Councilmembers grilled Department of Education (DOE) officials last week at a joint hearing on education and immigration. Testimonies concluded that Mayor Eric Adams’s 60-day shelter eviction policy, as well as budget cuts, have wreaked havoc on the lives of migrant families and students just settling into the city’s public schools.
As of this Tuesday, there have been more than 100,000 new migrant arrivals to the city, and more than 175 Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs), shelters, and respite centers built. As a result of the influx, school enrollment numbers that were on the decline have skyrocketed.
More than 32,000 children are now classified as living in temporary housing in the public school system and nearly one in five kindergarten through 12th grade students in the city are English Language Learners (ELL), according to the Independent Budget Office (IBO).
The joint hearing was headed by Councilmember Shahana Hanif, who chairs the immigration committee, and Education chair Rita Joseph. The DOE testified about struggles to provide adequate bilingual instruction due to staff shortages, transportation to school, language access, special education services, and more for immigrant students and their families. Hanif said it is obvious the Adams administration does not want immigrants to move to New York City, but it’s “egregious” to “intentionally worsen” conditions for migrants already here.
“For this administration, cruelty is the point,” said Hanif at the hearing. “As we’ve seen over the past few days, shelter evictions have resulted in asylum seekers sleeping outside in weather so cold that it required the city to declare a code blue emergency. The shelter evictions are inhumane, and as chair of the committee on immigration, I oppose them in the strongest possible terms.”
Deputy Speaker Diana Ayala and Joseph later further condemned the 60-day shelter limit policy for removing asylum-seeking families with children from shelters. “It is clear from the Council’s recent oversight hearings and the longtime experiences of students in temporary housing that the City has not taken the necessary measures to ensure that children from asylum-seeking families will continue receiving their federally mandated education once forced out of shelter,” they said in a joint statement.
They said the decision to proceed with 30- and 60-day shelter stay limits risks further destabilizing these families, taking them away from the communities and schools they joined after harrowing journeys. They also said the mayor’s office hasn’t “produced any proof” that these policies provide meaningful cost savings or increased shelter capacity.
Joseph said the mayor’s order to cut asylum seeker spending by 20% and education by 15% severely affected migrant communities, as did cuts to library services that provided reliable computer access, help with obtaining city IDs, and a safe space for their kids to read.
Hanif said that the shelter evictions have further exacerbated situations for migrant students, which nonprofits like New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) attested to. Some students have had to transfer to shelters outside of the district of their school, possibly in another borough, without reliable bussing services. Due to the circumstances, many migrant children have missed several days to weeks of schooling.
“Even prior to this shift in housing rules for these families, it was taking weeks for families to be enrolled in quality schools and shelters, and longer still to figure out their transportation,” said Kesi Gordon, NYIC Senior Manager of Education Policy at the hearing. “Displacing families from shelters will interrupt their education, creating either long commutes or requiring students to hop from school to school. This will increase absenteeism and create even more instability from families who are already experiencing so much.”
DOE Chief of Staff Melissa Ramos testified that school leadership, shelter coordinators, and dedicated community-based organizations are doing their best to gather donations, establish care closets, help with school supplies, provide bus transportation or MetroCards if students are forced to move, and staff bilingual programming. She said the DOE is working “aggressively” to change the mindsets of teachers and schools in regard to welcoming students in temporary housing at all schools.
“One of the things we’ve learned in the last year is that while we have structures in place to support all students in temporary housing, and we deeply value our shelter-based coordinators given this experience, we also need an ecosystem across schools to support our students in temporary housing,” said Ramos. “That looks very different [among] schools.”
The office of Comptroller Brad Lander testified that the Adams administration has seemingly created “resource scarcity” at schools with newly arrived migrants on purpose through budget cuts to all city agencies, flawed fair student funding (FSF) calculations for students in temporary housing, and the 60-day shelter limits.
Adams has maintained that the budget cuts will not affect children’s education. He is traveling to DC this week to reconvene with President Joe Biden staff about immigration policies and federal funding to deal with the asylum seeker crisis.
[updated Thursday, Dec 7]
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member who writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.