Last week’s narrowly averted plan by President Donald Trump to deploy federal troops in San Francisco triggered a response from the city’s public school system. While Mayor Daniel Lurie and powerful figures like Marc Benioff and Jensen Huang prevented the deployment for the time being, the threat served as a real-time test of how the San Francisco United School District might deal with immigration enforcement at its schools. While some school staff members found the response sufficient, principals with deeper insight into the district’s reaction told Gazetteer SF that the plan was thin on details and required them to improvise.
The plan was disclosed at an emergency meeting held by SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su with San Francisco principals and attended by general counsel Manuel Martinez on Wednesday afternoon shortly after Trump made his troop surge threats. The presentation included a deck (obtained by Gazetteer SF) of seven slides titled “Federal presence in SF Response,” addressing what teachers are supposed to do if their schools or students are approached by federal agents.
The deck contained an Emergency Operations Center flowchart showing information moving from Su to Martinez to Hong Mei Pang, the district’s top communications official, and then through four other district officials and their designated SFUSD divisions.
It also had links, including one to a script for principals to reference if immigration or ICE officials show up at schools. It tells them to direct immigration officials to SFUSD headquarters. “If they are already in the building and refuse to leave,” principals are told to direct agents to remain in the school’s main office while the principals coordinate with Martinez and Su for guidance. It also links to information and documents principals are supposed to collect from immigration officers who refuse to go to SFUSD headquarters.
“Many school leaders were hoping for a more robust response plan,” said Anna Klafter, the principal at Independence High School. SFUSD’s response, Klafter said, was “less comprehensive than it could’ve been… In fact, some site leaders have already developed more comprehensive plans with their teachers and staff, independent of the district plan.”
Klafter noted that In Los Angeles, where ICE officials have detained students, the city’s school district worked with community partners to create safe zones around schools. At those schools with higher percentages of immigrant students, Los Angeles has prepared responses for different scenarios, including ICE moving into a particular neighborhood or near a school, or if agents approach parents taking kids to school, Klafter said. Partly in reaction to this concern, District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood is proposing legislation to create such safe zones, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday.
Teachers reported feeling nervous for much of last week and that Wednesday, before the deployment was called off, was particularly difficult. “I think my biggest worry was, is someone going to come and try to take one of my kids, and, like, that’s on me to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said one special education teacher who spoke on condition of anonymity because she isn’t authorized to speak for the district.
The teacher said a number of her special education students didn’t come to school last week because even if they weren’t at risk of being detained, their parents worried about what they might see and experience. She was particularly concerned about nonverbal students, and their ability to express feelings of fear.
The teacher said her school’s staff is on a group chat and that the principal was a key player in relaying the information. “If, for some horrible reason, ICE comes to our school, I have the phone numbers available of who to call from the district to help us,” the teacher said. SFUSD, she said, “is doing the best that they can to prepare for this kind of unknown, which hopefully isn’t going to come.”
But SFUSD might be getting more credit than it deserves, thanks to the creative improvisation of its principals. Another principal, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he also isn’t authorized to speak about district procedures, said staff members at schools with large immigrant populations reacted differently than schools with students and families who aren’t at risk of detainment and deportation.
“I think SFUSD is guilty of being reactive, and doesn’t have the bandwidth to do a lot proactively,” the principal told Gazetteer in a text message.
In an emailed response to a detailed message asking about the criticism of SFUSD response to the deployment threat, a school district spokesperson said in an unsigned email that it “remains deeply committed to proactively supporting school communities and school leaders.”
The principal I spoke to said San Francisco’s school district is tacitly allowing schools to improvise and tailor their responses, even if they’re not hewing to district policy, because SFUSD officials are aware of the weaknesses in the official response. Had the deployment of federal agents moved forward, he suspects the district’s response would’ve been more concrete and useful. “I think/ hope it would have evolved,” the principal wrote in the text.
I spoke briefly with Superintendent Su after Lurie’s Thursday press conference. She told me that on Oct. 20, the day after President Trump said he would send National Guard troops to San Francisco, “we very quickly stood up our emergency response, and became prepared.”
That meant making sure students filled out their emergency forms, that families have emergency plans and know their rights, and “making sure that our schools have a continuity of learning plan, and a crisis response plan on their school sites,” she said.
“We started to organize ourselves so that we could rapidly respond if there was an incident that occurred,” Su said. “It’s always very important for us to continue to prepare our students, and go through training like that in this particular situation.” Su added that so far, no federal agents, including those from ICE, have confronted students or family members at any public school.
“We will stay vigilant and continue to communicate clearly about any developments that may affect our school communities,” Su said.
“The overview that we got was basically like, ‘Don't worry about those possible scenarios, we’ll deal with those when we get there,’” Klafter said, referring to the Wednesday presentation. Martinez, SFUSD’s general counsel, advised principals that school staff should avoid physical conflict with federal agents.
The response from principals was, “OK, but what do we do if they don’t listen to us, or if they’re trying to force their way in?” Klafter said. “There were a lot of questions from the school leaders.
