Anne Arundel County Public Schools leaders struck a cautious tone this week while speaking about the potential impacts of President Donald Trump’s education and immigration mandates, including threats to federal funding.

The Republican has pledged an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration, empowering federal agents to conduct raids at places once considered off-limits, such as schools. Trump also threatened to withhold federal funding from public school systems that teach about race and gender in ways that he views “woke,” signing executive orders codifying his rhetoric.

At stake for Anne Arundel County schools is more than $90 million in federal funds for fiscal year 2026. While that’s only about 5% of the system’s $1.82 billion budget, those federal dollars are designated to help feed students and fund 463 full-time positions for services such as special education, student mental health and support for high-poverty schools.

“We’ve looked at district regulations to see where are there conflicts and where do we align and ultimately as a school district, after our conversation with the school board, what will be the line in the sand that we will draw?” Schools Superintendent Mark T. Bedell said at a meeting Tuesday of the Caucus of African American Leaders of Anne Arundel County. “Because our school board has made it very clear: They expect us to continue on the path that we’ve been on.”

He presented the caucus with a range of data that generally shows improved learning metrics across the school system, including year-over-year increases in proficiency test scores, the number of students taking advanced placement exams and graduation rates.

“Why would you deviate when you see the kind of progress we’re making?” Bedell asked. “We’re not going to deviate.”

Across the country, fears of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have led to drops in school attendance, threatening to interrupt learning for many children. Despite a substantial immigrant population, that doesn’t appear to be the case in Anne Arundel yet, said Bob Mosier, a spokesman for the school system.

“While there have been cases in which families have expressed they are not going to send students to school, as a district our overall attendance rate is about the same as it was at this time last year,” Mosier wrote in an email.

Bedell said immigrant families “absolutely should” feel comfortable sending their children to school in the county, describing campuses as “safe zones for kids.”

“Should something happen on one of our campuses, I’m not just letting anybody take a kid,” said Bedell, recalling a conversation he had with Matthew Elliston, director of ICE’s field office in Baltimore, which covers Maryland. “It’s not about blocking a federal agent. As I told him, ‘We’re not here to block anybody.’ But I’m just telling you, ‘Nobody’s walking out with a kid if we don’t have proper verification.’ ”

Bedell told The Banner that he came away from the conversation with Elliston with the understanding that the agency wasn’t planning immigration enforcement on school campuses.

Elliston did not respond to emailed questions.

In an interview with WYPR’s Tom Hall on Thursday, Elliston discussed the Trump administration’s decision to lift a “sensitive locations policy” that prohibited ICE arrests in and around schools and churches.

“We’re not out arresting kids at schools,” Elliston said. “We’re not going to churches looking for people, unless it’s some kind of wild criminal allegation.”

He recounted a recent arrest in Talbot County.

“We arrested someone who had a felony conviction in their past after they dropped their child off at school and we followed them about a mile away from the school before we initiated our arrest,” Elliston said. “It did not happen on a school campus. It did not happen even in front of a school campus. We arrested that person a mile down the road.”

School officials are grappling not only with Trump’s immigration mandates and rhetoric but with what the president believes should be taught in American schools.

Trump has long railed against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, programs and “critical race theory,” an academic concept about systemic racism that is not taught in the public schools.

“We have removed the poison of critical race theory from our public schools, and I signed an order making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” Trump told a joint session of Congress this week.

On Jan. 29, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. education secretary to, among other mandates, eliminate “federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”

Under Bedell’s leadership, the school district has prided itself on being an inclusive one where children feel welcomed.

Chief Academic Officer Christina Catalano said the school system must continuously “analyze” and “interrogate” its curriculum to ensure that it reflects various human perspectives and elicits empathy.

“Right now, my team is not planning on making any changes, any modifications to any of our curriculum, our instructional materials, based on any executive orders,” Catalano told the caucus.

Lisa Snead, the school system’s general counsel, said the federal government is supposed to follow a legal process before stripping away funds.

“The federal government still has an obligation to comply with the law. So you can’t just use the words ‘DEI’ as a vacuum. You have to apply it to the law,” Snead told the caucus. “I can tell you this: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is still the law. As a school system, our obligation is to continue to comply with the law.”

Bedell said the school system doesn’t teach critical race theory, but rather “a holistic curriculum that has been approved by the state of Maryland.”

“We don’t have nothing to hide. We’re going to continue to do what we’ve been doing in this county. Any deviation from that, in my opinion, is a setback for all children in this county,” Bedell said. At the same time, he added, “I’m not going to sit here and tell you all there aren’t going to be some adjustments. … If some of this stuff becomes law, we’re going to have to make some adjustments.”