The challenge of New York schools to receive thousands of migrant students

One year after traveling by bus and walking eight countries from Venezuela to USA, Eliézer, 10, and his older sister Elaíza, 12, proudly display their school diploma. His school has received more than a hundred migrant children.

“My pride is that after two months he learned to read and now he knows a few sentences in English. Imagine how I feel!”says her mother Yeisy Sira, 33, her eyes sparkling with emotion. Her little one will enter the institute next year.

“It wasn’t easy to get there, but we got there”account after the traditional end-of-year ceremony at the primary school “PS145 The Bloomingdale School”In New York.

The school is “A first stage and the beginning of many good things”, ensures.

With her husband and three children, Yeisy Sira is one of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants who have arrived in New York in the last year fleeing poverty, political instability or the violence that plagues Venezuela and other countries. from Latin America such as Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala or Peru.

Challenge

This unprecedented arrival -80,000 asylum seekers according to the city since the spring of 2022- have put the capacity of the megalopolis to the test, where dozens of hotels have been transformed into emergency reception centers for new arrivals.

This is also a challenge for the New York public school system, the largest in the United States with one million students, of whom 71.9% are classified as “economically disadvantaged”deserving of social assistance, according to the city’s Department of Education.

Located in a Hispanic-majority neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, PS145 appears poised to cope with its bilingual English-Spanish and English-Russian programs teaching students of many backgrounds, including fled from the war in Ukraine.

“Many of these children sitting here have seen things that neither you nor I could ever imagine”says the director of the school, Natalia García, during the speech at the end of the year ceremony, which includes the raising of the American flag and the delivery of diplomas.

The number of students at the center has gone from around 400 to more than 530 in the 2022-2023 academic year. The city unlocked additional funds, about $2,000 per child, which are housed in temporary shelters.

minors and parents

The director, teachers and educational assistants, as well as parents, mobilized in response to the emergency and the “enormous challenges” both for the students – most of them did not speak a word of English – and for the families, who arrived in New York with nothing on their backs, without even winter clothes, and who sleep in hotel rooms where it is not possible to cook a plate of food hot.

“Many of these children had already been displaced, sometimes for years. Some had not even gone to school.”explains Naveed Hasan, president of a PS145 parent committee and member of the city’s Educational Policy Council.

“We have a roof to sleep in”says Yeisy Sira about the room where she sleeps with her family. “We arrived with nothing. We literally started from scratch.” Explain.

Space

school has been a “great help” for administrative procedures, he assures. The workers of the educational center “they did the whole process” helping them with obtaining the documents they needed and began to locate their children by age and by grade.

And for the procedures of the asylum application they also received help from another association.

“We are happy to help”says Naveed Hasan, who came from Pakistan in the early 1980s. But now, “There is a huge problem of classroom availability” for both students, he explains.

“This means that all the spaces that were not classrooms, such as the music room, the science room, the art room, the library, the television studio, have been converted for other uses, mainly smaller classes to help the little ones. ”recounts.

Parents wrote a petition, and Manhattan elected officials alerted the Department of Education, proposing ideas to increase the premises. The Department of Education has indicated that it wants to work with the center to “finding solutions”.

Since the summer of 2022, more than 18,000 students temporarily housed in drop-in centers have begun studying in New York public schools, according to the city.

Source: AFP