ABSTRACT
Recently, principals and teachers at two schools in Lincoln, Nebraska, were faced with agonizing choices. They had just learned that two of their students, a sister in middle school and her younger brother in elementary school, were about to leave the country because their father was being deported to Mexico, a land neither child knew as both were U.S.-born and their family had remained in the U.S. since their birth. This chapter uses their cases to raise and then analyze potential responses to this dilemma. The educators had to consider: how to help these two children; how to manage the rest of their schooling, as they made sense of their departure; and how to plan for future possible similar departures, including asking what their teachers needed to know about schooling in Mexico (and some other countries) to ease students’ transitions.
