KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT
Mayor urged to not let psych programs, migrant aid expire
Mayor Adams shouldn’t let school programs that help tens of thousands of students expire this year, says a coalition of immigrant advocates, attorneys and other service providers.
The group, which also includes housing advocates, is urging Adams to allocate funding in his executive budget for students struggling with mental health, learning English and living in shelters.
“With the pandemic having exacerbated the need for mental health support for students and with the increase in newly arrived immigrant families, thousands of whom are living in our city’s shelters, the need for these programs has only grown,” read the letter spearheaded by Advocates for Children and signed by more than 60 organizations.
“We are working with the City Council to find ways to sustain and build on the work we have done to lift up our students and schools through the budget process,” said mayoral spokeswoman Amaris Cockfield. “We appreciate the focus on these important initiatives .”
The advocates’ demands include reinvesting in a range of mental health services across 50 schools as teens recover from the social isolation, disrupted routines and, in some cases, the loss of parents and caregivers over the past few years.
More than 9% of public high school students in the city self-reported attempting suicide in 2021, according to figures shared by City Hall this month.
The program provides mental health clinics, trains teachers in deescalation and, as a last resort, sends “mobile child crisis” teams to schools — rather than send children to the emergency room. It comes with a $5 million price tag shared by the city’s Education and Health departments and its public hospital system.
The letter noted the initiative was included in Adams’ new citywide mental health plan, even though its funding was not earmarked in his preliminary budget. City officials pointed to a $12 million investment to roll out a citywide telehealth program to support high school students.
Other programs prioritized by advocates provide support to thousands of newly arrived students from South America, as well as their classmates living in shelters or learning English.
On the list is $10 million from the Administration for Children’s Services budget for a new child-care voucher program for undocumented families that could lapse just as it is getting off the ground, as previously reported by the Daily News.
Called Promise NYC, the program officially kicked off in January through community-based organizations in each borough. In Queens alone, the Chinese-American Planning Council was contracted to connect up to 205 children and their families with subsidized care across the borough.
“We surpassed the number just within a month and a half,” said Sumon Chin of the Chinese-American Planning Council, which received more than 330 applications and opened a waitlist, “and we heard similar stories in other boroughs too.”
The organization reached out to more than 2,300 child-care programs to find open slots near where migrant families are staying, but only heard from 130 providers with space for more kids, Chin said. The Chinese-American Planning Council runs its own early-childhood programs, but those, too, are filled to the brim.
“Families need to know if their children will be able to stay in their child-care program in July,” read the joint letter.
Another $4 million is used by public school employees to communicate with immigrant families through ethnic media, nonprofits, calls and texts and paper notices. Its loss could have a profound impact on the hundreds of thousands of students without a parent who speaks fluent English, including 61,000 without internet access, data compiled by the advocates show.
And while the school system recently beefed up its shelter-based staffers, nearly a quarter of those who came on this year were hired using $3.3 million in one-time city funding. Unlike most school employees who assist homeless students during the academic year, those workers continue through the summer, making sure that students have access to school buses and enrollment processes.
Roughly 14,000 students living in temporary housing have enrolled this school year, many of them asylum seekers.
City Hall pointed to other educational resources and supports for migrants, including school registrations made available at humanitarian emergency response centers and navigation centers in multiple languages. The administration also sent hundreds of millions of dollars to schools this academic year, rather than claw back funding midyear for enrollment changes, officials said.
“We want to be celebrating the success of these programs and partnering to make them as impactful as possible,” read the letter. “Instead, we are concerned that they are on the chopping block with no commitment to funding beyond June.”