Migrant children in New York City were the object of a recent claim by Donald Trump with regard to their school enrollment. Alex Zimmerman, a reporter for the education website Chalkbeat, covers the city’s public schools.
“Former President Trump made some comments recently suggesting that migrant children were somehow displacing children who were already enrolled in the city’s public schools which is just flatly not true,” he said.
In fact, said Zimmerman, the city’s public schools have struggled in recent years with the opposite problem: too many empty seats.
“There are roughly 9% fewer students in the city’s public schools than there were before the pandemic, which is about 92,000 kids, and those fortunes have reversed a little bit recently because there’s been just a really large surge of migrant children,” said Zimmerman.
He said this all may have been prompted by an incident at a Brooklyn high school.
“The tent shelters that the city had set up at Floyd Bennett Field were facing severe wind risks, and so the city very briefly relocated some people there at a high school in Brooklyn, which then went remote for a day, which caught the attention of lots of right wing commentators,” Zimmerman said.
He said the Trump campaign did not respond to his request for comment.