School’s out and NYC migrant families face a summer of uncertainty

NEW YORK — Then Damien Carchipulla started his first year of school In September in New York City, the first-grader’s family stayed at a hotel for immigrant families in Manhattan.

In the ten months since, the family of four from Ecuador has moved three times under Mayor Eric Adams’ policies imposed in the autumn This limits the number of days migrants can stay in one place. Every 60 days, they must give up their shelter beds and reapply for housing or leave the system.

With a fourth move expected within weeks, Damien’s mother Kimberly Carchipulla hopes the family won’t be pulled too far from the 6-year-old’s school in Harlem this summer. Her son will be attending a summer program starting in July.

“A lot has changed because new laws have been introduced,” Carchipulla said in Spanish as he picked Damien up after school one day. “They get stressed. They get upset. Every 60 days it’s a new home.”

The school year in New York City ended Wednesday, but for thousands of migrant families, the shuffle from shelter to shelter continues. With that comes concerns about how they will handle their children’s educational needs, both this summer and next school year.

“These families came in with a lot of trauma already, which impacted their children’s attendance at school and their ability to engage once they got there,” said Sarah Jonas, vice president of Children’s Aid, a nonprofit that provides mentoring, health services and after-school programs at city schools. “With the added burden of the 60-day rule, we’ve seen even more disruption for our families who are getting these eviction notices and all the anxiety that comes with that.”

Like the Carchipullas, most families chose to stay in the same school year-round, even if they were transferred to shelters in another part of the city. The trade-off for many was longer and more complex commutes, leading to children exhausted before the school day even started. Absenteeism also increased, as parents struggled to get their children to school on time.

Carchipulla, 23, counts her family among the lucky ones: The three moves they made during the school year were all to different hotels in downtown Manhattan, so her son’s daily commute remained about the same.

For Rosie Arias’ grandchildren, the moves were more disruptive.

The 55-year-old from Ecuador said her daughter arrived in January with her 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. They were immediately placed in a shelter and enrolled in a local school where Spanish was widely spoken.

But when their 60 days were up, they had to move to another shelter and another school, Arias said. When the family got their own apartment in Brooklyn, the children had to switch schools again, this time to a smaller one where few people spoke Spanish.

“As a grandmother, I worry. The children don’t want to go to school. They don’t adapt because of the language and because they don’t have friends,” Arias said in Spanish. “They cry.”

School officials did not yet have a definitive overview of how many migrant students were affected by the shelter-in-place time limits.

According to Tamara Mair, a senior director at the school, 44% of the migrant students since February 14 have been staying in the same shelter and at the same school in the first week of May. Project Open Armsthe district’s program that supports asylum seekers and other new students in temporary housing.

Another 40% of migrant students moved to shelters but remained enrolled in the same school, while 4% moved both schools and shelters, she said. About 10% left the school system entirely, with the “vast majority” of them dropping out because they were leaving the city.

District officials will monitor migrant families at the shelters throughout the summer, Mair said.

“The one thing we want to keep constant for our kids is school,” she said. “But we also want to support our families in their choices, because families have the right to stay in their school, or they can choose to go to a new school that is closer to where they are moving.”

Adams, a Democrat, imposed shelter restrictions to encourage migrant families to leave the city’s emergency shelter system, which includes vast tents and converted hotels that have been overrun by thousands of new arrivals to the U.S.

More needs to be done over the summer to prepare new families for the next school year, immigrant advocates say.

That includes better education for immigrant parents and more investment in translation services, said Liza Schwartzwald, director of the New York Immigration Coalition.

Schools also need more specialists to assess immigrant students and help them get to the right level of education, said Natasha Quiroga, director of education policy at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.

Damien Carchipulla’s mother remains optimistic about her son’s future.

Eventually, she said, the family hopes to save enough money to buy a home of their own, perhaps in Queens, where her husband recently found steady work.

“He’s learning more and more every day,” Kim Carchipulla said of her son. “Even though he misses school, his teacher says, he catches up quickly.”

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Associated Press videojournalist John Minchillo in New York contributed to this story. Succeed Philip Marcelo twitter.com/philmarcelo.