Mayor Eric Adams should reverse school budget cuts and allocate millions more in funding to properly serve more than 5,500 new students seeking asylum, the city’s fiscal watchdog said Tuesday.
Comptroller Brad Lander said the city should allocate an additional $34 million in funding for individual schools instructing the asylum seekers who have been bused to New York from the southern border and will need intense academic and social service help. Some of the young migrants don’t speak English, have not attended classes for years and are illiterate, educators previously told Gothamist.
Lander said Adams’ cuts to the education department budget – which the comptroller estimated is $469 million because of declining enrollment – have put an added burden on schools coping with the unanticipated influx of asylum seekers.
“Schools where enrollment exceeded DOE projections this fall are already operating at a deficit of staff, and now face even greater shortfalls as they take in new students who they were not budgeted to support,” Lander said in a prepared statement. “The Department of Education must move swiftly to provide schools with the necessary funding to support students from migrant families.”
Lander’s comments followed an announcement from Schools Chancellor David Banks that the city is adding more programs and staff to help the migrant kids. The expanded programming includes bilingual instruction, mental health treatment and access to social workers.
“Strains are always put on schools anytime they see a sudden, unplanned influx of students,” Banks said at a press conference at PS 16 in the Bronx, which received 39 new asylum-seeking students. “We have to care, because if we care all the other pieces will fall into place.”
The city traditionally adjusts budgets for the system’s 1,600 schools in the fall, after enrollment numbers are confirmed at the end of October. Each school’s budget is calculated with a Fair Student Funding formula using a combination of state and city funds.
DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer said that schools with significantly increased enrollment already have been allocated additional funding.
“We've provided $25 million directly to schools in response to new students enrolling, and there is more to come,” Styer tweeted. “We don't wait till October 31st if schools have new needs, never have.”
But comptroller spokeswoman Chloe Chik said the $25 million in funding is not enough. She said the city’s extra allocation was “woefully short” of the overall school budget cuts, which are the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.
Roughly 18,600 asylum seekers have come to the city since the spring, more than half of whom are living in homeless shelters. There were 63,363 people in city shelters on Monday, highs not seen in decades.
