Last week, many classrooms were quieter, parent groups and text chains lit up with offers of help and walkouts roiled campuses. Students and educators shared stories with WFAE of how schools across the district bore the weight of this past week’s immigration enforcement.
Roughly one in five students was absent than normal across the district. Many reported empty classrooms and carpool lines. Students at Olympic High School organized a town hall. School communities organized food drives. Staff gave students rides to and from school when parents were too afraid to leave their homes. And the images of student walkouts and protests drew national attention.
Protests happened at Hawthorne Academy of Health Sciences, East Mecklenburg High School, South Mecklenburg High School, Phillip O. Berry Academy and Ballantyne Ridge High School, to name a few. Students held signs and chanted things like “No more ICE.”
At Tuesday’s school board meeting, several educators shared harrowing stories of the tension they’re seeing — even among students here legally. Here’s Amanda Thompson, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators.
“CMAE building captains are reporting heartbreaking stories,” Thompson said. “A child arriving with a handwritten tag saying ‘I am a US citizen.’ A parent messaging the school saying, ‘My child is carrying their passport today to school.’”
Providence High School senior Lucy Silverstein is the board’s student advisor. She spoke to what she’s seen around the district.
“From what I've seen in the last couple of days, the atmosphere in our schools has felt different, almost like a quiet tension hanging in the air. Some hallways that are normally loud and full of life have felt unusually still.”
Rafael Ramirez has seen that tension firsthand. He’s a curriculum specialist with CMS who works at several schools across the district. And while there have been no instances of immigration enforcement on school grounds, he said the fear lingers.
“So it's draining the staff, it's draining the students, it's draining the teachers because also when you walk in some of the classrooms, there are classrooms that have just half of their students,” he said. “I walked in a classroom that should have 27 students and only six showed up.”
Ramirez has been working to deliver groceries to families and pick up and drop off students whose parents fear leaving their homes. He said he knows of many people here legally who are still staying home because they worry about being racially profiled – he himself has had concerns. Students fear being detained or seeing their parents detained or deported.
“I've heard students saying, what if I come back and my parents are not home?” Ramirez said. “What would I do? Where am I going to get my food? Who's going to take care of me? Who's going to provide for me? Will I need to go back with my parents?”
At East Mecklenburg High School, where around 40% of the student body is Hispanic and absentee rates increased early in the week, the school community has taken action. That created its own disputes.
F., a senior at East Meck who WFAE is only identifying by her first initial due to concerns about disciplinary action, said the school environment was tense, especially early in the week.
“I definitely noticed that there was just a lot less, like, foot traffic, teachers weren't like speaking to students as much. It just felt very tense for the people that were there,” she said.
Students tried to arrange a walkout and protest during homeroom on Monday, but school administrators warned that all protests needed to be planned and approved, and unplanned protests could result in discipline. Students held an approved walkout the following day, but F. says she was disappointed it was held on the school’s track.
“It kind of felt like administration was kind of just throwing a band-aid over it, kind of being like, well, here you can protest,” she said. “But protest to me feels like we're trying to incite some sort of change in society and get our word out. And it feels like we can't when we're just protesting to ourselves in the back of the school.”
The Border Patrol says they arrested around 370 people this week in Charlotte. Despite claims they’re targeting “the worst of the worst”, the agency has largely not answered questions about who they’ve arrested, what they’ve been charged with or where detainees are being held.
The surge of Operation Charlotte’s Web has ended, though officials have said that normal levels of immigration enforcement will continue. Ramirez, the CMS curriculum specialist, says he believes the operation’s effects on students will linger. Students will have to catch up on what they missed, making up exams and assignments amid continued uncertainty at home.
“The fear is not going to go away that easy,” Ramirez said. “It's going to stay there for a little bit. And some of our families are going to be a little bit reluctant to come back to the buildings, come back to normal life because they're going to be afraid.”
