Orange County students are returning to class this month as districts navigate an anxious back-to-school season shaped by immigration raids over the summer and the possibility that attendance drops could cut into school funding.
In Santa Ana, where school started Monday, teachers and administrators said they are watching student attendance closely, uncertain if fears from ongoing enforcement will keep some students at home.
Santa Ana Unified School District spokesperson Fermin Leal said the district had been preparing for months.
“We were looking at this issue all summer long coming into the new school year, and what we have been emphasizing is that our schools are safe havens,” Leal said. “We do not share any information with immigration, we do not let agents come onto our campuses without a judicial warrant.”
Santa Ana Unified has about 35,000 students. The district doesn’t track how many are undocumented or from mixed-status families for privacy reasons, but Leal said they know there’s a significant number because of the city they live in. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, roughly a quarter of Santa Ana’s residents are undocumented.
Leal said the district budgets for a 93% attendance rate, and even a small drop can mean a big financial hit. California schools are funded based on average daily attendance, or ADA, and Santa Ana Unified typically receives about $16,481 per student per year, though the amount can vary for students in special education or English learner programs.
This means that in Santa Ana, even a 0.5% drop in attendance over the school year could cost the district more than $2 million in the future.
“If we see anything below 90%, or even if you see a 1% drop, that’s going to be a significant loss in funding,” Leal said. “When we had the inauguration back in January, we did see our attendance drop in the first few days of that week by 30%. If that was sustained for weeks, that would be a significant drop in funding.”
Leal said summer school enrollment dipped by nearly 10%, which the district attributed to fears over immigration enforcement. Whether fears will carry into the fall remains unclear, he said.
“Whether we’re going to see drops is to be determined,” he said. “It’s going to be two weeks until we establish that baseline.”
Summer raids stir community anxiety
In July, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducted operations near a Santa Ana school that advocates say shook parents and students.
Sandra De Anda of the Orange County Rapid Response Network said several families contacted the group in the weeks before school with one main worry: “A lot of the students are scared that they’re going to come back home and see that their parents are missing.”
“Two weeks ago, there was an operation by a school in downtown Santa Ana where ICE and ATF showed up at a house in front of a fenced school and then a couple of days later, they came back again to that area,” De Anda said. “It was an issue of concern because it was a visible enforcement really close to a school.”
Maria, a Santa Ana resident, said she’s been sending her children to school while constantly worrying about their safety. She asked not to be identified by her full name because her immigration status puts her at risk of deportation. In her mixed-status household — where some family members are citizens, some are legal residents and others, including herself, are undocumented — the uncertainty has seeped into daily routines.
In years prior, she said mornings in her neighborhood were filled with the sound of parents walking their children to school. This year, the streets are hushed, and many children walk to school alone.
“We’d like to walk our kids to school,” Maria said. “But now it’s really quiet, everything is quiet.”
Maria said she’s worried about their ability to learn under such stress. Her children, like many, fell behind academically during the pandemic when learning was entirely virtual, she said.
“How is my kid going to learn if he’s nervous, is fearful, how is he going to learn?”
Maria also wants the district to expand transportation services. She said her oldest child, who is deaf, takes the bus to his special education program, but some kids in the neighborhood still have to walk more than 30 minutes to get to school.
Leal said the district currently provides transportation only for students with special needs, but “everything is on the table,” including expanding bus service and delivering meals to students who can’t attend school.
So far in the first days, attendance has been steady, he said. “The students who registered are the students who are showing up. So far, so good as far as daily attendance goes.”
Still, the district’s long-term budget could be affected. Associate Superintendent Ron Hacker explained that California’s “hold harmless” provision cushions districts with declining enrollment by funding them based on an average of the past three years’ attendance.
That means this year’s numbers won’t hit the budget immediately, but any sustained drop will reduce revenue for years to come.
“What happens this year affects revenue for the next three years,” Hacker said.
He added that it’s too early to know whether fear of immigration enforcement will keep students from attending school over the long term.
“The first week of school is always very dynamic. It will become clearer next week,” Hacker said. “Outside of ICE, there are always going to be students that can’t come to school … there are too many factors. One of the major ones that affects enrollment is the high cost of living that forces families to move away.”
In Garden Grove Unified, spokesperson Abby Broyles said the district launched a family helpline over the summer to replace resource centers closed over the break. Broyles said the helpline received more than 100 calls, many from families afraid to leave their homes for food.
Over the summer, students and staff, including athletics coaches, also organized food drives and food distribution events in the district.
“While we still had healthy participation in summer programs, we did see dips in attendance, especially during those weeks when immigration enforcement was occurring in the region,” Broyles said.
For the foreseeable future, the district has increased bus transportation in areas most affected by recent immigration enforcement, Broyles said, and schools have sent surveys to assess how these events are affecting families and what support they need.
Broyles said it’s too early to know if immigration fears will affect average daily attendance.
“We’re really doing our best to reassure families that school is the safest place for students,” she said. “We have strict protocols in place on what to do if immigration agents come onto the campus or even near the campus, and we’ve trained all of our staff on that.”
On the first day of school, Garden Grove school board Trustee Walter Muneton said turnout appeared solid (Broyles said the same), but there’s still fear in the community.
“A lot of the families have a hard time differentiating whether this is local, federal or the state,” Muneton said of the ICE detentions. “From what I’ve seen, and I’ve heard, there’s still a lot of fear, still a lot of concern.”
Muneton said the district connects students experiencing family trauma with its own mental health resources, including in-house social workers trained in trauma-informed care.
Some districts have been emphasizing early contact with families. In Capistrano Unified, spokesperson Ryan Burris said bilingual liaisons returned six days early to call and meet with parents about safety concerns and learning options.
“We do have the option of enrolling students 100% virtual,” Burris said, though he noted the pandemic showed it’s “not an ideal way for many students to learn.”
Burris also noted that while the district overall had low numbers of absences for summer programs, schools with a higher number of English language learners had much higher levels of absences.
“Summer program staff reached out to these families by phone and email to help increase attendance. Some families did directly indicate student absences related to immigration fears,” Burris said, “however, we also know from previous summers that free summer programs often have more sporadic attendance.”
In Orange Unified, Superintendent Rachel Monarrez said the district is expanding outreach through its student support and community engagement division. She said principals received updated immigration guidance in January, but summer enforcement activity prompted more discussions.
“We have created a protocol where we closely monitor attendance, especially the first couple of weeks of school, because we want to make sure that families know school has started, make sure our staffing is correct and that our classes are balanced,” she said.
The district is offering short-term independent study or its virtual academy for families who do not feel safe sending children in person.
“We will continue to encourage them to put their child back into the regular setting. But it would not be fair for me to try to understand what this might feel like for a family or for any of my staff who may not live in the same circumstances, with mixed documentation in the home and whatever else is going on,” Monarrez said.
Monarrez acknowledged that lower attendance can have a financial impact, which is part of the reason why the district offers options for students to “help mitigate the loss of funding while creating the opportunity for us to educate.”
“Our guiding principle, though, is children in school so we can educate them, because that’s why we exist,” Monarrez said. “It really goes back to meeting the need and meeting the family where they’re at.”
Santa Ana Unified trustee Valerie Magdaleno said her district is also allocating staff to schools near reported enforcement sites and offering its Santa Ana Virtual Academy for students who prefer to learn from home.
“We just want to make sure that we cover all of our bases and we have opportunities for our students to continue learning, regardless of whatever they’re facing at home,” she said.
Countywide picture still forming
Orange County Department of Education spokesperson Ian Hanigan said the department has not received specific reports tying immigration enforcement to attendance changes.
“That said, most districts in Orange County haven’t started the new school year yet, so it may be too early to fully assess enrollment or attendance patterns,” Hanigan said.
In Orange County, 16 districts had begun classes as of Friday, a few the week prior, but most in the last several days, meaning concrete attendance data is still weeks away.
While recent concerns over delayed federal education funds have eased — the administration recently released the money it had originally held back — local funding from the state remains tied to daily attendance.
“So district leaders are always monitoring attendance patterns closely,” Hanigan said.
As Leal put it in Santa Ana:
“If there’s another enforcement like we had over the summer, protests and high-profile arrests that prompted lots of parents to keep kids home, that might cause a significant drop in attendance. But we can’t predict what’s going to happen.”