School Board Members respond to concerns about ICE guidance and counter rumors that Hawthorne schools will close

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the January 20 School Board of Alachua County meeting, Board Members responded to comments from the public about the district’s guidance on interactions with ICE agents and countered rumors that there are plans to close schools in Hawthorne.

Concerns about the ICE guidance during public comment

During public comment on non-agenda items, Amy Schwarzer said she was concerned about the district’s policy about ICE access to schools: “Currently, they are not required to provide identification or a judicial warrant to enter our schools, which I find utterly absurd, and I don’t know why this has not been addressed… We are a liberal school district overall — not all constituents, I understand that, but we are a liberal county in a red state, and you all have stood up for a lot of things over the last five years… I understand that we stick out sometimes like a sore thumb, but… we’ve seen what ICE is doing in multiple places in this country… Our silence is not going to keep our children safe. And honestly, if it’s a difference between keeping you all safe from the State coming after you and the children safe, I choose the children.”

Wendy Wood said, “We’ve seen the atrocities happening across our country… We do not want to see that in our schools… Silence is violence. If you are not choosing to make a policy to protect our children, you are choosing to let these ICE agents perpetuate violence upon our students… We need to have the policy say that anyone coming there, saying they are an ICE agent, needs to produce ID, and they need to produce a judicial warrant… We know that they are not vetting these ICE agents. They can have records. They can be abusers. So we do not want those people coming with no oversight into our schools.”

Tina Days, whose main topic was gratitude that the UFLI reading program is coming to the Duval Pre-K program, added, “I see what’s happening in Minnesota. They have gone in daycare centers, the same day that that poor woman dropped off her six-year-old son and got killed… If y’all don’t want to do anything, these teenagers gonna protect their friends when ICE comes on the campus. They’re not even trained. It was six months; they’re not even six weeks. They don’t even know how to use a gun… These kids are going to protect their friends, and if something happens to these kids, the blood is going to be on your hands.”

Concerns about Hawthorne schools during public comment

During public comment on agenda items, Jancie Vinson said she was concerned about the possibility of closing schools in Hawthorne, and Hawthorne Mayor Jacquelyn Randall and City Manager Robert Thompson also expressed their concerns about that topic. Randall said, “I want to charge you all to not govern rural schools like you govern inner-city schools. We are not the same.” 

Heather Surrency said, “Here we are again, eight years later, fighting for our kids in Hawthorne to not only keep our school open but to create quality education for our students… What are y’all doing up here? Because whatever it is, it’s not working. We need to get back to the basics, this district and its policies, we need to put structure, discipline, and accountability, with real consequences… People are leaving public schools for a reason. Parents are tired of a lack of quality education and behavioral issues.”

Matt Surrency said reliable transportation is an issue in getting students to Hawthorne schools, “so if you’re going to bus them somewhere else, that’s going to make it even worse… We need your help with saving the school, but not just keeping it open — making it better, and then trying to figure out how we can retain the good people that we do have, like [Coach Cornelius Ingram], that we’re trying not to lose right now.”

Zachary Hand cited Hawthorne’s eight state athletic championships: “Imagine what we could do with more funding and more resources… We’re champions. I mean, truly, we’ve accomplished more as a school than any other school in Alachua County, and yet we still see more going over to the west side.” He said that closing Hawthorne Middle/Senior High would “break Hawthorne.”

Donna Crofoot and Terry Wells also spoke in favor of keeping the Hawthorne schools open.

2026-27 school calendar

The board approved the school calendar for the 2026-27 school year; click here to see the 2026-27 calendar.

Board Members address Hawthorne concerns

Later in the meeting, Member Tina Certain addressed the comments from Hawthorne residents and said the possibility of closing Hawthorne schools had “never been discussed amongst us as a Board, never been discussed with me by [Superintendent] Dr. Patton… There has been no decision made, or no discussion that we’ve had collectively about closing any schools.”

Certain acknowledged that the district has seen a decline in enrollment, “in particular in our schools in the eastern quadrant.” She said she had been advocating for re-evaluating the attendance boundaries since before she was elected to the School Board, but “decisions haven’t been made… We have to look at it holistically, because if we make decisions in an emotional way and just say we don’t want to cut this and we don’t want to change that, we’ll end up with an untenable situation, where a decision will be taken out of our hands locally and will be made by… outside people, if we get a financial overseer… The landscape of public education has changed to where we have to change.”

Member Janine Plavac thanked Heather Surrency for bringing up behavior and expectations “because I think a lot of the times, the reason these kids are leaving our public schools is because of that.” She said the district should look at what Hawthorne has to offer and consider putting another magnet program in Hawthorne to draw students to that school. She continued, “I mean, kids go to GHS from Hawthorne. Why can’t we put a magnet [in Hawthorne]?”

Member Sarah Rockwell agreed, “I have never heard or mentioned closing the Hawthorne schools as even an option. I mean, where would all those kids go? Where would we bus those kids to?… We need to invest in Hawthorne.” She said she understands how much “a school is the backbone of a [rural] community,… but all of our schools are centers of their communities. It’s just whether there’s another school two miles away that could fill that gap, or whether that other school is 15 or 20 miles away — that’s a huge difference, when you’re talking about a school as the center of a community.”

Chair Thomas Vu thanked the Hawthorne residents for coming out and said he agreed with the statements from the other Board Members, but he took issue with people who said the Board isn’t being truthful: “I’m pretty sure all five of us up here have the exact same information, and none of us have seen maps.”

Member Leanetta McNealy said she would “not sit here ever and not fight for [Hawthorne]… I will fight and fight and fight again for this community to be whole.”

Union update 

During the Alachua County Education Association update, President Carmen Ward urged public school educators to talk to her about going to Tallahassee to help the union promote public schools in their “Target Tallahassee” effort. She said that without the One Mill and the half-penny sales tax, “we wouldn’t have any arts [in this district].”

Ward also said the district’s ICE policy is “not appropriate because it does not cover what it needs to cover, and all this has been brought up many, many times, and I’m going to continue to remind our district that we can do better when it comes to our ICE procedure.” She said the guidance does not require “appropriate documentation from people that come into our schools, and we need to make some changes.”

Board Members address ICE concerns

During Board Member Announcements, Rockwell said she’d had multiple conversations with the Superintendent and with Attorney David Delaney about the ICE guidance, and “one of my biggest concerns is the lack of requiring ID… If we were to allow anyone not wearing an ICE vest past a sally port entry without appropriate identification, we would be in serious, serious trouble, and I could go to Amazon right now and buy a vest and borrow my sister-in-law’s Cricket and put whatever logo I wanted to on it. That does not make me a federal officer.” She said Patton told her the legal team is meeting this week to work on revisions to the guidance. She said the guidance is not policy, so the Board doesn’t vote on it, but “I am getting to the point with this ICE procedure where, if we do not have guidance that I feel like is protecting our students in our schools, I will speak with Mr. Delaney and legal about drafting it as policy.”

Rockwell said she didn’t think that was a good idea because “we need to be able to be nimble and responsive to changes,” and it is easier to do that with procedures than policies, but she would “bring that through as rule-making” if she thought it was necessary.

Certain asked whether it made sense for the Board to adopt a resolution instead of a policy: “We need to… offer some guidance a little bit quicker than we have.” She also said she was concerned that ICE agents don’t have to present identification and added, “They’re not law enforcement; they’re just an agent.”

Attorney David Delaney recommended working with staff to develop a procedure that would implement the feedback from the Board. He said, “I think there is a serious misperception in the community that federal agents are just being invited onto campus, no questions asked, and are leaving with students. There’s no instances of that occurring that have been reported to this district.” 

Delaney said that the campus administrators have been trained to work closely with School Resource Officers and School Resource Deputies to identify any federal agents who request access to a student or access to the campus. He concluded, “So to answer your question [about a resolution], ma’am, I still think a procedure and then training that goes out to our campus administrators is the best way to respond to current conditions.”

Certain asked Patton for an update within two weeks because “I don’t want this to just keep dragging on.”

Patton said she would be talking with Sheriff Chad Scott, Gainesville Police Department Chief Nelson Moya, and the other police chiefs around the county to make sure they’re all on the same page. 

District’s ICE guidance requires identification

Alachua Chronicle reached out to ACPS Public Information Officer Jackie Johnson, who confirmed that the Guidance for Law Enforcement Interactions has not changed; click here to read the actual document. 

The document provides a list of actions that school administrators must take if any law enforcement officer wants to interview or remove a student, and the first thing on the list is “Request identification.” Johnson confirmed that this guidance is still active, and all administrators have been trained to take these actions. Johnson also said that no ICE agents have visited any ACPS schools for the purpose of deporting students.