President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power on Monday is prompting schools across Vermont to review their policies around student privacy and immigration — particularly since advocates fear that potential changes in federal rules could pave the way for schoolhouse raids.
Federal policy created during Barack Obama’s presidency, which Trump kept in place during his first administration, currently prevents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from making arrests at so-called “sensitive locations,” including schools, churches and hospitals. But Trump now plans to rescind that policy, according to reporting from NBC News.
Many educators are feeling a mix of fear and hopelessness, and aren’t sure what to say when students or their families come to them with concerns about deportation, according to Winooski Schools Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria. The Winooski school board is now reviewing a policy, proposed by the superintendent, that would limit the district’s ability to share student and family information, restrict ICE’s ability to come on campus without a judicial warrant, and help connect families to community resources.
Federal law supersedes district policy, and Chavarria said he’s well aware that the district’s abilities are limited.
“It doesn't matter how imperfect what we do is. We just have to do something, and we have to put ourselves out there. We have to get out there so that the next district over, who was, you know, not sure about it, they can at least say, ‘OK, one has done it. I think we can do it too,’” he said.
Winooski High School teacher Caitlin MacLeod-Bluver said some of her students were “immediately scared” the day after the election, and that this kind of stress gets in the way of learning.
“This (policy) is one thing that we can do to assure students that we're doing everything in our power to help students feel safe at school,” said MacLeod-Bluver, who is Vermont’s 2025 Teacher of the Year.
Freshman Gabby Dzessou agrees. While she was born in the U.S., many of her friends are worried, and she thinks this policy will make them feel “very safe.”
“It's a hard topic to talk about,” she said.
Winooski, the only majority-minority district in the state, appears to be the only one publicly reviewing a standalone so-called “sanctuary school” policy for now. But others, like the North Country Supervisory Union, are prominently distributing know-your-rights information to their communities. And Chavarria and Alyssa Chen, co-coordinator with the Education Justice Coalition of Vermont, which is distributing a similar model policy, both said administrators statewide are reaching out for advice.
An estimated 651,000 children without legal status are enrolled in schools across the country, according to the Migration Policy Institute, although Vermont-specific figures are not available. Neither the Agency of Education nor advocates know how many such students exist in Vermont. Migrant laborers, however, have long formed the backbone of Vermont’s dairy industry, and are increasingly leaned upon in the state’s construction sector.
More from Vermont Public: Trump deportation plan spurs calls for protections for Vermont farmworkers
Because the state’s population of immigrants without legal status is smaller and less visible than it is in other states, many also lack familiarity with immigration enforcement, according to Chen.
“I was talking with teachers the other day, and they were like, ‘What do you mean? We can tell ICE they can't come in?’ And it's like, oh, yeah, unless they have a warrant, they're not allowed to just come in and start searching students and questioning people,” she said.
The Vermont Agency of Education will soon also be issuing guidance to schools on the topic, Lindsey Hedges, a spokesperson for the agency, said in an email this week. That guidance will note that schools “can prevent entry by federal immigration authorities to the school building in an enforcement capacity unless the federal immigration authorities have a valid judicial criminal warrant or judicial order,” she wrote.
Advocates frequently complain that ICE will often conduct searches by presenting documents that don’t actually entitle them entry. Hedges added that an “administrative warrant” or “immigration detainer” does not “carry the legal authority of a judicial warrant.” School districts will need to consult with their attorney to confirm that a warrant or order that’s being presented as grounds for entry is valid, she said.
Jill Martin Diaz, the executive director of the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, which participated in the coalition’s model policy development, said it’s important for guidance to be centralized and that staff be trained.
Encounters with law enforcement are unnerving, and educators need to know what to do so that they don’t have to make their own individual judgement calls. That takes the pressure off educators, they said, and helps schools ensure staff don’t inadvertently divulge student information that federal privacy laws prevented them from sharing anyway.
“Have a script, say the script, say nothing else, and refer up the line,” Martin Diaz said.
There’s also a value in schools making it very clear to families that schools are a safe place they can come to get connected with community partners, including immigration attorneys, who might be able to help.
"As of next week, I am not ever again, until this administration is over, going to host a publicized know-your-rights assembly for undocumented and under documented people,” Martin Diaz said. “We can't gather in public anymore.”
More from Vermont Edition: How Trump's immigration policies could impact Vermont
But even though several districts are reportedly examining their practices and speaking to advocates, few appear eager to do so publicly. Vermont Public outreach to superintendents across the state yielded few responses. And while Winooski’s school board agreed last week to advance Chavarria’s proposed policy for further consideration, they did so after a lengthy discussion about the risks involved.
“In the prior Trump administration, jurisdictions that adopted sanctuary policies were specifically targeted for loss of funds or heightened scrutiny, heightened enforcement,” one Winooski board member, Nicole Mace, told her colleagues on the board. (Trump’s new "border czar" Tom Homan, recently promised similar retaliation again.)
And Mace also argued the district risked over-promising. The federal government has broad authority to enforce immigration law, she said, and the district was limited in its power. She suggested the district instead take more under-the-radar means of protecting its students, including minimizing what it includes and collects as part of its “directory” — student information that it shares publicly. (Advocates have also recommended similar measures.)
Chavarria acknowledged he thinks Mace’s concerns are warranted. But he also thinks it’s worth taking a public stance. He recalled a recent conversation he had with parents who were worried about what would happen if they were apprehended by ICE while their child was at school. That was a “hard, hard” conversation to have, the superintendent said, in part because he wanted to reassure those parents, even as he “knew, deep inside” that he had “very little power as well.”
“I'm trying for all of us together as a system, as an institution, including the board, not just me alone or not just the teacher alone, but all of us together to speak in the same voice and to say to that family: ‘We got you. We may not be able to fully protect you in the way that you wish we could, but whatever we can do to protect your child and to protect you and maintain the integrity of your family, we will do that.’”
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