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It was just two weeks from the end of the semester and the start of holiday break in 2006, when Superintendent Steve Joel got a phone call from the police chief. Federal immigration agents were raiding his community.
Immediately, Joel said he knew there would be students who would not have parents to go home to that day. By 8:30 a.m., “we were in absolute despair,” Joel recalled.
Joel now looks back on the day of the raid as the longest 24 hours of his career, and worries school leaders in Colorado will face a similar situation soon.
Joel shared his memories of that experience at the recent Colorado Association of School Boards conference in Colorado Springs.
Dozens of education officials attended the session to hear from Joel about what to expect and how they might prepare for the possible upcoming mass deportations promised by President-elect Donald Trump that could split kids from parents and create a host of problems for schools.
Last week, NBC reported the incoming Trump administration has plans to remove the long-standing practice of not conducting immigration enforcement at schools, hospitals, and churches. An influential conservative group with ties to Trump has also shared a blueprint to challenge a Supreme Court ruling that protects undocumented children’s right to go to public schools.
The 2006 immigration raid took place at a food processing plant when Joel was superintendent of Nebraska’s Grand Island school district. About 1,400 of the school district’s 10,000 students had parents working at the plant, he said. Some of those parents had legal status, but without proof on them, some were detained and rounded up anyway.
“Be prepared,” he urged school officials. “Your community, your parents, your leaders, your state, they’ll appreciate you for it.”
So far, most Colorado school leaders have been quiet about any possible plans they may be drafting to deal with mass deportations affecting their community.
Adams 14 school leaders are holding “know your rights” seminars for families, and training front office staff to direct federal authorities to the district’s legal team or director of security.
Here’s some of the advice Joel had based on his experience:
Have a message ready for families
As families in the community learned about the immigration raids, the school district began fielding nonstop calls, Joel said.
Relatives were calling, asking what they should do.
“It was gut wrenching,” he said. Joel said school leaders should have responses ready to share with families.
By around midday his district had created a plan to set up a triage at one of the district’s schools for any children whose parents had been detained and needed a place to stay. The district held a press conference to let the community know the plan and where people could come to reunite with affected students.
Joel also said that as word got out, they saw high school students walk out of class, go to the elementary schools to pick up their siblings, and then go into hiding.
“We weren’t quite ready for that,” Joel said.
As part of his message that day, Joel said he was attempting to assure the community that schools were safe. The district of about 10,000 students was down by 2,500 students the next day. Some slowly returned in the weeks following the raid, but about 500 students didn’t come back.
He said one thing he regretted was saying that immigration authorities would not be allowed on school property. In that moment, he was motivated to stop them himself if needed, he said.
Soon after that comment aired, he received a call from the leader of the immigration enforcement operation.
“He said, ‘I want you to know you’re wrong, we have jurisdiction. If we want to go into your schools we can. But I promise you, we won’t,’” Joel recalled.
Education officials don’t have a clear answer to the question of whether schools have the authority to stop immigration officials from entering schools today.
Joe Salazar, an attorney for Adams 14 who attended Joel’s talk, told the group that in his view — based on a state court ruling from this summer — immigration warrants aren’t considered warrants in Colorado and that schools do have the right to turn officials away.
In response to reports that Trump would permit immigration enforcement in schools, Denver Public Schools published a statement noting that according to current district policy, “federal immigration law enforcement activities would not be permitted at our schools, on transportation routes, on DPS property, or during school activities.”
DPS said it is committed to providing safe learning environments for all students regardless of their immigration status.
But the district also is encouraging families to have their emergency contact information updated and to identify who is authorized to pick up their children if parents can’t.
Have a way to verify who people are
When the district was preparing to reunite students with relatives who could take them in, Joel said security reminded him that they needed a way to verify that the people claiming to be relatives really were.
He said they had students and teachers confirm the relation to the family member they were released to.
In about a dozen cases, Joel said, teachers who had volunteered took in a student who did not have a confirmed relative to stay with for a night or two. But, he said, the district tried to limit those cases because of the district legal team’s concerns about liabilities.
Have a list of students who might be affected
Joel suggested that school districts create a list of students who could be affected in the case of mass immigration raids.
But doing so isn’t necessarily straightforward. Alex Marrero, superintendent of Denver Public Schools, asked Joel how districts should do that, given that they don’t collect immigration information about students or families. (The U.S. Department of Education has said schools may not collect information about students’ and families’ immigration status in order to deny them services, because by law they have to serve students regardless of their status. Joel did not suggest collecting that.)
Joel responded that his district did collect information about parent employers. So on the morning of the raid, the district was able to quickly identify students who had parents working at the worksite that had been impacted. Not all students’ families were undocumented or detained, but it gave the district a list of students to check in with.
Joel suggested districts can think about the larger employers in their community who might employ immigrant parents. They can even open a line of communication with those employers ahead of any possible raids.
A spokesperson for the Denver district said that DPS doesn’t collect information about parents’ place of employment either.
If Grand Island schools had lacked that, Joel said he would have probably asked staff to identify the students they thought were impacted.
Have a way to raise money for students
Knowing the district may need to help house, transport, or feed some children, Joel said his district decided to raise money, and he encourages districts to have a system prepared to take in donations.
“The funds flowed in like I would have never expected,” Joel said.
Joel recalls that one of the first checks he received came from an unexpected source.
Joel had a neighbor who was a friend who was heavily involved in the local Republican Party, Joel said. Every time the man’s property taxes went up by any amount, he grilled Joel about whether that money was going to educating undocumented children, Joel said.
But on the morning of the raid, the man showed up to Joel’s office with a “big check.”
“‘I’m a daddy too and I hate what this is doing to families,’” Joel recalled the man telling him.
The money the district collected helped students and families for weeks.
Joel said that a few days after the raid, a principal called him for help to talk to a student.
The student was a young girl who was pregnant and was two weeks away from graduating. Both of her parents had been detained, and once the girl found out where her parents were, she was anxious to join them.
The principal was pleading with her to stay in school and finish her diploma first.
Finally, Joel and the principal were able to talk the girl into staying, with the promise of helping her stay in the apartment she had been sharing with her parents. The district paid for food, utilities, and other bills through the end of the semester so the girl could get her diploma.
When doing home visits looking for children in the days after the raid, school staff sometimes found children speaking through a window to say they were under instructions not to open the door. So, principals and social workers also brought those families food, school work, or other necessities as they were trying to earn back their trust and get them back in schools.
Work with community groups, faith leaders, and others
Joel also emphasized that school districts should call on other leaders in the community to help. On the day of the raid, when he reached out to groups, he called a meeting. Despite the short notice, he said within an hour he had a great turnout.
“There’s going to be a lot of fear and quite a bit of anger,” he said. “They were hurting, mad.
None of it was really directed at us, but it sure felt that way.”
It can help if school districts start having conversations with those organizations and leaders before any raids.
Among other pieces of advice, Joel told school leaders that they should be prepared for a day of a raid to be an emotional day for staff, and to know that not all staff will be able to handle working on helping students and families. There will also be threats from people who don’t agree with the school district’s approach to helping families, he said.
He said the biggest thing is remembering to keep it about the children and advocating for them.
“If you can’t advocate for kids, what are you doing on the board?” Joel said. “That’s sort of the position we took.”
Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.
