No-show bus rides, fatigue, and illnesses are making it hard for some migrants housed in Floyd Bennett Field tents to send their children to school, parents told The Post.
During school hours this week, The Post observed at least 15 children skipping class outside the city’s controversial mega-tent shelter in southeast Brooklyn, where roughly 1,900 migrants are housed.
Despite the city forking over $625,000 this year for buses to take students from the isolated national park to a subway stop, parents blamed missing shuttles for their kids losing out on class time.
“They say the buses are supposed to start coming at 6 then come every half an hour but that’s false, they don’t come,” said Venezuelan migrant Yuandris Carbo, 31, whose daughters, ages 12 and 7, and son, 8, attend the city’s public schools.
“We woke up early to go get the bus and I took them outside in the freezing cold, and the bus didn’t come on time.”
Colombian migrant Katherine Mora, a 29-year-old single mom, said the city’s decision to assign her 12-year-old son to a school on Coney Island has frustrated her ability to get both him and his 3-year-old brother to class.
“They assigned [the older son] to a school very far away. It would take us an hour and a half to get there because the bus that takes kids to school from here doesn’t go there,” she said, adding it takes three different buses to get him to class.
“If I dropped off one first and then the other, they would be too late. So that’s why they’re not in school.”
During a recent tour of the remote Brooklyn shelter, Councilwoman Joann Ariola’s office counted at least a dozen migrant children outside the tents with their families during school hours.
One parent told the lawmaker’s staff that she was “too tired to get up and send the kid” to class, an aide said.
“These children need to be in the classroom, not in a tent in the middle of Floyd Bennett Field,” Ariola (R-Queens) said. “This is unacceptable”
Others are keeping their kids from attending class because of illnesses spread among family members and other migrants in the crowded tent shelter.
“His first day was supposed to be Monday, but he didn’t go because of the [weather] evacuation and all the moving around,” a 28-year-old Venezuelan dad said of his 3-year-old son, who was assigned to PS 188 in Coney Island.
His son didn’t go the rest of the week because the dad caught a cold from his 1-year-old daughter who was “sick with a cough and phlegm,” he said. “He will start school on Monday.”
Mayor Adams’ office did not immediately return a request for comment.