This is the first installment of a series exploring how schools are responding to the election of Donald Trump.
Andrea Reyna’s students, most of whom are Latino, asked her if her bags were packed. They were certain she, a woman of Mexican descent, would have to leave. One student at her San José, California, school apparently ran into her arms sobbing. A box of tissues soon emptied, and kids squeezed the classroom stuffed animals tight. She and the other teachers tried to put up a strong face, but it didn’t always work. “Our kids are more perceptive than that,” she said. “They could see the fear and how upset the adults were.”
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory at the polls, teachers across the country are finding themselves trying to impart more than just science lessons and math theorems. Educators have spent the past few days trying to explain to a student body that has now shifted to mostly nonwhite from white how a man who has threatened to deport Mexicans and ban Muslims and resurrect stop-and-frisk has earned the title of president-elect. Others are trying to explain to their pupils that they think the outcome is a good thing—an upshot that, in the words of the seventh-grade Phoenix teacher Patricia Farley, will “unite America and make it strong again.”
Armed with tissues and hugs, journal prompts and mock-campaign assignments, Harry Potter and the Socratic Method, these educators have worked to give students both a comfortable space to process the outcome and a healthy dose of reality. They’ve tried to foster respectful dialogue in classrooms where some children come from Trump-loving families and others come from families terrified the president-elect will bring great harm. They’ve found themselves fielding concerns that the business mogul’s prospective role as commander in chief would come with extreme, sometimes surreal, consequences. In some cases, they’ve guided these conversations in stalwart defiance of school leadership who would rather avoid conversations about the whole thing.
In the last week, we’ve interviewed close to 40 teachers and counselors (and a few students, too) around the country—in places like Seattle; Houston; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Olivet, Michigan—about how the election results are playing out in schools. Nationally, more than 80 percent of public-school teachers are white, and the vast majority are female. The profession also skews heavily Democratic: According to one analysis, just one in five teachers identifies as Republican. And while we’ve attempted to gain insight from a politically and racially diverse array of voices, that reality is reflected in the teachers we interviewed.
Over the next five days, we’ll publish a piece daily that explores how teachers and other educators are navigating the election and its results with their students—and vice versa. Where teachers were comfortable giving their names and schools, we’ve listed them. Where teachers preferred to remain somewhat anonymous—in some cases because they openly defied school leaders in discussing the election with students and in others because they have not revealed personal details like sexuality and political affiliation to colleagues—we’ve eliminated certain identifying information. It should be noted that almost all of these contacts were curated based on social-media inquiries, so the teachers represented in this series are not necessarily a proxy for the U.S. teaching force at large. Up first, a look at how students reacted to the election results.
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Christina Torres, a high-school English teacher at Hawaii’s public chartered University Laboratory School, said she started bawling on election night when a friend asked what she was going to tell her students the following day. Until then, the prospect hadn’t even occurred to her: “That’s when I kind of lost it,” said Torres, who’s originally from southern California.
“Normally, my kids are what make me feel hopeful when the world is awry ... [as a teacher,] you get to interact with tiny humans who are the next generation,” she said. “My worry [Wednesday], for a lot of my kids, was that I was going to have to be that source of hope or the message that it’s going to be okay.”
Torres, like most of the teachers we spoke with, has students who are immigrants or identify as Muslim. For many of those children, Wednesday was marked by intense—and in some cases amplified or otherwise distorted—fears about what the election results mean for their futures.
Gregory Michie teaches seventh- and eighth-grade social studies at a public school in Chicago that serves a large immigrant population—he estimates about 95 percent of students are either immigrants themselves or are the children of immigrants. Many students, he said, expressed concerns for the safety of their families. “This one kid, a couple days in a row [leading up to the election], had said, ‘Mr. Michie, if Donald Trump deports my mom, can I come live with your family?’ It’s awful. My initial impulse is to want to make that student feel safe and feel okay.”
Teachers across the country fielded similar fears. “Are we going got be sent back to the places we were born tomorrow?” one 8-year-old reportedly asked Angela B., a music teacher at a school in southwest Philadelphia. Angela is white, but virtually all of her students are of color, and many fear Trump’s election means instant deportation.
“I’m going to die today,” a first-grader at her school said as he got out of his family’s car Wednesday morning. He’d heard that as president, Trump would push a button and send a bomb that would blow everyone up.
Similarly, Aly A., who teaches science at a high-poverty and predominantly black middle school in Miami, said two students on separate occasions asked her whether the new presidential administration would reinstate slavery.
“They are upset, and they think that somehow this new president can change things right away,” said Angela, the Philadelphia teacher. “But as educators and people they trust, we need to keep reminding them that they are cared for and protected and, as much as we can, we’re going to stick up for them.”
“I’m happy Trump won,” came the occasional whisper in Karissa Devore’s first-grade classroom at an international school in Denver full of multilingual, multicultural kids who she said mostly felt scared. How could she prevent those kids from being ostracized while making sure other kids felt safe?
“He hates people from other countries, which means he hates my family,” other kids at the school allegedly proclaimed. One little boy poured his feelings into art. His journal entry that day featured a picture of Donald Trump jailed behind bars. “The general sense of disbelief that was pervading among adults was affecting them and making them feel uncertain,” Devore said, “and with little kids, that’s not a good thing for them to feel.”
At Dolores T. Aaron Academy on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, the music teacher Andy Bower’s morning started with a question from a student that was hard to answer. “Can you keep me safe?” a fifth-grade black girl reportedly asked Bower, a white man. “I saw the news this morning.” He gave her a hug and tried to reassure her—but how is a teacher supposed to respond to that?
“They see the speeches and they hear the sound bites and they don’t necessarily have a ton of context for how the political process works,” Bower said. “So to a kid, if someone says ‘I’m going to deport people’ and then they win the presidency, they don’t necessarily understand what sort of steps would have to be taken to do that.”
At Emily Moscol’s school in Southern California, a private middle- and high-school with mostly white students, sexism more than racism was the topic of the day, with teenage girls telling teenage boys they felt sad and scared. One boy supposedly said, “Yes, my mom talked to me about how disappointed she was, and so I definitely understand that.” That’s not the kind of thing that teachers expect to come out of an adolescent boy’s mouth. “I was surprised,” Moscol said, “because I don’t always see that kind of empathy amongst teenagers.”
Those silver linings were harder to find at first for David Quinn, the International Baccalaureate coordinator at Edmonds-Woodway High School north of Seattle. On Wednesday morning, a girl walked into his office afraid she’d be deported. She’s an American citizen. Why, he asked, was she worried? “Because people here are going to hate me,” came the reply. Not here, he replied—not going to happen.
“It was a hard day,” he said. But then came a rare thank-you note, from a former student—an Iranian who can’t vote and often feels like an outsider. In class, though, he wrote, “I was an insider.” Quinn had been keeping it together but that was too much. He lost it.
Indeed, educators as a whole seemed to reject that the surprising election results would interfere with learning. “We’re not letting it stew,” said Meria Castarphen, the superintendent of Atlanta Public schools, on Thursday, two days after the election. “Yesterday, [teachers] spent more time talking to kids about the election—there were concerns about kids who were immigrants, minorities, Hispanics ... Today, we’re trying to do a really good job moving back into their normal rhythm.”
“We’re all just working,” continued Castarphen, who’s black. “I’ll leave it at that.”
Kate Roseman teaches music at an all-girls K-8 private school in San Francisco. Some students arrived on Wednesday with tears streaming down their cheeks. Others were outraged. One first-grader, according to Roseman, demanded to know how a “bully” like Trump got to be president in the first place. But then the principal gathered everyone together for an assembly. “When we sang ‘America the Beautiful,’ our principal addressed that it was okay to choose not sing, and it was okay to sing, even if you didn't feel like America was ‘beautiful’ at the moment,” said Roseman in an email.
Sophie, a teacher in the Chalmette area of St. Bernard Parish just outside of New Orleans, wanted to help her students process the election. But her principal didn’t want teachers bringing it up. She told Sophie and the school’s other teachers not to talk about the election. If you must talk politics, she said, focus on the student-council race. But Sophie couldn’t avoid it—not when the first child she encountered, a sixth-grader, certain she’d be deported, reportedly said, “I’m going to miss you.”
When one little boy said he’d have voted for Trump, a little Muslim girl got up and moved seats. Talk to each other, Sophie urged; ask questions. Later, a little girl wearing a traditional Muslim headscarf piped up. “This is a hijab,” she said to her classmates. “It’s really hot. I don’t sleep in it. If you have questions, ask me—don’t say terrible things.”
“Let’s have real talk,” Sophie told the children, crying as she outlined why she, a woman of color, was terrified of the election results. “I couldn’t hold it in anymore,” she said. “It was probably the hardest day I’ve ever had teaching, but it was the most rewarding day I’ve ever had teaching.”