NYC Goes Back to School

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, class. Today's the first day of school in New York City. Our first math lesson of the term involves numbers that indicate the challenge, oh, and the glory of welcoming New York's newest students. Our education reporter Jessica Gould has a story that begins with the fact that last week the Adams administration estimated 19,000 new kids entered the school system since last year from the current wave of asylum seeker families. By this week that estimate jumped from 19,000 to 21,000. Jessica reports that 2,500 new students enrolled just this summer.

As we change periods now instantly from math to social studies, the first essay question of the year is how does the school system serve 21,000 newly arrived students who just entered not just the school system, not just the city, but the country. WNYC and Gothamist education reporter Jessica Gould joins us now along with Michael Elsen-Rooney reporter for the education news website Chalkbeat. Hi, Jess and Michael, thanks for coming on WNYC today.

Jessica Gould: Hey, Brian.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Hey, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let me say, class, right off the bat that I don't want to frame this discussion merely as a problem. I think a lot of media are doing that. It's a challenge, of course, but I think it's an amazing point of pride that the biggest city school system in the country, which has helped so many generations of immigrants from so many countries assimilate, in the good sense of that word, into American life and up the intellectual and economic ladders, and we're doing it again for a new generation. Schools Chancellor David Banks had a news conference yesterday. Here's a minute of the chancellor on some big-picture context.

Chancellor David Banks: If you read the papers you would think there's chaos that's happening in our schools. 20,000 migrant students have come in. Well, first of all, over 18,000 already came in last year. They've already been assimilated into the schools. The work that has been happening with them has been so phenomenal because of the great principals, the teachers, the parent coordinators, and everybody that's a part of the schools.

Kids who came in not even speaking a word of English by the end of the year already speaking English. It is a story of New York City. We don't treat people as outsiders, we welcome them with open arms and that's what we have been doing here. I just want to tell everybody here, don't believe the hype when you hear the messages as though there's somehow chaos and anarchy. What you see happening here today is happening in schools all across New York City, so go tell that story.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Chancellor David Banks from his news conference yesterday. Jessica, you cite the chancellor in your new story that's out on the station and on Gothamist this morning. Is the attitude reflected in that clip reflected by Banks' behavior generally or is that just some pro forma, blah, blah, blah for the microphones?

Jessica Gould: Well, I think it's true that the schools have been absorbing and in many ways embracing their new students. We've heard about school communities coming together to help with everything from hot meals and clothing drives and food drives and backpacks to doing kids' laundry, teachers taking kids' laundry home because they don't have laundry facilities at the shelters themselves. There's been a tremendous groundswell in communities, often from the ground up, but also there has been some support from the city. At the same time, there are challenges.

We heard a lot last year about as you know one, two, three kids then five maybe would join a class, some speaking only Spanish, some speaking only Ukrainian and teachers would have to figure out how to communicate with them. They would use their iPhones and apps with translation to try to talk to them and other kids would help out. There's a lot of effort going on, but it is challenging when there are a bunch of kids in a class who haven't been in school, many of them for months or years, and don't speak the language. It's not easy.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, a correction. That Chancellor Banks clip wasn't from yesterday, it was from just this morning out on the first morning of school. Our crack news department brought that back instantly and we were able to turn that around. Michael, we'll get to your article on the challenge of matching kids in homeless shelters with schools having enough bilingual educators, as Jessica was just referring to all of that, but do we have any historical context or comparisons worth starting with staying on the big picture for a minute, the big historical picture?

I was reading some New York City immigration history the other day to prepare for another segment, and in 1907, for example, according to the History Channel, one and a quarter million people entered the country through Ellis Island. Think about that. One and a quarter million people entered the country here in New York City in one year 1907 in the Ellis Island era, and a quarter of those settled in New York and New Jersey. That's more than 300,000 new arrivals in one year and some people today are freaking out over 100,000.

Also, the History Channel reminds us most of the ones back then were Catholic and Jewish, and many white Protestant New Yorkers argued that the new arrivals were too culturally different to be assimilated. Again, I'm just saying this is not as new as some of the news coverage would have us believe and the descendants of those Ellis Island immigrants are the ones considered classic native New Yorkers now as if they were the Lenape themselves. I promised to ask you real questions about your reporting, but I'm just curious if Chancellor Banks or Mayor Adams or anyone up there are framing today in actual numerical context of the city schools' history or if you've got any from your reporting.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Yes, I think that's a really important point that actually does not get raised much in this current conversation about the asylum seekers. Just looking back at some historical New York City public school enrollment data, right when we're seeing this huge wave of immigrants, the enrollment in the public schools booms from-- it was just over 400,000 in 1900 to nearly 800,000 in 1910, a decade later. It almost doubled over a decade. Many of those immigrant children. That spurs a lot of really important developments in the school system including a wave of new construction and some of these beautiful school buildings that we now see. This is not unprecedented to say the least.

I think, just going back to the chancellor's comments today, it was really interesting hearing him talk about this because he tried to draw this line between acknowledging that this broader wave of asylum seekers and migrants is a political issue and problem that the city is trying to deal with, but for the schools it's just a matter of accepting who arrives. It is an interesting contrast, some of the rhetoric we've been hearing from the mayor about this wave of asylum seekers threatening to destroy the city versus the chancellor's insistence that from the school perspective, we're really doing everything we can to absorb them. There's certainly, as Jessica said, a lot of work happening alongside some struggles.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder how many of the descendants of those Italian and Irish and Jewish and Greek and Polish and Russian immigrants from that era who expanded the school system by that many students that quickly, and thank you for those numbers, Michael, are now walking around saying, "We can't do this. We can't handle this," when they certainly weren't looking back at their own ancestors and saying, "Well, we don't want to do that again." Maybe we do. The 21,000 new kids, Jessica, out of how many total New York City school children if we have that latest numberish?

Jessica Gould: Sure. It's just over 900,000 now. That's been going down in recent years as we've talked about before. The chancellor was saying it's not that we don't have room for these kids. There is room, although the distribution of the children has not been even throughout the school system, so there are some schools that are having overcrowding issues that are exacerbated by this, but there has been declining enrollment and he's making the argument that it's good for the city that there's going to be more children in the public school system. Just I have to say my own family were among those 20th-century refugees and immigrants from all sorts of war-torn places, and-

Brian Lehrer: Mine too.

Jessica Gould: -many of them came to New York.

Brian Lehrer: You remind us and how quickly we forget, it's not just that we forget 1923 and 2023. We forget last year because the story last school year, as you just referenced was the declining enrollment in the city schools and the financial challenges of that because state aid is calculated per student by the size of enrollment, as is city distribution of money to each school. Do we know the number of kids in the system in September of last year compared to today? Or is that what you just gave us? Do the 21,000 new students even replenish what there was a year or let's say just before the pandemic?

Jessica Gould: The projections are that if there's a decrease in enrollment going into this year as there had been in previous years, the past few years, it's not going to be as sharp. Either we're going to hold steady or close to it, which is a difference from the trend that had been particularly after the pandemic when the reduction in students was especially steep.

Brian Lehrer: All right, so turning the page and acknowledging the immediate challenges, which are very real, Michael, your article on Chalkbeat starts with the line, "As scores of asylum-seeking families continue to arrive in New York City, the city's efforts to quickly enroll their children in public schools are often failing to keep pace according to families, advocates, and education department staffers." The next line calls it a mammoth task. What makes it a mammoth task?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Part of the issue is the pace of new students signing up, but there are a number of compounding issues. In nearly all these cases, there's a question of language access that can throw things off course. There's also the fact that almost all of these newly arrived families are in shelters, and so figuring out a way to get people who know about enrollment into those shelters, to talk to the families, making sure that there are schools that are nearby that are open, especially if, as Jessica said, you're seeing a disproportionate concentration of shelters in certain parts of the city.

All that I think just added together makes it a complicated task for sure. For families who are arriving now and really hoping and needing to start school by September 7th, if they're not ready and if they don't have a school seat, that can be a really frustrating and difficult experience.

Brian Lehrer: Now, listeners, I wonder if anyone is out there right now who can help us report this story. We're going to get into some individual families and individual locations, stories that Michael and Jessica have both reported, but who listening right now can help us report this story? 212-433-WNYC. I realize this is the first day of school, and if you're involved with recently arrived migrant kids' education, maybe you're not listening right now, but maybe some of you are who don't have a task this minute, or maybe some teachers homesick with COVID or for whatever reason, who can tell us the story from your school or help give us some context on what you see going on. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692.

We'd love to hear your voice on the phones, or you can text us at that same number or tweet @BrianLehrer. How about also this, if your grandparents, or great-grandparents, or whoever came to this city in the Ellis Island era, is this all making your heart sing a little bit to see part of New York's future being transplanted here like your ancestors were transplanted from Italy and Ireland and Russia and Poland and Greece and wherever?

Did stories of starting school in a new country when they didn't speak the language get passed down at all? Thinking about this, I realize I never heard that story in my own family. There's probably a story to tell but that particular piece of it. I know about my two grandfathers who came from Eastern Europe and one worked his whole adult life in a fish store in the Bronx.

The other worked his whole adult life on a sewing machine in the garment district, but I never heard about school or assimilating into school. Anyone have those stories in your family or anyone actually involved in getting 21,000 migrant kids who've come in the last year going here on the first day of school in New York City? Help us report this story of what's going on right now.

212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692. For Jessica from our newsroom and Michael from Chalkbeat 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Jessica, you reported from what they called an enrollment center in the auditorium at the High School of Fashion Industries. Where's that school and what did you see in that enrollment center?

Jessica Gould: That's in Chelsea area and actually our colleague went, but what we have heard and seen with our own eyes is at these enrollment centers, there are long lines of families trying to get in, get their paperwork processed, and there has been a crush of people over the summer more than some of the processors say they can handle. Although it does seem like a lot of people were processed in the last week.

I also heard from a teacher at a local school in Brooklyn that nine families showed up just yesterday seeking enrollment at an elementary school. It's happening every day. I think it's going to keep happening through the first few days, and then ongoing through the year.

Brian Lehrer: You cite an education department official in charge of supporting migrant kids. Melissa Aviles Ramos saying many schools have reached capacity. Does that mean neighborhood schools closest to the shelters?

Jessica Gould: That's right. Under the law, students have to be placed close to their shelters as a first choice, and if there's not room there, they look for other ones nearby. In some cases, the families can elect to go to bilingual programs or the city will place them there if that makes more sense for them, but there aren't enough bilingual programs or bilingual teachers across the city, so that's been a challenge.

I was talking to folks at PS 145 around 105th Street in Manhattan where they had a Russian and a Spanish dual language program, both of those, so a lot of kids have come there over the past year. They've done all this amazing stuff. The parent community, the educators to integrate the students, but they also said that they're now losing space. In fact, the parents are trying to raise money, fundraising to rent space nearby so that they can accommodate the kids without losing some of the specialized classrooms they had before for science and music. I think they had a TV studio within the school, so it's having impact.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, you reported on one family, the Pricenos, mother, father, three kids who arrived from Venezuela in June and are now living in a shelter in Far Rockaway. Want to tell their story a little bit as an example of what some families are going through right now?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Yes, so I met this family reporting this story and they have three children. They had arrived back in June and really got no information about school enrollment in their shelter, which I think is indicative of part of a larger issue too, which is that the city has had to build so many emergency shelters recently that they've had to contract out to a bunch of new providers who don't necessarily have the same experience in providing services like help with education as some of the more longstanding providers.

Some of these families are getting no real information in their shelters. The DOE staff who are in charge of being in shelters and being in contact with families in shelters say they're really stretched thin. This family said they basically had to find out through word of mouth at the shelter where to go to sign up. They went now about a month ago or more and submitted their forms.

When I spoke to them, they'd only heard back about one of their children having a spot. That left two other kids wondering if they're going to have a spot by September 7th. I just think one more interesting detail to point out is that InsideSchools is a website that does a lot of work on school enrollment, has been working with some of these families, and they pointed out that for all the language access that exists in the DOE and the translation and the services in Spanish, one thing that's happening is when families receive emails confirming their school enrollment, those are in English, and so some families are just not seeing those messages, thinking they're getting scammed and ignoring them or not seeing them. There's just a lot of places at which this can go off the tracks.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, Michael, I want to apologize for misstating your name. I said Michael Eisen-Rooney you're Michael Elsen-Rooney. I have to go back to my typing class because that lowercase l can look an uppercase I unless you do it right.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: No problem at all.

Brian Lehrer: Michael and Jessica will continue with us in a minute, and we'll start taking your phone calls. Our lines are full. Callie in Brooklyn with an oral history call from the Ellis Island era. I see you. You're going to be first. Barbara in Mountain Lakes who just retired as an ESL teacher, you're going to be second. Others hang in there as we continue to talk about assimilating all the new migrant kids in New York City on the first day of school. Stay with us.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Mayor Adams: My fellow New Yorkers, immigration is the New York City story. It is the American story. It is a story of those who boarded ships to reach these shores. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free. For centuries immigrants have made that remarkable journey, that leap of faith searching for freedom, safety, a shot at the American dream. The asylum seekers who have arrived in our cities since last spring are writing a new chapter in this timely story. As I declared nearly a year ago, we are facing an unprecedented state of emergency. The immigration system in this nation is broken. It has been broken for decades. Today, New York City has been left to pick up the pieces.

Brian Lehrer: Mayor Adams from early August laying out the challenge and the glory of the immigrant wave right now to New York City. You don't hear the first part of that from him very much. That doesn't get quoted. Adam says that a lot. You only hear that last part usually about how New York is being left to pick up the pieces, which is also true but both things are true. There's the mayor in early August right about a month ago laying out both halves of it in about 59 seconds. Callie in Brooklyn you're on WNYC. Hi, Callie?

Callie: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thanks so much for calling in. You have a story of your grandparents. I see huh?

Callie: Yes, so on my father's side my grandmother came through Ellis Island from Ireland and started here with a [unintelligible 00:22:48] here with a fifth-grade education and made her way up and started a life in upstate New York that way. Then on my mother's side, my grandfather and my grandmother are both Holocaust refugees from Germany and Austria. My grandfather would always tell the story of how on his first day of school in New York City public schools, he started in kindergarten, and by lunchtime, he was in third grade because he was nine and he spoke English.

He always told that story as proof of the meritocracy of America and that you would come here and people would recognize what you could do, and they would elevate you because of it. They raised my mother in New York City public schools in the Bronx, and now I live here full-time too and I used to be a public school teacher as well.

Brian Lehrer: How are you looking at this first day of school with 21,000 migrant kids having arrived in the last year? What does that history of your own family make you think or feel this morning?

Callie: Full of joy and full of promise. I taught in Colorado and most of my students were migrant families from Mexico. The dream of America really starts in its public schools. I've been listening to all the reporting of like, "Oh no, how are we going to do this?" Teachers are incredible at their jobs. Students are amazing. Families have come through so much to make it here, that they can definitely get, if they're helped, they will get their kid to school and that kid will thrive because their teachers, and their parents and the community will support them.

I listen to the reporting and it just seems so at odd with my experiences teaching. My experience is going to public school, my family's experiences, that it's not a danger or a fear. It's a challenge in many ways, but these families have overcome so many challenges already and teachers overcome challenges every single day. We should absolutely give them so much support and they should get everything that they need, but they will thrive and everyone will be better because of it.

Brian Lehrer: Callie, thank you so much for your eloquent call. To her point, Michael Elsen-Rooney from Chalkbeat, were you able to get any sense from that family you were describing who you reported on before the break? The Pricenos from Venezuela now in a shelter in the Rockaways of their bigger picture state of optimism over being in New York with their 12-year-old as opposed to trauma. I'm sure both things are true or might be true to different degrees because I didn't want to leave home to land in a shelter thousands of miles away in Queens or whatever their big-picture state of mind seems to be.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Unfortunately I didn't get a whole lot of depth into their journey, but I will say that I met them as they were also going through the process of applying for asylum. That was this real big legal issue looming over their heads as is the case with so many of these families, whether they're going to have legal protections when they're here, and so I think there is a lot of optimism. There's also a lot of uncertainty about how long this is going to last for them, and what it's going to look like, and what their life is going to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Barbara in Mountain Lakes you're on WNYC. Hi, Barbara. Thanks so much for calling in.

Barbara: Hi Brian. Thank you so much. I agree 100% with your prior caller Callie. I'm just retiring this summer after 33 years as an ESL teacher. Just as a snapshot of what's going on--

Brian Lehrer: For people who don't know that's English as a second language, but go ahead.

Barbara: Yes, it is. Sometimes called ELL, English Language Learner. I was in a very suburban school in New Jersey, and our numbers just skyrocketed in the last three years from maybe 18 students to close to 60 students in a very suburban school. The school was really trying to acclimate to this new normal of kids arriving from mostly Central America, mostly Honduras. The skills of the kids generally were very, very low. They hadn't been in school. The literacy of the parents is very low, so it would be very typical for a fourth or fifth-grade student to come and barely be able to read when the typical fourth-grade classmate was reading Wonder or Bridge to Terabithia or on grade level book.

It really was the onus was on us to try to bring that literacy up, but overall whatever we could do the parents were so grateful for food we brought in, clothing, winter coats, books. It's just it's really an amazing process to watch the kids flourish here, but it is definitely a process.

Brian Lehrer: Barbara, thank you very much for your call. Let's take another call. Here's Issa in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, Issa. More oral history, right? Oops, did we lose Issa? All right we lost Issa. Let's see if I have someone to go right to someone else. Let's try Rebecca in Cambridge Massachusetts. Rebecca, you're on WNYC.

Rebecca: Hi?

Brian Lehrer: Hi.

Rebecca: Hi, Brian. Thank you. I only called because my ancestor immigrated to the United States in 1663, and I'm sure he wasn't anywhere near as much a benefit to his neighbors as the current immigrants are to us. Get my point?

Brian Lehrer: I guess so. Do you want to-- Yes, I get your point. Do you want to elaborate on it at all?

Rebecca: Yes. He settled Harlem. He arrived in Staten Island and was the first settler in Harlem. I mean one of them. There was a little settlement. I'm sure these people were not really that helpful to the Native Americans who surrounded them, but nowadays the immigrants who come from other places are so crucial to our economy, and welfare, and bring so much cultural diversity, and new ideas, and different thinking, and benefit to the state, I lived in New York for a long time, to the state of New York and to the city of New York, and I just think about it all the time. I'm sorry I got choked up a little bit. I think about it all the time.

Brian Lehrer: Well, thank you for that.

Rebecca: Coach me here to help me along.

Brian Lehrer: Isn't it weird Rebecca how sometimes the critics have two main complaints about New York? Too many people are leaving New York and too many people are coming to New York.

Rebecca: [laughs] In any case, I think more people should come to New York. I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts right now but I long to and aim to come back to New York soon. My main point is that the immigrants do nothing but help New Yorkers. Why would anybody have any complaints about this except for political reasons?

Brian Lehrer: Rebecca, thank you so much for your call. Obviously, there are many short-term challenges and we're going to continue to talk about them with our education reporter guests. Rebecca, thanks for getting through that as emotional as it was for you and some more oral history and some more big picture. Nancy in Jackson Heights, you're on WNYC with a story of today it looks like, this very morning, right Nancy?

Nancy: Yes. Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. Today is really important to me. I'm an immigrant myself. I came to New York in 1994 from Italy, and I didn't know any English. The only word that I knew was no speak English when I went to school, and I walked around with an Italian English dictionary. That's how I communicated. Today was the first day of school and I dropped my daughter off at 3-K for All. Thank you for that program. It's wonderful. It just really resonated with me. Here I am an immigrant who didn't speak any English and today I dropped off my daughter at her first day of school.

I want to make a really important point. I know how hard it was for me as a seven-year-old in a new country, didn't speak the language, new school jitters for anyone even if they speak the language are hard but I think parents maybe need to have a talk with their kids to be more compassionate and be more understanding of all the new kids from all the different countries who are coming to school right now who might not know the language and might also be going through a culture shock, family shock. There's a lot going on right now, and I just think we need to remember like, hey, this is hard for everyone, but imagine how hard it's for these kids.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Nancy, Jackson Heights where you are might just be the most diverse neighborhood in the world right now. I don't know that I can quite crown it as that but it well might be. Are you seeing that and including from some new migrant families at your daughter's school?

Nancy: I have seen but like you said yourself, Jackson Heights is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world, and that's why we chose to live there. That's why we chose for our daughter to go to New York City Public School because we want our daughter to be around all different cultures and all different people in all different languages because, to me, that is what makes the most understanding, compassionate, well-rounded individual to be around culture. Yes, it might be new people but it's still the same because we are so diverse.

Brian Lehrer: Nancy, thank you so much for your call. Good luck to your daughter on the first day of 3-K. Jessica Gould, how concentrated are the 20,000 migrant kids who've entered the system in the last year? We hear about all these various political dust-ups over trying to locate families near Creedmoor in Queens, on Staten Island, Randall's Island, all these places, and push back in each case. Where are they winding up when the political dust settles, if you know? Are these families with the children who are trying to enroll today concentrated in a few particular neighborhoods?

Jessica Gould: We did get a little bit of information about that yesterday at a press conference with Schools Chancellor David Banks. They haven't been very forthcoming about where all the students have landed but they did say that the school districts that have had the highest concentration, I'm not going to name the districts themselves. I'll just say what neighborhoods they include around there. Midtown Manhattan, that's where a lot of the shelters have been in Times Square that was very, very full and concentrated. Then I'm also hearing about-- Then the surrounding neighborhoods. I've heard a lot about the upper West Side and East Harlem but Highbridge area in the Bronx and then parts of Queens, Corona, Jackson Heights are among some of the others where there are concentrations.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, beyond enrollment, is the actual education that the kids will be getting during the school year being talked about much yet. A big problem that I see that everybody's talking about is a shortage of bilingual teachers and staff. Can you quantify the shortage or describe it in any way?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Yes, so I think there are a number of complexities and you heard a little bit about this just from the teacher from New Jersey who called in. One of the issues that schools confront is assessing whether students have had significant interruptions in their education in their previous countries or maybe they've been on long journeys. There's a question of whether this is just a language need or whether there are some more foundational academic needs even in their own language, whether there are special education questions and evaluation, and that needs to happen from someone who can speak the language. There are a lot of considerations that schools have to deal with upfront. I think it's important to note too that every school in New York City is expected to be able to serve English language learners.

The primary way that they do that is through English as second language teachers who teach in English but just for students who are learning English. There's two other options. One of them is called transitional bilingual ed where you start in with some of the student's native language and try to phase out. Then the second is fully dual language where the whole model is to keep up instruction in both the home language and the new language. It's a lot of options but there is a shortage, a longstanding shortage of bilingual teachers.

I believe the city has about 1,700 and just to give a sense, fewer than half of the schools where these asylum seeker students ended up last year had a bilingual teacher. That may be a really attractive option to families and the city doesn't currently have enough to meet that. There was an announcement today that they made just quickly about a move they're going to make to allow teachers who have a bilingual certification to more easily transition into teaching bilingual classes to try to help that shortage.

Brian Lehrer: The union wants teachers certified more quickly with fewer rules so more bilingual people can get into the classroom. Right, Jess?

Jessica Gould: That's right. That was what the announcement was about today. I think we're going to hear more about easing rules for certification. Certainly, there's a desire to get rid of the red tape there.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a little piece of Ellis Island era oral history from a listener writing on Twitter. Writes, "My grandmother [unintelligible 00:37:15] who came with her family to the Lower East Side when she was eight years old went through school as Josephine Rakely because her older brother thought she would be more accepted if she was Irish." [laughs] I am assuming that that's an Italian name, the real name. It relates to part of what I was saying at the beginning of the segment, the discrimination, the assumption that Italians in particular among a few other groups at that time were not assimilable, were too culturally different from the "Americans" who were already here which included the Irish that [unintelligible 00:37:57] changed her name to Rakely because her family thought she would be more accepted if she was Irish than if she was Italian. This call-in is amazing. I wish we could go on all morning, but we have a lot more to do. We're getting calls from the Bronx to Paris. Since that's the case, we have to give Michael in Paris a shot. Michael, you're on WNYC. I assume that's not Paris, Texas.

Michael: No, I'm in France, Paris, France where it's really hot like in New York. I want to just relay an anecdote from my grandmother who was the daughter of Italian immigrants. She attended George Washington High School in the late 1930s and would always talk about this one particular refugee child whom she met and she remembers him as being really smart, had a really thick accent, and he fled from a country that was very unwelcoming to him. The refugee was Henry Kissinger and she would always basically say that we never know what kids' potential should be. We should always help them no matter where they're from. I think we should really be thinking about that right now.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you very much for chiming in all the way from Paris with that. Omar in The Bronx, you're going to be our last caller. Hi, Omar.

Omar: How are you doing, Brian? Thanks for taking my call. This is all about the immigration thing. I'm going to have to conflict some things and just ask a question. I might be a little to the left of the conversation for the whole interview but what about the students that are already here where the classes are getting flooded with the migrants? Like I said, they deserve to get taught, however, my thing is, are there enough resources? It seems like we're scant right now with what we have going on for our public school kids at the moment. They're still left behind from a few years from COVID. Now we're talking about implementing all of this stuff and making New York the funnel for this. At the end of the day, that's not our responsibility, I believe. When I start to see kids that just got here for the asylum leapfrogging over the kids that are already here, I got a real bone to pick with the mayor on stuff like that. You can read that speech to the Statue of Liberty and all that. All right, no problem. That's fine, but at the end of the day, what settles down on the ground is there are kids here now that need stuff and that are in these public schools.

I mentor elementary and junior high school kids. I'm on the ground. I'm seeing what's lacking, and now we're going to flood it with more. Come on, at the end of the day, I'd like to ask your guests who are on the line, what remedy do you think-- Matter of fact, what remedy do you think is going to actually be able to get done for them? Then now, what about the kids that are here? Then also, one final thing, isn't there a ban, I could be wrong, check me if I'm right, on the Haitian refugees coming into this country looking for asylum? I'll listen up there.

Brian Lehrer: Omar, all good questions. Thank you very much. Please keep calling us. Jessica, can you dive in on any of that?

Jessica Gould: I would just say that there is always a desire among public school parents for more resources for their kids. I think that nobody would argue that there is a finite amount and there should be more opportunities for smaller classes. We're going to be watching the class size bill go into effect. More teacher supports, more support for students in special education, the overhaul of literacy, all of these things we're going to be watching and to see how the system can balance all those needs at the same time.

I was listening to all of the optimistic stories, and it reminds me of a student that I profiled earlier this summer who came from South America in the fall. She didn't know any chess. Her name was Mary Angel Vargas Gomez. She joined a chess club at school, and she's now in the top 100 for her age group in chess. She wants to be a chess teacher and a math teacher, and bringing that back into the community as she gets older.

Brian Lehrer: I know Haiti is one of the countries that President Biden targeted with his program that has now been overturned by the courts that assigned a certain number of asylum entry visas, I don't know if visas is even the right word, but asylum entry slots that one could say limited the number of Haitians, or one could say, gave them privilege because they were specifically cited as those who could come in certain numbers of thousands. That's been thrown out by the courts anyway.

That's one partial answer, Omar, to your question about Haitians. Let me close with this, Michael. All these shortages of staff to help place kids, especially from the shelters in school in a timely fashion, one way to look at it is two weeks from now they're going to be in school. We're not going to be talking about enrollment anymore.

This is a very short-term problem. Getting kids up and going into particular seats in particular classes, this will pass very quickly, and then we're going to have long-term education issues to discuss, but is this a failure on the part of the Adams' administration on one level, because they've known all year what the pace of new people arriving has been or is it just that hard to staff up for this amount of enrollment?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Yes--

Brian Lehrer: Well, did we lose Michael's line? Jessica, are you there?

Jessica Gould: I'm here.

Brian Lehrer: You take that.

Jessica Gould: Oh, he's back.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Hi, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Oh, now we got you, Michael. Sorry, go ahead. We have 30 seconds last answer.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Sorry about that. The city's admitted to some structural issues here, one of which was that some of the DOE employees who are supposed to work with students in shelter were 10-month employees and so they weren't available to help over the summer. The city said that they're going to remedy that for next year, but you could argue that that should have been something they anticipated.

You're right, it is in some ways a short-term problem, but we know these first days of school are really critical. A lot of really important stuff happens. If you're late, if you're missing those, if it's a scramble, then it can set you back both as a student and a school.

Brian Lehrer: Michael Elsen-Rooney reporter for the education news website, Chalkbeat, WNYC, and Gothamist Education Reporter, Jessica Gould, her newest Gothamist article on all of this just dropped this morning. Thank you both so much.

Jessica Gould: Thank you.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We turn the page and talk to the New York City Sanitation Commissioner about all these new garbage rules and the war on rats. We'll take your questions for her and your reports from your block. Stay with us.

 

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