With its arrows and boxes explaining “Campus Procedure,” the newest flow chart from the Garland Independent School District looks like instructions for handling weather emergencies -- a tornado, perhaps, or a Code Red day.

But this diagram has nothing to do with the weather. It’s called “Parental Deportations,” and it tells staff at the 57,000-student district near Dallas what to do if parents are detained in a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). About 43 percent of Garland students are Hispanic; the number who are illegal immigrants is unknown.

“This is relatively new to a lot of school districts,” Clyde Schilling, principal of South Gate Elementary School in Garland, told the Dallas Morning News. “I don’t think it’s a topic of discussion at the lunch table, but as you imagine, it is very upsetting when it happens to any of your students.”

District offices don’t anticipate any raids, but they don’t want what transpired in places like Postville, Iowa, to happen in Garland. As Senior Editor Del Stover describes in ASBJ’s September Special Report, “Immigration and Diversity,” nearly 200 of Postville’s students -- one-third of its enrollment -- were affected.

“We had kids crying and going crazy,” Chad Wahls, a principal in the town’s combined elementary/middle school, told Stover. “They knew mom or dad was at work [at the nearby meatpacking plant], and they were saying, ‘They’re taking them. They’re taking them.’”

Now, districts like Garland are writing contingency plans for responding to ICE raids, telling staff, for example, not to let students get on buses if their parents are detained and to try instead to have one of six emergency contacts -- provided earlier by all parents -- pick them up.

For more information on the effect of immigration raids on families, see also the Urban Institute report: “Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children.”

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor