Said a South Burlington teacher: “There has to be a balance, right? I don’t want this to be my only focus because the more the student feels embroiled in this situation, the more unsteady they’re going to feel.”

By Ekaterina Raikhovski, for the Vermont Daily Chronicle

Donald Trump’s second term in the White House has been dominated by a flurry of executive orders, with the president signing 76 in his first six weeks back in office. Many are tied to his campaign promise to crack down on immigration, and the hardline approach so far has driven anxieties in schools nationwide — including in Vermont.

“It’s a concerning time — you can definitely quote us on that — because we know that there are some families and students out there that are really worried about this,” said Jay Nichols, executive director of the Vermont Principals’ Association. 

“What we’ve told our members is that if there’s a judicial warrant from a judge allowing ICE or federal agents to come in the schools and remove a parent or, God forbid, a student, they have to follow that,” he said soon after.

In a memo from 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement directed officers to avoid carrying out arrests, interviews, searches and surveillance in sensitive places such as schools and churches. U.S. Customs and Border Protection adopted a similar policy soon after. This January, the Department of Homeland Security rolled back those limits 

“So many of these policies and announcements and executive orders are creating an environment of fear, and there’s certain things that all noncitizens and all Vermonters should be aware of,” said Hillary Rich, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont.

“I think there’s a lot of really really frightening rhetoric and we are trying to do a little bit of myth busting,” said Rich.

Melissa Corrigan teaches in the multilingual learner program at South Burlington High School, which belongs to a district where students speak over 40 different languages, which is reflected in Corrigan’s classroom. “I have students that speak Swahili, Arabic, French, Nepali and Spanish all in one classroom,” she said. 

During the first Trump presidency, immigrant parents reported only leaving the house for work and abandoning recreation, leading children to spend many hours inside, and reluctance to participate in programs or services for which they are eligible, such as health coverage, in response to restrictive immigration policies, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — now known as KFF — the health policy research nonprofit that also owns a national health news outlet.

Research shows exposed to immigration raids have an increased risk of many short- and long-term negative health outcomes, KFF also reported.

“I have had students relocate recently, and I don’t know why they relocated,” Corrigan said. “There was no information in school, and two days later we got a call from a different district that said the student is attending here now. It may be related to the discord, it may not be.”

As an educator for multilingual learners, Corrigan said she wants to equip her students with the tools necessary to understand the current political climate. But she believes it’s necessary to tread carefully between educating and fear-mongering. 

“There has to be a balance, right? I don’t want this to be my only focus because the more the student feels embroiled in this situation, the more unsteady they’re going to feel,” she said

Some places in Vermont, like Winooski, have considered adopting a sanctuary school policy across the district, as part of a movement that calls for additional protections to ensure a safe school environment for all students, affirming rights to education for all students, regardless of immigration status. 

Still, there are many existing regulations that protect students, like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects students’ personal information from being disclosed to a third party without consent from a parent or guardian. 

“Regardless of what kind of label a school district adopts, there are very specific restrictions on what a school is allowed to share with immigration authorities,” said Rich, from the ACLU. “Regardless of whether the school has this label, I think it’s important for families and students to know that there are responsibilities that a school district just has to protect, like the rights and safety of every child who’s enrolled.”

Corrigan shares a similar sentiment as Rich, confident that the existing protocol at South Burlington will work to protect her students. 

“What we’re witnessing on the part of the administration is shock and awe,” the teacher said. “If you’re not shocked by it, you just move through the court system to honor the agreements that have already been put in place legally that are not being legally removed. Then we just keep doing business as usual.”

Martha Tecca, a core team member at SHARe, a refugee resettlement organization in the Upper Connecticut River Valley, feels Trump’s executive orders and announcements open the door for harmful outcomes for all immigrants in the U.S., students or not. 

“The impact of saying schools aren’t protected or churches aren’t protected means that people with bad intentions feel freer to just do bad things,” Tecca said, “and I think that’s the much bigger issue.” 

Trump’s campaigns and administrations have been characterized by dehumanizing rhetoric against migrants and people in the U.S. illegally — and Corrigan believes it’s a deliberate message to them that “they don’t matter, and they’re not important.”

“The more that message comes to my students, the less likely they will be to buy into the American dream in the way we would hope new Americans would want to,” she said. “We have many success stories in Vermont, but you run the risk of alienating whole subsets of the population by doing that.” 

The second largest city in Vermont, South Burlington has a population of 11.5% foreign-born residents, according to the latest census estimates from 2023, compared with 4.5% for the state. More than 8% of the city school district’s students are multilingual. But Corrigan said there has been some pushback from the community over continued funding for the multilingual learner program. 

“Even before Trump was elected, there was a mention at a school board meeting — ‘Why are we spending so much money on multilingual students?’ — without understanding that it takes more for them to be able to do the same work,” she said. 

In 2017, the district board voted to replace its schools’ original sports name, the Rebels, citing racist connotations and connections with the Civil War South — 1960s yearbook photos displayed images of students wielding Confederate flags. A group of residents put out a petition to put the question to a districtwide vote, but district officials declined to do so. After a lengthy legal battle, the Vermont Supreme Court sided with the district. 

Corrigan worries her students will be affected by rhetoric from those around them, too. 

“The more likely a student is to believe that no one is going to punish them for something because the president is telling them it’s okay,” said Corrigan, “(the) more likely we will see if not actual aggressive acts, then more microaggressions, and that affects my students’ ability to learn in their classrooms because it directly affects their safety.”

Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship