The Durham Public Schools (DPS) board of education voted last week to modify its immigration-enforcement related school policies.
The board’s recent changes to policy 5120 won’t change much in practice. At recent meetings, administrators repeated that district and building administrators already followed the now-policy, but the board’s vote makes those provisions more official, gives a clearer path for recourse if they’re broken, and gives the public more insight into how the district may respond to enforcement situations.
The policy update, which spells out broad protocol for law enforcement’s access to schools and student information, meets some, but certainly not all of, the requests of groups like the district’s union staff, the Durham Association of Educators (DAE).
The DAE and some parents have put pressure on the board and administration, arguing that the district does not have a sufficient public policy for families to look over.
That pressure gained new urgency in November when Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents carried out sweeps in the Triangle, causing at least 20 percent of DPS students to stay home as parents worried about agents showing up to schools, bus stops, and pickup lines.
While there was no confirmed activity at Durham schools, that pushed the board to pass a November resolution to, among other provisions, direct the superintendent to “ensure training for all school personnel on the district’s protocols for responding to requests from immigration authorities.” The DAE would still like to see the district attempt to protect students even beyond school grounds.
The updated policies don’t present much defense against masked agents if they show up at schools. But they do reinstate many of the changes that a previous iteration of the board passed in 2017 and then were apparently unintentionally pared down in a bureaucratic shuffle of policy reordering and consolidation.
The changes made by the board’s December 11 vote include:
- The various memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with the local law enforcement bodies that work with and within DPS shall be posted publicly. That includes the Durham Sheriff’s department, which provides the student resource officers inside schools.
- Contact between schools and law enforcement officers should, whenever possible, be initiated through the superintendent’s office or through school administration, officers should report to the school’s main office before visiting a school, and school principals shall notify the superintendent’s office of warrants served at school.
- Law enforcement officers, including the resource officers working for the local sheriff’s department, will have limited access to confidential student information absent a judicial order, subpoena, or to address a safety or health emergency.
- Any request to gather information or access a school site by “any law enforcement officer or federal agency for immigration enforcement or monitoring purposes” shall be forwarded to the superintendent, who will immediately notify the board.
The board is not done looking at policies procedures regarding the district’s relationship with law enforcement. The policy committee and full board are set to discuss further changes in January, including an evaluation of if and how the district should provide translation services to students who do not speak English as their primary language if they are questioned by law enforcement on school grounds.
Another part of that conversation may be driven by a draft document of “community suggestions” from the (DAE) and other community members, which envisions more muscular DPS authority against immigration officials.
That draft, which board members have not spoken about in any detail, would extend a broad bubble of protection beyond school buildings. It states that “non-local law enforcement . . . are not permitted to arrest any students on school premises or at a school event. This includes parking lots, bus stops, on buses, sporting events, meetings, dances, field trips, in any part of the school building, classrooms, traveling to and from school/a school event, etc.”
The board seems unlikely to try to push the legal jurisdiction of a local school district—in conversations around the recent policy changes, members repeatedly asked the board’s lawyer how legally sound the language was and backed away from anything they saw as potential overreach.
But the DAE may be done, at least for now, pushing the district on the policy. For the first time this year, the policy is not on the agenda for the upcoming meet and confer session between the DAE and the superintendent.
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