CV NEWS FEED // According to internal emails, a public high school in Brooklyn, NY, housed illegal migrants without notifying student parents.
James Madison High School “tried to pass off its decision to close school and house illegal immigrants at the expense of students [and] their families as a last-minute decision made with the community,” The Daily Signal investigative columnist Tony Kinnett wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday evening. “Newly obtained emails show that was a lie.”
Kinnett reported earlier on Wednesday that The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project obtained internal emails showing that officials from New York City’s Education Department met with James Madison Principal Jodie Cohen in early January “to discuss ‘FBF Evacuation Planning’ at the high school.”
“FBF refers to Floyd Bennett Field, a local airstrip where the city has housed almost 2,000 illegal immigrants in a tent community,” Kinnett continued:
Impending inclement weather with “high winds” at the time prompted local officials to seek other accommodations.
In a private email to staff sent at 11:17 a.m. Jan. 9, less than two hours before the scheduled meeting, Madison Principal Jodie Cohen announced that the Brooklyn high school “is the secondary sight [site] to support the residents at Floyd Bennett Field in case it is needed.”
“Cohen claimed that, if the illegal aliens were housed in the high school, they would be gone by morning so that students’ lessons would be unimpeded,” Kinnett added.
In her email, the principal stated that the migrants’ presence means “nothing” to the school’s “daily instruction.”
“The plan is for [the migrants] to come here after the school day ends and leave before the school day begins,” Cohen wrote.
Kinnett noted that parents of James Madison students “were not consulted or notified until five hours later, when Cohen posted a letter to the school’s website informing parents that classes were canceled for the next day, which was Wednesday, Jan. 10.”
“Cohen didn’t email parents or students first when deciding to close Madison High the next day,” Kinnett wrote. “[The parents] were kept in the dark until 4 p.m. Jan. 9.”
On X, the journalist stressed that Cohen “explicitly chose not to contact parents.”
“Parents were left scrambling as they found out school was closed the following day from 4pm to 6pm,” he explained. “Staff knew as early as noon. While admins were free to strategize and make suggestions in a 1pm meeting, parents would have to wait until Cohen griped at them at 7pm.”
“Cohen would later yell at parents in a 7pm Zoom meeting for questioning her commitment to JMHS students—passing off the decision as a last minute necessity,” the Signal writer reported.
Last week, The New York Post reported that the principal “lashed out at parents who ripped her decision to boot students out of the classroom the day after 2,000 migrants moved in for a night.”
“How dare someone say that I don’t care about kids,” Cohen said to parents on the Zoom meeting. She was responding to their accusations that she “sold the kids out.”
“I don’t understand how people who never come on a Zoom like this could take an opportunity like this evening to throw mud,” Cohen complained. “This [emergency] is for one night, one night!”
Kinnett also pointed out on X that the high school “isn’t even the NYC Emergency Management storm evacuation site for [the] section of Brooklyn” in which it is located. “[The site is] Brooklyn College—which could’ve hosted the migrant families without causing this fiasco for students, parents, and staff.”
Early this month, CatholicVote reported that New York City had converted at least 100 hotels into “emergency shelters” for its skyrocketing migrant population:
Per the Post, “The city has opened more than 210 emergency shelter sites to house more than 170,700 migrants during the border crisis now entering its third year, according to officials.”
In addition, the Post reported that “[m]ore than 100 hotels have been converted into emergency shelters, at an estimated cost topping $1 billion.”
…
Sen. John Kennedy, R-LA, reacted to the reports of New York hotels increasingly being used to house migrants.
“If you want to know where Democrats’ soft border policies are taking America, just look at NY,” he wrote on X
>> OVER 100 NEW YORK CITY HOTELS USED TO SHELTER MIGRANTS <<
