Chicago school board members call for remote learning amid ICE raids
Some members of the Chicago Board of Education are calling for virtual learning options for students in the face of ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the city.
The members spoke at a board meeting just hours after a 17-year-old Benito Juarez High School student was detained on his way to school during an anti-ICE protest in Little Village, according to a letter sent to parents, obtained by Chicago ABC station WLS.
"We have received reports of federal law enforcement activity in a nearby neighborhood, and I am very sorry to share that a member of our school community was impacted," the letter from Chicago Public Schools reads.
The student was later released without charges, according to WLS. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment on the student's arrest.
"I marked a junior student absent, not because that student was sick... it was because ICE had snatched him up on his way to school," Benito Juarez Community Academy teacher Liz Winfield told WLS. "It's a sense of unease. It's a sense of anger and frustration. It's a lot of students calling in, or parents calling in saying, 'I don't feel safe.'"
At the school board meeting Thursday, some school board members asked for virtual learning options in the face of ongoing ICE activity.
"Our parents are asking for remote learning if possible," board member Emma Lozano said at the meeting. "It is an emergency. Period. This is an emergency right now. So we need to figure that out whether we go to the governor all together, we write a letter, we do what we have to do, we march, we do everything, but it is an emergency right now."
Karen Zaccor, another board member, also said the school district should figure out a way to have virtual learning.
"I think we all understand that it's very difficult, a lot of obstacles to that," she said at the meeting. "I'm just hoping we can figure out a way to work together to make it work for the many families that are telling us they really are too fearful to allow their children to come to school."
However, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Macquline King said during the meeting that only Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker could authorize virtual learning for the district in "emergency" situations.
“As a district, CPS does not have the authority to call remote learning,” she said. “We should have a remote learning plan in the event of an emergency. But if the governor does not call a state of emergency, we do not have the ability to just send the district into remote learning.”
Destiny Singleton, an honorary student member of CPS and a senior at Ogden International School of Chicago, said that as a student she feels the presence of ICE in the city every day.
“We feel the weight of ICE in our city and in our country,” she said at the meeting “Students have been posting minute-by-minute updates on ICE agent locations in hopes to protect our fellow students,” she added. “I feel like we shouldn’t do this because we’re children, and we shouldn’t need to protect ourselves in this way, and we are terrified.”
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) also argued for virtual learning options at the school board meeting
"When a child stays home because their route to school feels unsafe, that's not an attendance problem, everybody, that's a failure of protection," said Vicki Kurzydlo, the CTU recording secretary. "I'm hearing from educators whose classrooms are half empty because families are scared."
In a memo last month, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin pushed back against accusations that ICE is arresting children.
"ICE is not conducting enforcement operations at, or 'raiding,' schools. ICE is not going to schools to make arrests of children," the statement reads.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has previously vowed to keep DHS out of the city's schools.
"The illegal deployment of the National Guard in our city and the escalation of ICE raids do nothing to keep our young people safe. In fact, it makes them afraid and disrupts their learning,” he said at an October press conference.
The school district did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.
