Damien, age 5, was giddy with excitement as he left a Manhattan homeless shelter, sometimes running and skipping along the sidewalk accompanied by his wistful mother, a migrant from Ecuador.
“What I want for him is a future,” Kimberly Carchipulla said in Spanish of her son, one of nearly 800,000 New York City public school students who headed off to class Thursday for their first day of the new school year.
That is what school officials want, too, as the city’s classrooms work to accommodate nearly 20,000 migrant children newly arrived in the U.S. — a number that could swell as record numbers of families cross the border from Mexico in hopes of gaining asylum.
