A BACK SEAT TO MIGRANTS
Special ed. may be pushed to old bldg.
A space crunch at a Manhattan public school building sparked by a massive influx of migrant kids is likely to force a city special-needs school out of its home and into an inadequate 127-year-old site.
West Prep Academy, a 168-student school on the West Side serving primarily children with disabilities and special needs, is being overrun by a surge in enrollment at PS 145, which shares the same 105th Street building, driven largely by the recent wave of migrant kids flooding the school system.
“We’re at a point where now parents are not feeling heard,” one academy parent told The Post. “I see all of these parents expressing these real concerns for why this is not going to work for their kids.
“We don’t agree with this change because we are actually, as teachers and parents and advocates, looking at the actual educational and developmental impact on the children with regard to this change.”
30,000 migrant children
West Prep’s dilemma, first reported by The New York Times last week, comes as more than 30,000 migrant children have been hurled into Big Apple public schools over the past three years.
City Education Department officials are offering the academy a new landing spot, but that is an aging nearby building with no outdoor space, a gym that doubles as an auditorium and no adequate accommodations for its disabled and special needs kids.
That building, once the home of the now-shuttered Ascension School on 108th Street, would be the academy’s new home for the 2024-25 school year, despite having no upgrades or modifications.
“It’s disingenuous to say that they’re looking out for the best interest of students and things of that nature when you’re willing to jeopardize kids’ academic futures,” Jibil Saleem, a sixth-grade teacher at West Prep, told The Post on Monday.
“They kind of came in, they looked, they basically determined that both schools are working within a footprint,” Saleem said. “That was last year, and then coming into this year it was just essentially like I said. We were blindsided.
“We didn’t know that they somehow looked at the report and convinced people higher up that we still need to go.”
City education officials declined to comment.
The academy has programs that are geared toward teaching children with autism, with 90% of the student population either black or Latino and 40% of with disabilities.
West Prep has seen its enrollment dip from over 200 in 2018 to 168, according to DOE records, while PS 145 saw its student population soar from 329 in 2019 to 382 now.
“At West Prep Academy we just want a building that is equitable to the one we have or a better facility,” said a magnet school specialist who asked to be identified only as Ms. Costa.
“We just want this to be done the right way,” she said. “Helping one group of students should never hurt another.”