Haitian Students Hit Placement Roadblock
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Most New Yorkers may not know it but city schools have already become a refuge for hundreds of students who have escaped the devastation in Haiti -- a transition that's proving to be anything but smooth. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report.Chesna Gelin, 17, has had many reasons to cry since her house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti fell down around her last month, but she says the latest was how hard it's been to enroll in a New York City school.
"It was very, very sad. I even cried," said Gelin.
The Department of Education says 219 Haitian students have enrolled in city schools since the earthquake -- a process that should take five days at most.
It often takes longer for high schoolers since they have to go to an enrollment center to get placed. As a result, schools can refuse to take them for a variety of reasons, which means back to the enrollment center to start the process over.
"When you have immigrant students who still need to learn English, who are coming in mid-year, there aren't many spots for them, there aren't very good programs to begin with, and now we are going to have a number of students coming -- some now, some later, some down the road -- and the system still isn't equipped to deal with them," said Guisela Alvarez of Advocates for Children of New York.
Chesna joined her father in New York on January 26th. But she still hasn't started school. She waited hours in an enrollment center three times during the past three weeks before she was assigned to a school that said it had no room until next fall.
Finally, this week, a youth organizer from the Haitian organization Flanbwayan said she may have found Chesna a spot at the Emma Lazurus High School for English Language Learners in Chinatown. She plans to start on Monday. But for earthquake survivors like Chesna, getting into a school may be just the beginning.
"On top of the fact that they still need to learn English, they are dealing with trauma and that's not something that we've seen the DOE prepared to address either," Alvarez said. "You can have short term counseling but this trauma is going to play out over a number of years."
Advocates expect a steady trickle of students like Chesna will be arriving in New York from Haiti during the next several weeks, months and even years. They're asking the DOE to be better prepared to find the students good schools, with the right supports, as soon as possible.