At Valley View Elementary School, joy has become an important lesson.
The Columbia Heights elementary school, where about two-thirds of students are Latino, has been on the front lines of Minnesota’s ICE surge. Four students there have been detained, including 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who captured the world’s attention in a viral photo with his blue bunny hat. At least 30 parents of Valley View students have been detained, too.
Children ask their teachers if they are safe at school. Social workers say that children are reporting more nightmares. And though border czar Tom Homan indicated that the ICE surge in the Twin Cities — the largest immigration enforcement operation in history — would soon wind down, Valley View staff say their students will need extra support for years to come.
So on the day before Valentine’s Day, and the day after Homan’s announcement, the first-grade teachers of Valley View Elementary in Columbia Heights shared a surprise with their students. They had received a donation of stuffed animals — and each of the children would be taking one home. Their classmates learning online and staying home in fear of ICE agents would receive one as well.
The children grinned as they hugged their soft stuffed kittens, puppies, and elephants. One presented a floppy-eared bunny to the principal, Jason Kuhlman. “It’s going to be my baby,” she informed him.
Alex Tupper, a first-grade teacher who helped distribute the stuffed animals, has tried to incorporate more joy into her first-grade activities over the last few months — letting kids decorate the windows and bringing M&Ms and pretzel rods to teach math lessons. She knows that many of her students return home to closed curtains and locked doors and a family that hasn’t left the house in months. And though in first grade, her students are typically starting to act a little more independent, this year they are acting younger — wanting to sit on her lap and hold onto her.
“They just need all the extra love,” she said.
The focus on joy is just one of the ways Valley View has transformed to meet the changing needs of its students over the last two months. Staff have also mobilized to deliver food for families, organized walking groups and carpools to get students to school, and provided online learning options for families who didn’t feel safe leaving their homes.
The school has also sent Hennepin County Medical Center’s mobile clinics to families who need them — including families returning home from detention at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. (Three of the detained students have since returned home; the fourth is still at Dilley.)
And they’ve connected families that need help with rent with mutual aid donors.
“We’ve basically turned into a nonprofit in the past couple months,” said Nicole Herje, a school social worker.
Now, as the surge starts to wind down, staff say the increased needs at Valley View are ongoing — and they worry that support for the school will die down as national media attention fades.
Kuhlman, the principal, said that in many families, adults have gone a few months without working and would now have to find a new job. “Our families are still going to need two, three months of food supports,” he said.
Herje described her students’ mental health needs. “A lot of trouble sleeping, a lot of expressing fear,” she said. “They’re scared to go outside and walk their dog. They’re scared to just go and play.” One girl told her she was having nightmares about her worries, she said.
Kevin Centeno, Valley View’s full-service community school coordinator, said that families would need both financial assistance and trauma support.
“Even though right now they say that Metro Surge has ended, we are still picking up all these pieces for years to come,” Centeno said.
Herje said when students experience a prolonged period of hypervigilance, they could have trouble concentrating or limited capacity to handle small problems, which she said Valley View was already starting to see.
“I think we’re going to see a lot of [these] lasting effects, and it’s going to take a long time,” she said. “You can’t start to heal from trauma until you feel safe.”
A full-court press to meet student needs
Finding creative ways to meet students’ needs isn’t new for Valley View. When Kuhlman became principal in 2019, tasked with increasing the school’s enrollment, he dreamed of making it a full-service community school. Such schools provide wraparound support services for students, like dental and mental health care, in the building.
“We converted into the model of a full-service school, but we never had the funding,” Centeno said.
The designation became official when the school was awarded a $600,000 grant from the Minnesota Department of Education in October 2024. Centeno, who’d previously worked in the district as a home-school liaison, became the full-service community school coordinator.
Centeno started a food pantry at the school in November 2025, when SNAP funding delays added uncertainty to many families’ food supply. The effort started small, with some canned goods, fruit and vegetables, he recalled.
Soon, the impacts of immigration enforcement on Valley View began to become clear. Jason Kuhlman recalled when he heard an aunt who lived with Valley View students was taken by ICE in front of the school. He and the middle school principal walked the kids home. Rene Argueta, Valley View’s home-school liaison — and a pastor at a local church — started to hear from some parents that they had stopped going to work, in fear of encountering immigration enforcement. That meant family income was cut off or diminished.
“We need to bolster this, big time,” Kuhlman recalled thinking of the food pantry. The school added a refrigerator and a freezer to its shelves and cabinets for dry goods.
Argueta’s church, along with others in the area, began collecting donations to help families meet basic needs. One night, he and some other school staff including Kuhlman had stayed late to pack 20 or so bags of food for families. Then, someone knocked at the door with a long line of cars behind them. Volunteers from Minneapolis had brought 110 grocery bags, already packed. Soon, the cafeteria was packed full of donations.
As Argueta welcomed the volunteers, he received a call from a parent who was pregnant and worried she was miscarrying. He asked one of the volunteers to go drive the parent to the hospital. That volunteer stayed at the hospital with the parent until 1 a.m., and made sure mother and baby were both fine, he said.
The school now delivers food to 157 families weekly.
Meanwhile, the school redoubled its efforts in transporting kids to school. As parents reported they were afraid to send their kids to school, Kuhlman wanted to know why so he could address their concerns. “Is it because you have to walk too far? Is it because the bus stop is too far?” The school adjusted bus stops as much as it could to accommodate families’ needs — and also started walking groups and carpools to get kids to school safely.
Argueta and Herje looked at attendance records and realized that many of the students missing class were those who lived too close to qualify for bus transportation. Argueta’s church brought a van to drive kids from a nearby mobile home park to school. Soon they had organized three color-coded walking groups, with teachers volunteering to walk their students home. Thirty to 40 students now are part of designated walking groups, Argueta said.
Organized carpools became another key way to support students getting to school. Eliza Fultz, a first-grade teacher, became one of the carpool coordinators after it became clear that Herje, Argueta, and Centeno had too much on their plates. She’s now arranging rides for 38 students.
Fultz credited her church community for volunteering to drive students. She vets volunteers, matches them with families, and makes sure drivers and students know who is picking up whom. It’s a system that needs constant tending, as children transition in and out of online learning and drivers call in sick.
“We’re scrambling to find subs in the middle of teaching phonics,” Fultz said.
Even with all the walking and carpool support, some families didn’t feel safe sending their kids to school in person. So the district developed an online learning system, shuffling teachers’ responsibilities and combining classrooms to make sure kids at home had the support they needed. Last week, about 100 Valley View students were learning remotely; now, it’s down to 60.
Kuhlman said they will bring families back in person when they feel comfortable.
“I will not have on my watch bringing families back too early and someone getting snatched up,” he said. “That’s not going to happen.”
Supporting traumatized kids
Even with all the efforts to meet food and transportation needs, Valley View staff say kids will need support with trauma for years to come.
Tupper said that virtually all of her Hispanic students are in hiding or know someone who’s been taken by ICE.
“For a lot of my students, they go to school and they go home and the curtains are closed, the door is locked, going on for weeks now,” Tupper said.
Fultz questioned how her students’ families could feel safe, even after thousands of federal agents leave.
“That still leaves an entire community of people who have now realized they can be snatched at any moment,” she said. “I just don’t see how there’s any going back in any way.”
Herje, the social worker, recalled the first time she got a call from a Valley View mom telling her that ICE had taken her husband. The mom wanted help explaining to her kindergartener what had happened to his dad.
“At first we said that Dad was on a trip because we had no idea what was going to be happening,” Herje said. But in a few days, they figured out that he was in a detention center, and he would not be returning soon from his “trip.” They explained that his dad had been taken by ICE, Herje said.
“We drew a picture for his dad,” Herje said. “I don’t know if his dad ever got it. But just letting them know that it’s okay to feel really sad, it’s okay to feel scared, and it’s okay to still have happy times with your friends.”
That student didn’t come to school for a while, she said. But when he came back, it was helpful for him to reintegrate into his normal routine.
Herje has been teaching more classroom lessons, talking to students about how to deal with their worries and opening conversations where they can share their thoughts.
“We’ve been having a lot of conversations,” she said. “There are families that are being separated right now, and it can be really scary if you’re hearing whistles being blown, or if you’re seeing ICE outside your house. And once I say something like that, a bunch of hands go up.”
Herje said that trauma triggers could linger for a long time, if students hear a car horn or a whistle at a sporting event. The school has adjusted its whistle usage at recess, since students now associate whistles with ICE presence.
“If someone has been in this constant state of fear for such a long time, like these last few months, the brain turns into this state of hypervigilance,” she said. “It’s always looking for the next threat or always looking for the next fear. And it’s really hard for students to learn.”
The needs persist, but hope glimmers
Valley View staff greeted the announcement that Operation Metro Surge would soon leave Minnesota with a mix of skepticism and cautious optimism.
Tupper recalled a first-grade student who apologized to her for not coming to class one day: “Miss Tupper, I’m sorry I wasn’t here, ICE was at our door, and we had to go hide in the basement.”
“There’s no words to put into how awful it is that this child will have that memory for forever,” she said.
Kuhlman said he would not believe ICE was leaving until he felt it in his community. Then he would begin the work of communicating next steps with families.
In the immediate term, he said, he worried about students’ mental health. “We have a whole new generation of ACES [adverse childhood experiences] that’s happened right now,” he said. He noted that for many students, this trauma came on top of the difficulties of an immigration journey — and those stuck at home were unable to process through socializing with friends.
“The work’s just begun. But there’s always been light at the end of the tunnel. I think it’s a little brighter right now,” he said. “Still not there yet, we’ve got a ways to go. But maybe a little glimmer.”
To help Valley View Elementary School, you can email news@colheights.k12.mn.us or call the school at 763-528-4200. You can also donate to the PTO fundraiser here.
