What an outrageous act by Mayor Eric Adams: displacing public school kids from their gym time/physical education classes, so that migrants who are entering this country without proper procedures can take valuable spaces in public schools without parents and staff allowed to say "no".
 |
Migrants arrive at temporary shelter in Brooklyn elementary school gym
At least 75 migrants will temporarily stay inside the gym at PS 188 in Coney Island, two NYC councilmen confirmed — with one of the pols calling the temporary site a “puzzling” move by City Hall.
Dozens of migrants will be housed at the gym outside the Brooklyn elementary school with no timetable on how long the building will be used as an emergency site for migrants, City Council members Justin Brannan and Ari Kagan said Sunday evening.
“Unclear how long they will need to stay. This location remains puzzling to me,” Brannan tweeted.
Kagan, a Republican, also said in a tweet there was no “timeframe when this gym would be returned to the Coney Island community.”
The school is currently in Kagan’s district, but following the redistricting of council seats, both pols are fighting for the seat that would cover PS 188.
The migrants’ arrival comes just two days after the principal at PS 188 warned the city to choose the school facility as an emergency, temporary site for migrants.
Several migrant families were supposed to be sent to the stand-alone gym adjacent to the rest of the school building late last week, but the plan was put on hold amid community outrage.
The Big Apple continues to struggle mightily to house and care for the flood of migrants arriving from across the southern border – with many of them bused from border states like Texas. Over the last year, tens of thousands of migrants have reached the city.
Migrants could be seen milling around the Sandra Feldman Gymnasium Sunday night.
Antuan, a 21-year-old migrant from Venezuela, told The Post that officials informed him and others they were only staying at the building until Monday.
“They put us here because they don’t want us out on the streets,” he explained. “They’re processing us, giving us our paperwork and then we leave.”
Antuan, who reached New York on Sunday after eight months in Texas, said all the migrants were given a psychological assessment to determine whether they were dangerous before being sent to the Brooklyn neighborhood.
Brannan said in an interview Sunday that City Hall informed him the migrants began arriving at the school gym Sunday evening.
He questioned why city officials chose the Coney Island neighborhood for a migrant site because the area lacks services for them and public transportation is poor.
“And I think overall just housing folks in a public school setting, a public school gym, is just concerning and I think the location is just puzzling,” Brannan said.
The Democratic lawmaker also criticized how City Hall has communicated to the community about the site.
“I think people in the community are obviously compassionate and understanding but the way you find out about something, that colors everything,” Brannan said.
One neighbor asked why the school was the best place to house migrants.
“Why a school? That’s the part I don’t get. There’s always other options. A lot of the buildings around here, they have fallout shelters that are spacious, and used for emergencies,” a woman on the block told The Post.
School safety agents who work at PS 188 were also concerned about what their role would be with migrants there.
“School Safety Agents are trained to protect children, not migrants. National Guard and federal assistance are needed. We protect City school children. That’s our responsibility. Not migrants,” said Local 237 Teamsters spokesman Hank Sheinkopf in a statement to The Post Sunday.
City Hall press secretary Fabien Levy said the city is opening emergency shelters and respite centers daily, “but we are out of space” in a statement Sunday night. More than 4,200 migrants arrived in the last week with the city receiving hundreds of asylum seekers daily, he added.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams has said repeatedly the city is running out of options with even more migrants expected thanks to the end of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allowed for the quick expulsion of some border-crossers over COVID-19 concerns.
The policy ended last week.
City Hall has also faced uproar over its plan to bus migrants staying in city shelters to hotels in upstate Rockland and Orange counties. More than 80 migrants – all single men — were shipped to Newburgh hotels in Orange County, last week.
Orange County Executive Steven Neuhaus filed lawsuits Friday to stop the hotels from housing migrants.
Rockland County also took legal to thwart the city’s plan.
More than 140 sites and eight mega-shelters have been opened in the city.
***************************************************************
Parents in NYC want to end Mayoral control, and have made that clear for 20 years.
Several years ago I was outraged when I attended and submitted a statement to Assemblyman Michael Benedetto at a hearing on Mayoral control, and before the parent advocates were able to give their speeches for 2 minutes or less Benedetto warned each and every person about to speak that he did not want to hear anything negative about Chancellor Richard Carranza, the person who used to be the lead "VIP" at the NYC Department of Education. But that is exactly what we were there to do, (and see here: Carranza resigns) namely cite the reasons why the Chancellor and Mayor should not rule the public
schools without a valid opposition - a vote on the school board.
In fact, there has not been a day since October 2003 that I have not protested the disenfranchisement of parents and stakeholders of public schools in NYC due to Mayoral control.
In 2019, I wrote an update to my 2007 post on Parentadvocates.org:
Editorial: Mayoral Control Of The NYC Department of Education Must End by Betsy Combier
In this post I copied and pasted the discriminatory argument made by then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg on the reason that the vote needed to be removed from the black and Hispanic parents of NYC:
Michael Cardozo's introduction to his submission which removes the constitutional rights of NYC citizens
Pages index -11
Pages 12-25
Pages 26-41
Pages 42-58
Pages 59-80
I will highlight the claim made in the last paragraph:
"As we have demonstrated above, Chapters 91 and 123 have neither the purpose nor the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color or membership in a language group."
My opinion: the City of NY didn't discriminate, but took the Constitutional rights away from everyone who has been given those rights (are citizens over the age of 18). This is a crime. But someone might ask, "Well - what about the Community Education Councils, set up to encourage parental participation in public school education?"
Other posts on my website:
Betsy Combier
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
The city alerted the principal of P.S. 188 that the school’s gymnasium would be used as a sheltering site, said Ari Kagan, a Brooklyn councilman who represents the neighborhoods of Bensonhurst, Coney Island, Gravesend and Sea Gate.
“People are really concerned,” Mr. Kagan said Friday night. “I got a lot of phone calls from concerned parents, from community leaders. Nobody, nobody expressed their support for this plan.”
No migrants were being housed in the gym on Friday night, he said, but added: “What’s going to happen tomorrow and Sunday? Who knows?” He said that the city’s Office of Emergency Management would decide when people would be placed there.
Mr. Kagan, who also criticized the plan in a video he posted on Twitter, added that the struggle to house migrants was a nationwide problem and a shelter in a gym was not the answer.
The announcement comes one day after a Trump-era immigration policy called Title 42, which allowed for the rapid expulsion of migrants, ended Thursday night. The end of the pandemic-era policy is expected to lead to a rise in cross-border migration into the United States.
The city is in the middle of a “humanitarian crisis,” Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mayor Eric Adams, said in a statement Friday evening, adding: “We are opening emergency shelters and respite centers daily, but we are out of space. We will continue to communicate with local elected officials as we open more emergency sites.”
New York City, which is the only major U.S. city with a “right-to-shelter” law, has struggled to house the influx of migrants who have been bused from states like Texas since last year. Mr. Adams has proposed, pivoted from and implemented many options for housing migrants over the past year, even considering placing people on a cruise ship docked in Staten Island.
Earlier this week, Mr. Adams used an executive order to temporarily suspend some of the rules related to its longstanding guarantee to shelter anyone who needs it, including those that require that families be placed in private rooms with bathrooms and kitchens and those that guide how quickly people must be placed in shelters.
“This is not a decision taken lightly,” Mr. Levy said in a statement Wednesday night. “And we will make every effort to get asylum seekers into shelter as quickly as possible, as we have done since Day 1.”
Increasingly frustrated in recent months, the mayor has criticized President Biden and pushed for federal emergency aid.
Earlier this month, Mr. Adams said the city was projecting that it would spend $4.3 billion over the next two fiscal years to cover the costs of the migrant influx and that roughly 37 percent of that was likely to be covered by the state and federal governments.
As the mayor desperately seeks places to house the migrants who are expected to arrive in the city, he also announced plans to begin busing migrants to other counties in the state, setting off a clash with other leaders. On Sunday, he told city leaders to send him a list of all facilities with enough space to accommodate large numbers of migrants.
In an hourslong call on Thursday with more than 100 officials from across the state, Mr. Adams heard complaints that he was not working effectively, adding to criticisms that he had not planned well for a problem he himself had been warning about for the past year.