For the past several months, Kingston parents and community members have come to Kingston Board of Education meetings to ask trustees to pass a resolution in support of immigrant students and their families and share information about protocols should U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) target members of the school community.

At the board’s Jan. 21 meeting, they got an answer. The board voted unanimously on a resolution declaring Kingston City School District grounds, buses and events a "Safe Zone." Any non-local law enforcement agency seeking access to any KCSD space will need to follow a protocol before access would be granted.

The meeting began with Superintendent Paul Padalino explaining the rights of immigrant students in the district and how the school district plans to respond to any ICE activity.

“No one gets access to our students without proper legal reasons,” Padalino said. “This means no federal, state or local agency of any kind may question, remove, detain or gain access to data about any of our students. Not only is this our policy, but this is the law.”

Padalino said a communication protocol has been established between the district and the local group Ulster Immigrant Defense Network (UIDN) to provide support in the event that an immigration detention occurs in the district. School administrators have been trained and instructed on how to deal with any requests for access to school property, he added, and that security guards and monitors have been trained by the executive director of UIDN, Victor Cueva.

For “concerns that we can’t always control,” such as bus stops and school holidays, Padalino said the district needs support from the community and local government. He said he endorses the board passing a resolution that affirms commitment to the safety of students, but also for community members to take concerns to the state level, as he said funding to programs that assist immigrant, homeless and disabled students are not supported by the governor’s proposed 2026 budget.

The resolution was discussed at the end of the meeting, with Trustee Erika Bernabei saying, “We mustn't wait until there's murder and violence done to our community before we are called to act.”

“I asked us that as we sit here and we have members of the community come to us and for months, asked us to take action as a board, even though a resolution is not the same thing and doesn't have policy power per se, that we act before and we act when we're called upon to act,” Bernabei said.

In a previous meeting, one community member who had consistently attended school board meetings, A. Jacobs, said before the school break, a Kingston family self-deported after a family member was detained by ICE. At previous meetings, she spoke to families in the community who were nervous about sending their children to school and to the bus stop due to the risk of detainment.

While the board voted to pass the resolution unanimously, one trustee, Herb Lamb, expressed concerns about the resolution while agreeing with other trustees who spoke in support.

“I just worry about putting this out there and saying, ‘Just come on and get us.’ Because, one, we don't release our safety plans for individual buildings, because we don't want people to know what our mode of operation is, because they can then undo it,” Lamb said. “The more information they have, the more they know what they have to bring when they want to get into our schools.”

Lamb said New York law already has legal protections on the books about this issue, and that he doesn’t “like being forced to do a resolution that changes nothing.”

Trustee Steven Spicer, however, referenced the Declaration of Independence when he said resolutions can “change everything.”

“There is no difference between any one of us and Renee Good, which means there's already a target on your back when your government can walk up to your car and shoot you three times in the face,” Spicer said. “When your back is up against the wall, to write a declaration, to say to your government, ‘No,’ tells them New York says, ‘No,’ Kingston says, ‘No.’”

Bernabei said that besides Kingston, ICE has already been spotted in Newburgh, Albany, Hudson and Poughkeepsie. She also quoted Audre Lorde and said that silence would not protect Kingston.

“It [silence] only works for those who already have privilege, so for us to back away when we can actually be learning from black and brown communities across history, it's just not how it works,” Bernabei said. “I think that the rest of the county is waiting for us, and when we act, they will follow in suit.”