of newly arrived families, versus other schools that may not have that dramatic increase.”
Local education officials do not ask families their immigration status; instead, they rely on the number of new students in temporary housing registering since last summer as a proxy.
“[School placements] really depends on where the shelter sites are, where the HERRCs [Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers] are,” said Aragundi.
The emphasis on proximity during registration is more than a matter of convenience — students are guaranteed seats in most zoned neighborhood schools.
“Some [schools] have not seen this population come in before, so it may be a little bit new to them,” said Liza Schwartzwald of the nonprofit New York Immigration Coalition. “So there will likely be some transitions.”
“We do encourage for when that is possible, for students to go to some of the schools that have more experience serving immigrant students. We obviously have no control over where the shelters are. … If a student is in that shelter, they have the right to the zoned school.”
The estimate of migrant students is likely an undercount ahead of the school year, as most shelter-based education staff work 10-month schedules that exclude the summer. Advocates say there are more newcomers who have arrived than are currently being enrolled.
“That 10-month situation is something that never should have happened, because we knew there wouldn’t be a substantial slowdown over the summer,” said Schwartzwald. “That was absolutely an avoidable issue.”
The city is expecting to employ 3,400 teachers licensed to teach English as a new language and 1,700 certified bilingual teachers in Spanish this fall, compared with 3,600 English as a second language teachers and 1,600 Spanish bilingual teachers the year before, according to city and Independent Budget Office data.
“We’ll continue to try to get more teachers in place,” said Banks.
Schwartzwald said schools that historically did not enroll many Spanish-speaking students are getting additional support — both through a revamped school funding formula and supplementary investments in migrant students — that can be used to hire certified bilingual teachers or otherwise have expertise in teaching English.
But the pipelines to fill those positions are still being built out. Advocates on Tuesday called for the state to fund more bilingual teachers programs, while recognizing that it will take time for future students to complete their certifications.
“We’ve had the chance for years to bolster these systems,” said Schwartzwald. “We haven’t seen the kinds of boosts in funding for these programs that we know that we needed.”
