• By Morgan Craven, J.D. • IDRA Newsletter • January 2025 •Morgan Craven photo

All families must be part of building excellent and equitable schools regardless of their racial or ethnic background or socio-economic status. IDRA’s goal has always been bigger than family involvement in education.

We are focused on parent and family leadership in shaping the policies and practices in schools and the deep relationship building this requires. Our Family Leadership in Education model is a vision of all families as advocates for a high-quality and inclusive public education system, for their own children and for others.

Policies, including executive orders, that threaten families’ access to public schools are extremely callous and harmful. In addition to the climate of chaos and fear that targeting specific families, like immigrant families, creates, there are real, practical dangers that exclusion causes.

Take just a moment to think about what it would mean for a parent to feel unwelcome or unsafe at their child’s school. Excluded parents could face barriers to:

  • Advocating for their child with disabilities and protecting that child’s legal right to critical services;
  • Understanding their child’s academic progress and supporting their learning at home;
  • Supporting their child if they were being bullied or harassed;
  • Speaking with teachers about the personal or home challenges their child may be facing that could impact their learning;
  • Responding quickly if their child became sick or experienced an emergency
  • Providing support for their child if they were disciplined in school; and
  • Attending extracurricular activities, school plays, sports, and other important milestones in their child’s life.

Excluding immigrant families is detrimental to the academic and social well-being of children. Policies of exclusion are cruel. They terrify students, and they threaten to rob parents of the most basic and human need to protect and support their children.

Such policies also destabilize whole school communities. They threaten the safety of all teachers, students and families, including those who are not immigrants. These are not “common sense” policies.

It is not in the interest of any child, family or teacher to be under constant threat of sudden and targeted law enforcement intervention.

School leaders must remember their mission to create safe and welcoming environments for all students and

families, and the legal obligations they have to ensure there are no barriers that create a real or chilling effect on the right to access school.

For more information about school leaders’ obligation to ensure access to all children, and strategies to ensure schools are safe and welcoming, see https://idra.news/ImmigEd.


Morgan Craven, J.D., is the IDRA national director of policy, advocacy and community engagement. Comments and questions may be directed to her via email at morgan.craven@idra.org.


[© 2025, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the January edition of the IDRA Newsletter. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]

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