NYC looking to use nearly a dozen public schools as migrant housing, sparking outrage from parents, officials

Mayor Adams is opening the door to housing migrants in nearly a dozen public schools as part of an effort to alleviate pressure on the city’s overcrowded shelter systems — prompting pushback from parents and community leaders who fear the accommodations could disrupt classes and traumatize the asylum seekers, the Daily News has learned.

As of Monday, Adams’ administration was either housing or planning to house migrants in the gymnasiums of PS188, PS189, PS172, PS17, PS18, PS132 and MS577 — all of which are in Brooklyn, according to local elected officials, Community Education Council members and correspondences reviewed by The News. All of the gyms are freestanding from their respective school buildings.

The Richard H. Hungerford School on Staten Island, which was permanently shuttered during the pandemic, is also being repurposed as an emergency migrant housing facility, State Assemblyman Sam Pirozzolo wrote on Twitter over the weekend.

Danielle Rogers, who has lived across the street from PS188 for seven years, said she’s concerned about how the migrant housing will impact programming at the Coney Island school.

“How would you feel if you were living here and you got these random people moving into a school that’s active that your grandkids go to?” said Rogers, 42.

The focus on turning school gyms into emergency shelters comes after Camille Varlack, Adams’ chief of staff, issued a memo on May 7 directing all city agencies to identify spaces that could be retrofitted into migrant housing.

Varlack’s memo was distributed in advance of the May 11 expiration of Title 42, a federal border enforcement policy that allowed authorities to quickly expel many migrants crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.

Adams for weeks warned that the expiration of Title 42 would likely result in the city’s migrant influx accelerating. So far, there has not been an indication that the pace has picked up significantly since the Title 42 lapse.

For the second day in a row, Adams had no public appearances planned Monday. A spokeswoman for his office declined to provide a full list of public schools set to house migrants, but said “nothing is off the table as we work to fill our moral mandate.”

“We should all expect this crisis to affect every city service,” the spokeswoman said. “We will continue to communicate with local elected officials as we open more emergency sites.”

Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, a Democrat who’s running to represent a district that includes PS188 in this year’s elections, disputed the notion that the administration has been keeping him and other local stakeholders in the loop.

“Unclear how long they will need to stay,” he tweeted late Sunday of the migrants at PS188.

“This location remains puzzling to me.”

When news first broke late last week that PS188 would be used to house migrants, an Adams administration official maintained the setup would not impact programming at the school.

Erika Kendall, president of the Community Education Council for District 17, which includes Crown Heights, East Flatbush and Prospect Heights, poured cold water on the idea that all school’s programming would continue as usual while housing migrants.

“I’ve not spoken to a single parent that felt like these people were undeserving of some sort of space or shelter — but what people are concerned about is the disruption to their children’s education, that their children cannot move freely in their own school, and what this means to have people sleeping overnight in school buildings,” said Kendall, whose Community Education Council district includes PS189.

PS189, located on the corner of East New York and Buffalo Aves. in Crown Heights, received notice over the weekend that its gymnasium will also be transformed into a migrant housing site, Kendall said.

Samantha Orme, a mom of a student at PS132 in Williamsburg, said her kid is already being impacted by her school’s gym becoming a migrant housing site.

“They didn’t have recess outside today, which sucks,” Orme said.

But Orme, 43, said she understands that the migrants “have to go somewhere” and that she’d “rather have them in a school than sleeping underneath the BQE.”

The Adams administration has justified turning to school gyms because there’s no more space in the city’s homeless shelters and emergency hotels, which are housing more than 40,000 asylum seekers at the moment — and hundreds more arrive in New York every day. That’s in addition to the tens of thousands of homeless New Yorkers who sleep in the city shelter system every night.

Though she sympathized with the administration’s struggle to address the ballooning migrant crisis, Kendall said putting asylum seekers in schools is not the answer.

“They’re intending to use [school] buildings to house people — buildings that are not intended for housing,” she said. “It’s really inhumane.”

Over at PS188, a handful of migrants were milling around in front of the school’s gym Monday afternoon.

Yonathan Lopez, a 26-year-old migrant from Venezuela, said he and his partner got beds Sunday in the gym, which has capacity to house 75 adult migrant families, according to sources families with the matter.

“It’s okay in there,” Lopez told The News in Spanish, adding that staff with the city’s Emergency Management office are providing free food on site, including pizza and sandwiches.

In Community Education Council District 14, which covers Williamsburg and Greenpoint, four public schools — PS17, PS18, PS132 and MS577 — were informed over the weekend they’re expected to see their gyms transformed into migrant housing, said Jessamyn Lee.

Lee, a representative for Brooklyn’s education council presidents on the citywide Panel for Educational Policy, said she’s concerned about the way Adams’ administration has gone about notifying schools about the emergency housing plans.

“Nobody knows how long this is supposed to last, or the scope of it,” said Lee, whose child attends public school in District 14. “It’s kind of wild.”

PS17, located near the Bedford Avenue L train stop, is supposed to be part of “Summer Rising,” a program that provides kids with recreational activities during the summer. It’s unclear how that initiative may be impacted by its gym becoming a migrant shelter.

PS172, the other school whose gym has been picked as a likely migrant housing site, is in Sunset Park.

Beyond programming, Lee said she’s concerned that the abrupt manner in which migrants have been moved into school gyms could fuel anti-migrant sentiment.

“We’re absolutely pitting communities against each other,” she said, “and I don’t know if it was intentional, but the immediate net result has been a racist dog whistle.”