It’s hard enough to have your child gain a quality filled education with the size of classrooms and the lack of enough teachers since the pandemic, but now NYC is struggling to also provide education to 5,500 migrant children.
A Manhattan public school with just one certified bilingual teacher is reeling under the weight of a sudden influx of migrant students who don’t speak any English.
“We’re overwhelmed,” one frustrated teacher at PS 33 Chelsea Prep said Tuesday. “We’ve all got migrant students in our classrooms. The teachers don’t speak Spanish. There’s no resources helping us out right now, it’s a very challenging situation.”
One angered mother claims migrant children have increased her daughter’s class from 15 students to 20. The kids with lime green ID tags hanging around their necks have caused quite a disturbance to her child’s learning.
“She’s in the third grade. Her teacher is giving her lower-level work due to the immigrants. They’re making the curriculum easier,” said Maria, a 29-year-old fashion designer. “The work is too easy for my daughter. There’s first-grade, second-grade and third-grade levels in her class. It’s ridiculous.”
This burden on the school system, has caused many furious parents to contemplate pulling their kids out of the school and sending them elsewhere.
Maria said, “We are currently looking into a private school on 42nd street and are hopefully going to have her enrolled soon.”
Another parent, Cooper, a 45-year-old chef, said, “I’m trying to change schools for my 7-year old son. He”s in second grade right now. His classroom at his current school is an utter disaster.”
The alarming situation offers an example of how the flood of migrants to the Big Apple, now nearly 19,000 strong, with no sign of stopping — is straining the city’s ability to provide them with housing, education and social services.
On Friday, Mayor Eric Adams said that 5,500 migrant kids have been enrolled in the city’s public schools, revealing the startling number as he declared a state of emergency over the migrant crisis.
An official tally by Community Education Council District 2 lists 50 migrant students PS 33, which enrolled 555 children in 2020-21, the most recent school year for which the Department of Education has data posted online.
However, a PS 33 teacher said, “That count is far too low. We definitely have more than 50 migrant students. The number is closer to 90 right now.”
Other official totals include a combined 120 at PS 111 and MS 933, which share a single building, 65 at PS 51 and 15 at MS 297, with an unknown number at PS 11.
Some of the class sizes have grown substantially. Currently some classes have up to 38 students to one teacher in a classroom.
The DOE decides where migrant kids can attend school, based on factors including the proximity of the shelters where their families have been placed by the city and the availability of seats in area schools.
At PS 33, administrators have been scrambling to reassign teachers who can speak at least some Spanish even though they’re not certified to teach kids who don’t speak English, sources said.
“Maybe they were teaching another subject before but because they have second-language skills, maybe they’re teaching core subjects,” a PTA member said.
A dad of a PS 33 fourth-grader said his daughter told him the migrant kids in her class look so lonely, quiet and lost.
“They keep them in a separate corner in the classroom and they sit at a table by themselves,” he said. “They don’t understand anything and there’s no Spanish-speaking teacher in her classroom. They only communicate with themselves at the tables.”
