Schools Are Eerily Quiet About the Election Results, Educators Say

On the morning after the election, Chanea Bond’s day started with a group hug with three students.

“Are you OK?” the students asked her. Bond nodded and hugged them back. The group silently registered their deep disappointment with former President Donald Trump’s victory, called just hours before. The English teacher in northern Texas wasn’t scheduled to go into work on Wednesday but went anyway because she “wanted to be there” for her community, she told Education Week.

Trump’s decisive win over his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has resurfaced the sharp political and ideological divisions across the country, and teachers, as always, are left to help their students navigate the new reality.

Many public school educators have specific concerns about the win—the Trump campaign has made promises to abolish the Department of Education, slash K-12 funding, make the principalship an elected position, and curtail protections for transgender youth. Trump’s recent campaign has also fueled a consistent negative rhetoric against immigrant families, who now make up a significant portion of students in U.S. schools.

In classrooms across the country, though, the disappointment, anger, or celebrations among students has been muted. Education Week spoke to educators from states spanning Vermont to Nevada who said that while students may be hopeful, confused, angry, or disappointed, there’s no “shock factor” to the results—not like there was in 2016, when Trump first clinched control of the White House. Then, teachers reported tears and outbursts in the classroom, with students in a handful of schools walking out in protest.

“It’s been normal-ish. I don’t think it’s shock. No one was ultra hopeful because we live in Texas. There is an air of support [for each other] in the school,” said Bond, who teaches in a school with a large proportion of Black and Hispanic students, and students with disabilities.

In 2016, Bond said her immigrant students, some with undocumented parents, didn’t know what to expect.

“The fear was palpable then. They were coming up to me, asking me if they’d get deported,” she said. “That fear is a lot less palpable this time because students are better informed and less confused.”

A day later, though, Bond said a few immigrant students did bring up concerns that their undocumented parents would be deported. “They said they were preparing for it,” she said.

It’s been “fairly quiet” in Courtney Capozzoli’s classes, too, both in the run-up to the election and after the results came out. Capozzoli is a high school science teacher in Watauga County in North Carolina, which is still reeling from the aftermath of a devastating hurricane.

“That has been our biggest tragedy,” she said. “When all kinds of people came together, political orientation didn’t matter. I’m grateful for that.”

Even though talking about politics has become temporarily “taboo” in her community, Capozzoli said, she’s personally “hugely disappointed, fearful, and shocked” by Trump’s victory.

Fifty percent of educators had planned to vote for Harris, according to a nationally representative survey from the EdWeek Research Center that was conducted Sept. 28 to Oct. 8. Thirty-nine percent of educators said they would vote for Trump, and 11 percent planned at the time to cast their ballot for a third-party candidate.

The educators who voted for Harris must now balance their own personal feelings about the election result with their responsibilities to their students, who may be reluctant to talk politics.

“Some of us screamed on the way to work,” Capozzoli said.

How teachers handled reactions in class

Bond said it’s important for teachers to process their own feelings about the results before they address their students, since that will lead to more fruitful discussions. That’s why, she added, she didn’t specifically bring up the election in her classes on Wednesday.

Mario Fitzpatrick, a long-time high school social studies teacher in Reno, Nev., said he felt comfortable with the questions and concerns that came up in his political science class. Without trying to give explicit reasons why Trump won, his class instead examined local factors—rising gas and food prices, unemployment, and housing costs—that motivate people’s voting patterns.

“They wanted to know why Nevada broke the trend of voting for a Democratic candidate, which it has done going all the way back to Obama,” said Fitzpatrick.

Fitzpatrick also talked with students about who Trump planned to tap for cabinet positions, and the checks and balances at play, like confirmation hearings, before people are selected for these posts. Students had questions, too, about why the actual results seemed to veer away from what the polls indicated.

Like Bond, Fitzpatrick said there was “less surprise” among his students compared to 2016. But students’ concerns around the anti-immigrant rhetoric and abortion bans—especially from the girls in his class—haven’t dissipated, he said. Harris had been a clear favorite in a mock election held by Fitzpatrick’s class.

“Some students also worried about going to college. They’ve heard about the plans to [abolish the Education Department], so they’re worried about financial aid,” he said.

Fitzpatrick has taught through several elections in his 15 years in the classroom, so he knows how to manage students who may be put on edge by political rhetoric, he said: “I let them voice what they’re curious about.”

In her English classes, Bond has worked on getting her students to understand different points of view.

“We take a people-centered approach to talking about communities. We talk about them as survivors and not victims. I have students from different faiths and socio-economic backgrounds so there has to be some sort of norm for each other’s humanity,” said Bond. She hopes this will translate to how students talk through divisive issues.

Capozzoli, who avoided bringing up any political discussions in her classes, said she focused on good research practices instead, stressing the importance of trustworthy sources.

“I told them evidence matters. Evidence isn’t based on someone’s opinion,” she said. “I don’t know if they picked up on what I was trying to say.”

Cappozoli is worried that under a Trump presidency, teaching concepts like climate change will get much harder, as it was the first time around, she said.

Principals call for civility in the aftermath

Fitzpatrick and Capozzoli said they didn’t get any specific guidelines from their administrators on how to talk about the election results or what topics to avoid.

Other principals, like Chris Young in Newport, Vt., were more hands on.

The day before the election, Young held a faculty meeting on how to handle students’ anxieties and questions. Social studies teachers at his high school had also talked to students about keeping classroom conversations civil, even if their preferred candidate didn’t win. In other classes, Young advised teachers to not get into big discussions.

“Today was just not the day,” he said on Nov. 6. “I didn’t want parents to call me asking why my math teachers are talking about politics.”

North Country Union High School is located in a mostly red part of the state. Still, Young recognized that there might be students who feel anxious or uncomfortable about Trump’s return to office.

“We’re going to lean on our counselors and our affinity spaces for LGBTQ+ and students of color,” he said. “We are going to have conversations about valuing every student’s identity.”

Mostly, though, Young is relieved that there’s been no overt disruption in school. This election, students brought a lot less campaign paraphernalia than they did eight years ago, which has made it easier for the school to deal with the election results, he said.

Adam Clemons, the principal of Piedmont High School inMadison County, Ala., said he’s left it up to his students to talk out any potential differences over who they think should be president.

“Everybody is going to have an emotional reaction. Adults tend to put pressure on kids to respond a certain way. Kids are going to be happy if their side wins, and they’re going to be disappointed if their side loses, but they get up the next morning and they tend to shake it off,” Clemons said. “Students are resilient.”