Child advocates worry that the city’s school system does not efficiently track migrant students, including those who’ve been living at the Floyd Bennett tent shelter complex in East Brooklyn that’s closing this week.

The first child stopped coming to school in November. Then another, followed by another. At last count, five middle school kids living at the Floyd Bennett migrant shelter had vanished from their Brooklyn public school.

The teachers had no idea where they went, and fear more may get lost in the shuffle as the outdoor tent encampment in East Brooklyn closes this week, and families will be assigned to other housing, or leave the shelter system.

“They’re our babies. And now they’re gone,” said one of the public school teachers. Beside her sat her colleague, who agreed the children just seemed to disappear one day. Both teachers asked for anonymity, worried about retirement plans and retaliation. But not worried enough to keep silent. 

City Hall confirmed that more than 850 children living at Floyd Bennett as of Dec. 3 were enrolled in New York City public schools. Yet professionals working with these children are concerned that they’re not accessing the education they need in a system where migrant students aren’t officially tracked. 

“It’s been and continues to be a disaster,” said Susan J. Horwitz, supervising attorney at the Education Law Project of the Legal Aid Society, which advocates for Floyd Bennett families. 

Officially known as the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center at Floyd Bennett Field, New York City’s only outdoor shelter for asylum-seeking families with children will officially close by Jan. 15.

In an email exchange, a Department of Education spokesperson who declined to be named confirmed that New York City Public Schools does not track a child’s migration status or nationality. Instead, all children are required to have their parents fill out a home language survey so the school can provide English as a New Language, something most migrant new arrivals need, advocates say. 

Yet less than one-third of the city’s 1,800-plus schools offer bilingual services. Brooklyn, where Floyd Bennett is located, has only 133 bilingual schools. The city will not confirm how many schools the encampment’s children are attending, yet every parent from the shelter who spoke to this reporter said their kids went to schools in Brooklyn. 

This service gap presents challenges for families. When Yoselín, a former Floyd Bennett parent, helps her three children ages 7 to 11 with her homework, she relies heavily on her cell phone.

“There’s no bilingual teacher at [my children’s] school,” said Yoselín, a single mother from Venezuela. (Her children attended a different school than where the previously mentioned teachers work.) 

“All I get is a printed guide in English. Then I translate every one of their homework assignments using Google Translate,” Yoselín said. Her 7-year-old shared that he was the only Spanish-speaking child in his class.  

When she helped her children study at Floyd Bennett, Yoselín wasn’t sitting down with them at a kitchen table or desk. Instead, they gathered in the family’s cramped room—a container in a large military grade tent. For much of the time since it opened in the fall of 2023, the encampment has housed around 500 families, or 2,000 people at a time. 

During the warmer months, Floyd Bennett is a hell of hot pavement, with massive, underused parking lots and sparse trees. In the winter, harsh winds whip the tents. At all times of year, the land is a flood zone. 

“What’s there to say?” said Oswaldo, a Floyd Bennett father originally from Ecuador. “It’s not a good place to raise a child.” 

In January 2024, the shelter’s exposure to the elements motivated the city to evacuate families to James Madison High School, located five miles away, in advance of a brutal winter storm. The one-night evacuation led to a bomb threat and backlash from neighborhood parents hostile to the idea of living among migrants.

“We weren’t given enough guidance,” said one of the teachers who has taught children from Floyd Bennett. She explained that without a Spanish speaker or English as a Second Language teacher at the school where she works, Google Translate and YouTube became common instruction tools. 

At her federally recognized low-income school, she doesn’t assign homework because she never knows what sort of study environment a child has at home, or if they have a home at all. During any given year, she is used to children moving away or transitioning into or out of homeless shelters. Since the start of 2024, many migrant families in the shelter system have been subject to 60-day deadlines instituted by the city, which critics have slammed as disruptive to kids’ learning.

Yet the disappearance of the Floyd Bennett children causes special concern, as even more might get lost in the system when they are reassigned to new shelters and schools. The city is planning to close dozens of other migrant shelters in the coming months, citing a decline in the number of new arrivals entering the system. 

For the Floyd Bennett families, each was given a different move-out date. On that day, the family can apply for a 28-day stay at a hotel shelter, according to a city spokesperson. This requires going to the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where asylum-seekers are assigned shelters and schools. 

That journey involves more than an hour-long bus ride from Floyd Bennett Field, with suitcases, backpacks, and whatever else the family owns, with children in tow. The shelter’s problematic location in East Brooklyn, poorly served by public transportation, makes this move especially challenging.

“We have to take all of it, all the way back over there, after we already moved all the way out here,” said a Floyd Bennett father about the impending move.

Located on a former airfield, the shelter lies nearly six miles from the nearest subway station. This isolated site, located where the neighborhoods of Marine Park and Mill Basin meet, has one public transportation option: the Q35 MTA bus. To reach the bus stop, families must trek a long winding road from the shelter and then cross a busy two lane road and massive parking lot. It takes about 45 minutes by bus to reach the subway at the Flatbush-Nostrand Junction.

“We want to send our children to school, but how are we supposed to keep them in the same school when we have to move in the middle of winter?” said the aforementioned Floyd Bennett father. The students board yellow school buses, whose schedule was a mystery to teachers. Migrant parents also shared that the buses could be late or not have enough seats for all of the children. 

The aforementioned city spokesperson said via email that city agencies are working to ensure students have a smooth transition to new living situations and continue their education, either at their current school or a new school, if they desire. 

“As families are moving from Floyd Bennett Field, we are ensuring that they are aware of the school options and resources available to them,” she said, declining to address questions about problems thus far, or what specific resources would be available.

The teachers who spoke to City Limits said they are generally not informed of where a child transfers to after they leave the school. Horwitz, the attorney, explained that transient families can be hard to track if they change phone numbers or run out of minutes. Communication is further complicated when they rely on the WiFi-dependent Whatsapp, or move outside of New York City. 

“My sense is that DOE’s systems and staff were so overwhelmed by the increase in numbers that they couldn’t keep up with data entry and updating systems to track kids who leave the city,” said Horwitz.

Since 2022, more than 200,000 migrants and asylum seekers have entered the city’s shelter system, nearly 55,000 of whom were still living in shelters as of mid-December, the majority of them families with children. 

“DOE and shelters have done a decent job ensuring that families who are moved within the city know their options for schools, but their [Students in Temporary Housing] office never has enough staff and it wouldn’t surprise me if a huge number of the missing kids just aren’t attending anywhere,” she added.

At a City Council hearing in November, administration officials testified that roughly 15 percent of the migrant children in the system whose families had been issued shelter time limits had exited the public school system.

“Everyone wants stability and consistency in their lives,” said one teacher. “If we started off with that, why are we disrupting this process?”

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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