From parents’ fraught decisions over whether they can safely send their children to class to reports of districts losing families to self-deportation, schools around the country are responding to the ripple effects touched off by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids.
More specifically, they are trying to counteract the resulting fear that’s keeping students away from campuses — a continuation of what they saw in the spring as the immigration authorities ramped up apprehensions and deportations. Estimates put the number of K-12 students who did not have legal status in the U.S. at roughly 620,000 in 2021, about 1 percent of public school students.
Since the start of this new school year, education leaders and immigration advocacy groups have highlighted the challenges that schools and families are facing in light of ICE sweeps in their communities. Anxiety is higher following a recent Supreme Court decision allowing federal agents in Los Angeles to question people about their immigration status based solely on factors like their race, ethnicity or language spoken.
Speakers during recent panels hosted by America’s Voice and Advancement Project, an immigrants’ rights organization and a civil rights organization, respectively, discussed what they believe should be schools’ role in ensuring parents and students feel safe.
The Effects of Fear
Fear caused by the visibility of immigration apprehensions can impact any child, clinical child psychologist Allison Bassett Ratto said during an America’s Voice panel, but immigrant children in particular are facing psychological harm. The resulting stress and trauma could be short- or long-term, she adds, and they can develop conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder whether they witness violence directly in person, or online.
“What they see are their classmates, their family members, their neighbors often being apprehended in violent and confusing ways while going about their daily lives, and this for children creates a sense that nowhere and no one is safe,” Bassett Ratto said. “Young children don’t understand who is at risk of being detained in this way, so this creates a sense of fear and worry that they or their families could be next.”
Noel Candelaria, the National Education Association’s secretary-treasurer and a special education teacher, said that children of immigrant parents feel unsafe in their own communities and “unsure of who they will find or not find when they get home from school.”
“Every student, cada estudiante, deserves to feel safe at school,” Candelaria said.
Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, feels a personal connection to the issue. He’s spoken publicly about his experience living without legal status in the U.S. after graduating high school in his native Portugal. He was homeless in Miami for a time, eventually becoming a teacher and later superintendent of the Miami-Dade school district.
“As a once-undocumented immigrant, as someone who grew up in poverty and slept under a bridge, I cannot speak or address anyone without recognizing the impact that education has had on my life and that thousands of students are facing the same challenges and the same traumatic abuse I felt as a teenager alone in this country,” Carvalho said. “We are asserting the fundamental rights that belong to our children as prescribed and interpreted in the Constitution.”
Researchers have found that stress can impede normal childhood development, and instability like that caused by the Trump administration’s current immigration policies can interfere with children’s ability to focus and learn while in school.
“What we see in terms of school impacts is that when a child is managing trauma, anxiety or intense stress, it significantly impacts their ability to pay attention because that is like a vice on their brain,” Bassett Ratto said. “Fundamentally, it puts them in this fight or flight, the survival mode where math class or their band instructor is unfortunately moving to the back burner as they try and just get through their day over the long term.”
Fedrick Ingram, the American Federation of Teachers’ secretary-treasurer and a high school band director in Miami, described feeling a dissonance between the fear caused by immigration arrests and the normalcy of the school day.
“Unfortunately, we’re up against what we’ve not seen in the country in a long time, where we are traumatizing students and then asking them to go home and do school work in a traumatized situation,” Ingram said. “What many of our lawmakers have done is point fingers at our educators, point fingers at our students and say, ‘You didn’t pass this test,’ or ‘You didn’t do enough.’ They fail to understand these kids will bring those traumas to school and try to do the best they can, and we’re forcing them to try to process these things faster than they should, so shame on this administration.”
Attendance Struggles
Schools have a responsibility to protect students that goes beyond ensuring they can safely get into the building, Kristal Moore Clemons said. She is national director of the Children Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools program.
“This means superintendents, principals, school board members must establish clear procedures for how their staff should respond if ICE agents appear on school grounds,” she said during the Advancement Project panel. “This means taking the time to teach all students in all districts what their rights are if they are ever approached or questioned by immigration officials.”
Carvalho said that Los Angeles public schools have seen a slight enrollment dip, but concrete numbers on attendance won’t be available until mid-month. Prior to the school year’s start, he added, the district went on a communication blitz to reassure parents their children would be safe while en route to and inside their schools. The effort included adding more bus routes, increasing the number of mental health and legal aid professionals available to families, and helping parents understand their rights in case of an encounter with immigration agents.
“We prevented DHS agents from coming into our schools to talk to a first grader and second grader. What danger do elementary kids pose to national security?” he said. “I hope the community feels from us that we are that protective space, that our schools are those safe zones.”
Ingram noted that Miami-Dade County Public Schools saw enrollment drop by more than 13,000 students this fall, the result of not only immigration policy but also declining birth rates and families leaving for more affordable locales. The superintendent has promised not to lay off teachers as a result of any funding shortfalls.
“While we can’t attribute all of that to the immigration fight, we know that there’s a significant portion of people who are just not sending their students to school because of fear of deportation, because of fear of what will happen at home or because of tracing or what have you,” he said. “Where those dollar figures add up is there are fewer teachers, there are fewer programs and there’s less funding for students overall. And so anytime you get this particular kind of issue or this particular kind of trauma and stress to a school system, it hurts everybody from top to bottom.”
Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of the Opportunity to Learn Program at Advancement Project, said during a panel hosted by her organization that she’s seen families in the Washington, D.C., area show support by walking students to school in groups.
“They walk together to school to make sure that they get to school safely and aren’t afraid of being stopped or detained while just going to school,” Onyeka-Crawford said. “However, we don’t see that commitment coming from district leadership. We want them to make sure that these resources are available to all students, because we are just seeing that parents and school leadership need that support from the district and aren’t receiving it.”
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